Teaching language skills

Both as children and as future teacher's students, we all have heard about the language skills in English at some point, but on the last university lesson, we went a little bit deeper in this theme and we saw the relation between them, its implementation, and some more characteristics that I'm going to explain in today's post.

To have it clear from the very beginning, the four language skills are: speaking, reading, listening and writing. They can be classified regarding different aspects:

• When talking about the direction of communication, we found the productive skills (speaking and writing), and the receptive skills (listening and reading).
• Considering the mode of communication, we divided them into oral skills (speaking and listening), and written skills (reading and writing).

Although each skill has its own characteristics, they are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, some of them are strongly related as we could see below and this means that to teach them, we must take advantage of one skill to develop another one so that we combine activities involving different skills that are linked:

• Speaking, for instance, is necessary to write properly; if our children aren't able to organize their ideas while explaining them out loud, their writings will be also messy and incoherent. We should practise their speaking abilities in order to improve their writings too.
• Again, speaking is also very close to reading. If the students can pronounce the words correctly while they speak, it will be easier for them to have a good pronunciation as well when they read.
• Have a good listening skill can help the reading and speaking too, as it is necessary that students identify how the words sound to read and say them properly. It is important for students to have heard how to pronounce the words they are going to read in a text before doing it.
• Finally, the writing and the reading are also very related because students learn them simultaneously, although it is true that to write, it is necessary to know how to read because you should identify the graphic of a letter to write it. Also, a good way to start writing in English is by copying the words already written so that thanks to this repetition they will integrate how to write them.

Now that we have clear which skills does English have and how are they related to each other, we should ask ourselves which is the best way to teach them. As we have already said, some skills can't be understood without another so, bearing this in mind, the common steps to teach them are the following ones:

1. Listening and Speaking = the oral skills are the first ones learned by students and they should do it at the same time.
2. Reading and Writing = the written skills are the second ones learned as they are a little bit more complex and take more time to be mastered. They are, as well, learned simultaneously.

These steps are almost the same when learning the L1 and that's why we should always respect the natural way that children learn their first language to teach the second one effectively.

Besides most of the children learn the skills in the order mention before, we should know that some of them will suffer the "Silent-way".

This period happens when a new item or message is understood but learners aren't still able to produce it. As we saw in class, first the students will be able to understand the new item before they are able to produce it and use it in communication. The difference between being able to understand an item and being able to produce it is known as passive knowledge versus active knowledge. Teachers shouldn't force their students to skip the step of passive knowledge in order to produce texts and discourses faster because children can feel very pressure and that could block them even more. We should respect student's different pace to develop their skills by presenting material that doesn't require the students to respond verbally but allows them to show comprehension.

As a conclusion, we could say that teachers should always be aware that language has to be used in a communicative way and to do so, we must integrate all the skills in a natural way, what it is called "realistic communication". To do so, it is important to expose learners to a large amount of material (pictures, videos, songs, text...) using the new item, before they are able to employ it in communication because, as we have already explained, first learners absorb the new item on an unconscious level and after some time, they will be able to use it in a natural way.