Apart from language itself, there are four language skills that students need to learn:
listening, reading, writing and speaking.
It may be that it is more important for your students to learn one particular skill. For
example, an intellectual property attorney might want to focus on reading documents
and speaking. Personal assistants might say that speaking and listening are important
skills for them to learn. The amount of time you spend on each skill can vary but they
should all be covered to some extent.
Skills can be broken down into written (reading and writing) and oral (speaking and
listening). Another, more common, way of classifying the skills is as productive skills
and receptive skills. The receptive skills are reading and listening: the students receive
and understand the input; the productive skills are speaking and writing because they
involve the students in producing language.
However, skills are not entirely separate. We rarely use one skill in isolation. When we
speak, we also listen to what others say to us; we read an e-mail and write a reply, we
might at the same time ask the person sitting next to us how to spell a certain word –
this action will involve listening and speaking. Exceptions might be a day at home
reading a favourite novel or watching a film. However, we often talk about what we
have read or watched, at a later date. A teacher will attempt to integrate the skills in
order to mimic the real world.
You will find that students do not have a uniform level across all the skills and all the
elements of language. Students are inevitably stronger in some areas than in others.
Some students have a musical ear and can pronounce words and phrases well. Others
have a good grasp of grammar or vocabulary. Students are usually stronger in
receptive skills than in productive skills meaning that they can understand more than
they can produce. This is entirely understandable if you compare it to our competence
in our own language; for example we could watch a play by Shakespeare and
understand what is going on without being able to produce that type of language. We
can also read and understand (most of!) a legal document but we would have difficulty
writing one ourselves. It is our role to cater to the varying needs of students, wherever
possible.
Dostları ilə paylaş: