Module teaching and integrating language skills lesson 1

What are the implications for teaching?
As we noted earlier, integration of the four skills is concerned with realistic communication. This means that we are teaching at the discourse level not just at the level of sentences or individual words and phrases. Discourse is a whole unit of communicative text, either spoken or written.
Focus on discourse: The main implication for teaching is that we need to be aware of the discourse features of a text and to be able to make students aware of them. This helps the integration of skills because it makes clear the teaching points and, for simple integration, the discourse features are the main language aspects that we transfer from one skill to the other. Discourse features include aspects such as:
the way that the text is organized
its layout (for written text)
the style of the language (formal or informal)
the register (the vocabulary that is commonly found in such discourses).
As teachers, we have to use our professional judgment, based on our knowledge of the students, to decide how much detail we should include in our lesson. It is important to keep a balance. Too much information may confuse them. Too little information may mean that they are not clear about the features of a particular type of discourse.