Integrating four language skills in teaching

Integration of skills is a very important practice in the teaching any language. No skill can be taught in isolation and segregation. There exist a deep and inseparable connection between language use and the context in which it is connected. A kind of relation exists in the way we use primary skills of language, identified as listening, reading and writing. The teacher is to place additional and extra emphasis on a specific skill designated for a specific skill, while helping learners freely to use all the skills necessary for successfully carrying out a classroom activity. Even if the class is supposed to focus on one specific skill at a time, teachers and students follow an integrated approach. Even if it were possible to fully develop one or two skills in absence of all the others, such an approach would not ensure adequate for later success in academic communication, career-related language use, or everyday interaction in the language. An extreme example is the grammar-translation method, which teaches students to analyze grammar and to translate (usually in writing) from one language into another. This method restricts language learning to a very narrow, non-communicative range that does not prepare students to use the language in everyday life.

In the contemporary world of second and foreign language teaching, most professionals largely take it for granted that language instruction is naturally divided into discrete skill sets, typically reflecting speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and usually arranged in this order. That is, the primacy of speaking skills has remained unquestioned, for almost the entire past century, since the rise and preeminence of structural linguistics in second and foreign language teaching. Teaching English has become in a globalized world need and one of the most spoken languages in the world thus, there is the growing need to train our students with the basic tools to understand the language and communicate, the main purpose is to teach students to achieve mastery of the four skills supporting comprehension and expression through exercises of reading, writing, listening and speaking, while to interact and share with their peers what they have learned in class. Talking about the four skills seem wearisome to some teachers because every day they face difficult situations in the classroom with students, teachers have to be very careful in the preparation of the classes, innovate, reflect, look or design suitable materials and try to create different ways to make students learn easily and meaningfully.

Based on the principles of Bloomfieldian linguistic analyses and their applications to language pedagogy, the structural division of language teaching in the four skill areas has the learning objective of imitating the native speaker. The continual separation of the four skills lies at the core of research and testing in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Some current approaches to teaching language, however, strive to integrate the four skills in pedagogy whenever possible. Integrated language teaching and various integrated pedagogical paradigms are usually associated with outgrowths of communicative teaching. Relative to its predecessor, the audio-lingual method, integrated teaching of the four skills represents a central innovation. On the other hand, in the U.K., the path toward integrated teaching of the language skills did not derive from a strong audio-lingual focus but rather from an evolution of older situational and functional teaching methods that were developed prior to and concurrent with the structural method in the U.S. Current models of integrated language teaching are not without their shortfalls. Nor is integrated instruction appropriate in all contexts of language teaching and for all purposes of language learning. The advantages and disadvantages of integrated teaching may crucially determine its usefulness in second or foreign language contexts.

Modern day viewpoints on skill integration and integrated curriculum designs will also be discussed, together with problems and issues typically associated with integrated teaching.

The introduction of the concept of "communicative competence" brought about a change in the perspectives on how language skills were to be taught and used for communication inside and outside of the classroom. Although not directly associated with language teaching, Hymes' work emphasized the key role of the social context in communication and the centrality of the socio-linguistic norms of appropriateness in speech communities and their cultures. Hymes was particularly interested in language as social behavior. New perspectives began to emerge those authentic representations and uses of language in the classroom were nearly impossible -- particularly so within the established models associated with the audio-lingual method. The structural separation of the four skills, pattern practice, error avoidance, and native-speaker imitation in second and foreign language production contrasted markedly with teaching language as a means of communication [3; 78].

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) places a great deal of value on teaching language skills with the goal of enabling learners to communicate meaningfully both inside and outside of the classroom, as in, for example, asking for information, seeking clarification, relying on circumlocution when necessary, and in general, negotiating meaning by all linguistic and non-linguistic means at one's disposal. In their seminal publication on learners' coping strategies, Canale and Swain developed a three-component framework of language competence that learners needed to achieve: communicative competence, grammatical competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Canale's and Swain's empirical findings demonstrated convincingly that practicing a range of language skills simultaneously and in the context of communication allowed learners to attain levels of grammatical competence similar to those achieved by students who concentrated on audio-lingual structural patterns. In addition, however, the communicative competence of the learners who practiced their skills in interaction, measured in terms of language fluency, comprehensibility, and effort, substantively exceeded that of learners without comparable practice [1; 47]. As an outcome of this and other studies published at the time (e.g., Paulston; Savignon), CLT and its subsequent methodological offshoots have presently come to dominate integrated approaches to teaching of the central four skills [2; 67].

Developing the students’ abilities in learning English language depends on effective way of arranging a class and how to teach the language skills to students. Integrating approach for the development of communicative skills in the classroom, in which the four skills in the acquisition of knowledge of a foreign language can be taught in a coherent way, and practiced together.

One image for teaching English as a second or foreign language is that of a masterpiece of an artist. For producing a beautiful, colourful masterpiece, all of the colours must cooperate with the idea and must be painted in positive ways. For example, the teacher's teaching style must address the learning style of the learner, the learner must be motivated, and the setting must provide resources and values that strongly support the teaching of the language. However, if the colours are not chosen effectively, the work is likely to be not recognizable as a masterpiece at all.

In addition to the four colours mentioned above – teacher, learner, setting, and languages – other important colours exist in the masterpiece. In a practical way, one of the most significant of these colours consists of the four primary skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. This colour also includes associated or related skills such as knowledge of vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, syntax, meaning, and usage.

If this painting does not occur effectively and the colours do not correspond to each other, the colours may destroy the work, as segregated skills. This is sometimes known as the segregated-skill approach. In this approach, the emphasis is not on learning for authentic communication. By examining segregated-skill instruction, we can see the advantages of integrating the skills and move toward improving teaching for English language learners.