Integrating Language Skills: Content, Tasks, and Themes
Integrating Language Skills in Curriculum Design
Segregation vs. Integration
Segregation:
- Focus on language forms predisposes curriculum designers to segment courses into separate language skills.
- Administrative considerations often make it easier to program separate courses.
- Specific purposes for which students are studying English may be best labeled by one of the four skills, especially at the high intermediate to advanced levels.
Integration:
- Production and reception are two sides of the same coin.
- One skill often reinforces another.
- Written and spoken language bear a relationship to each other.
- Most natural performance involves not only the integration of one or more skills but also connections between language and the way we think, feel, and act.
Content-Based Instruction
Content-based instruction integrates the learning of specific subject matter content with the learning of a second language. The overall structure of the curriculum is dictated by the nature of the subject matter rather than by language forms and sequences. The second language is simply the medium to convey informational content of interest and relevance to the learner. Learners focus on useful, practical non-language objectives as the subject matter is perceived to be relevant to long-term goals.
When planning a lesson around a particular subtopic of your subject-matter area, students integrate all four skills as they read, discuss, solve problems, analyze data, and write opinions and reports.
Task-Based Language Teaching
In task-based language teaching, the priority is not the forms of language but rather the functional purposes for which language must be used, such as exchanging opinions, expressing feelings, asking for permission, etc. It emphasizes organizing a course around real-world communicative tasks that learners need to engage in outside the classroom: a job interview, a recipe, public announcements, e-mails, invitations, etc. The course goals center on learners’ pragmatic language competence by maintaining appropriateness according to purposes and contexts as the center of attention. Principles of listening, speaking, reading, and writing are appropriately considered under the rubric of what our learners are going to do with this language.
Theme-Based Teaching
Courses focus on topics, situations, or “themes” as one of their organizing parameters. It places an equal value on content and language objectives.
Language skills are enhanced through focal attention to the topic and peripheral attention to language. Challenging topics engage the curiosity and increase the motivation of students as they grapple with an array of real-life issues ranging from simple to complex. Theme-based curricula can serve the multiple interests of students in a classroom and can offer a focus on content while still adhering to institutional needs for offering a language course per se.
Experiential Learning
Experiential learning gives students concrete experiences through which they “discover” language principles by trial and error, by processing feedback, and by building hypotheses about language. Teachers do not simply tell students about how language works; instead, they give students opportunities to use language as they grapple with the problem-solving complexities of a variety of concrete experiences. Experiential learning techniques tend to be learner-centered, such as hands-on projects, field trips and other “on-site” visits, role plays and simulations, cross-cultural experiences (camps, dinner groups, etc.), etc. Experiential learning tends to put an emphasis on the psychomotor aspects of language learning by involving learners in physical actions in which language is subsumed and reinforced.