Integrated skills as a role model of today's modern language teaching

Integrated skills as a role model of today's modern language teaching

Teachers spend a lot of time in class working on reading, writing, listening and speaking with their students. These skills are essential for effective communication and are the areas tested in many well known English language examinations.

We may work on a number of these skills within a single lesson, however, we often teach students to do them in isolation. If we want our learners to become successful communicators, we need to make the situations as authentic as possible inside the classroom.

This is when we ask the students to use a combination (or all four) of these skills within a single activity (or series of activities) to create a situation which is much more similar to one they might come across in the real world.

If you take, for example, a simple telephone conversation. We listen to what the other person is saying and then reply. We may also need to make a note of something they’ve said, read it back to make sure it makes sense and then explain it to someone else.

Nominate a student to think of a sentence (ideally related to what you’ve been doing in class). Have them whisper their sentence to the next person in the circle, who must listen and repeat what they heard to the person next to them. This continues until they reach the final person in the group. The last person then has to say out loud what they thought they heard. Finally ask the first person what their original sentence was and write both on the board and compare them. Deal with any issues which come up.