Mastering Language Skills: A Comprehensive Approach
Communicative Skills and Linguistic Components
On the one hand, communicative skills are speaking, listening, reading, and writing. On the other hand, the linguistic components are grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
Why Can’t We Separate Language Skills?
Specifically, why are reading and writing inseparable? Reading and writing are closely related in two particular ways:
- Reading is a source of input and a model for written language. Some authors believe that reading is the best way to master writing.
- There is a continual process of feedback between the two skills. As Madrid and McLaren (1995) claim, we constantly read what we have written to revise content and grammar, organize the text, and so on.
Importance of Written Skills (Reading and Writing)
Writing and reading are an integral part of each educated individual’s life since they are the basis of written communication. Written communication, in its turn, is another tool for people to express their ideas and learn about those of others.
Reading skills serve as a foundation for writing. Developed and mastered, effective reading skills give people the opportunity to learn new information about the world, people, events, and places, enrich their vocabularies, and improve their writing skills.
Developed reading skills lead to the development and improvement of writing skills. Regular reader’s comprehension skills (ability to compare and contrast, evaluate and summarize, identify specific features and genres, make analogies) serve as a basis for oral speech.
What is Intercultural Competence?
Intercultural Competence is the open and respectful exchange of views between individuals and groups from different ethnic, religious, linguistic, and national backgrounds on the basis of mutual understanding and respect. It argues that such dialogue is crucial for promoting tolerance and understanding, preventing conflicts, and enhancing societal cohesion.
Components:
- Attitudes: Respect for other cultures, curiosity, willingness to learn, openness to people from other cultures.
- Skills: Skills of listening to people from other cultures, skills to interact with people from other cultures, multi-perspectivity, cognitive flexibility.
What is Listening?
Listening is an active process of constructing a message from a stream of sounds with what one knows of the phonological, semantic, and syntactic potentialities of language. Listening is an interactive process that goes on between the listener and the input, resulting in comprehension. The listener interacts with the text to create meaning, the listening situation, the type of input, and the listening purpose.
Casual/Extensive Listening vs. Focused/Intensive Listening
- Casual listening: Sometimes we listen with no particular purpose in mind, and often without much concentration.
- Focused listening: At other times we listen for a particular purpose, to find out information we need to know.
Processing Strategies Involved in Listening
The processing strategies involved in listening are similar to those employed in reading, as they are decoding skills. In both processes, you receive a message and try to understand the intended meaning. Those processing strategies can be:
- Bottom-up strategies: These strategies are text-based. Bottom-up strategies include, for example, listening for specific details, recognizing sounds, words, recognizing word-order patterns, etc.
- Top-down strategies: They are listener-based. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next. Top-down strategies include listening for the main idea, predicting, drawing inferences, summarizing, among others.
Listening as an Interactive Process
- Linguistic competence: The ability to recognize the elements of the language system; knowledge of vocabulary; knowledge of specific grammatical items; knowledge of how words are structured into sentences.
- Discourse competence: Knowledge of discourse markers and how they connect parts of the text to one another.
- Sociolinguistic competence: Knowledge about different types of inputs and their usual structure and content.
- Strategic competence: The ability to use top-down strategies (attending to the overall meaning), as well as knowledge of the language (a bottom-up strategy focusing on the words and phrases). The ability to maintain the flow of communication.
Main Listening Skills
Literal level of sounds, grammatical sentences, phrases, words, etc. / Skimming: Recognizing the main ideas. / Scanning / Listening for details. / Predicting: Using background knowledge (topic, text type, author) to predict what they expect. / Inferring: Working out the speaker’s opinion and attitudes. / Deducing meaning: Guessing meaning through. / Recognizing discourse markers. Recognizing different styles, tones, and forms of speech. / Others: Making assumptions.
The Challenge of Teaching Listening Skills
Why is Listening a Difficult Task?
Because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice. It’s frustrating for students because there are no rules, as in grammar teaching.
Three Key Aspects
- Accept the fact that you are not going to understand everything.
- Keep calm when you do not understand, even if you continue to not understand for a long time.
- Do not translate into your native language. Translating creates a barrier between yourself and what you are listening to or the person who is speaking.
What Does the Author Mean by “Key Words”?
To use the most important words or phrases to help you understand the general ideas (to understand the general meaning).
What is Listening for Context?
When you listen to something or read any sentence, there may be a word you do not understand. Then you look out not only in that word, but focusing on the rest of the words will make you understand that word. To use the context to decide the meaning.
Steps to Achieve Comprehension from a Listening Text
To extract meaning from a listening text, students need to follow four basic steps:
- Figure out the purpose for listening. Activate background knowledge of the topic in order to predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate listening strategies.
- Attend to the parts of the listening input that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest.
- Select top-down and bottom-up strategies that are appropriate to the listening task and use them flexibly and interactively.
- Check comprehension while listening and when the listening task is over.
Types of Texts: Examples
There are two types of texts:
- Authentic texts are those which are designed for native speakers: they are real texts designed not for language students, but for the speakers of the language in question.
- Examples: English song, English advertisement, English radio program, etc.
- Non-authentic text is one that has been designed especially for language students.
- Examples: Text in a textbook, graded listening, etc.
The Importance of the Before-Listening Phase
The before-listening phase is important because it introduces students to a particular text, elicits or provides appropriate background knowledge, and activates necessary schemata. This phase is important because it makes the listening task easier. Without it, the students often spend the first listening trying to understand the general topic and so don’t get a chance to focus on the aspects that they need.