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There are four basic skills in any language; receptive skills —— reading and listening, and productive skills —— speaking and writing. These skills are very important and we should try to incorporate all of them into our English teaching. As English beginners, the receptive skills are more important than others. From our native language learning process, we know that when we were young, we learned a language from listening, after a long time, we could imitate. And then we could read and write. As for listening, I usually follows these steps as below: Firstly, the material should interest or motivate them. Secondly, the long material could be put into small parts to avoid boring. We listen to the material at least three times without the text. Then, we look up some vocabularies in the text which are difficult for us to understand. At last, we listen to the material again. These steps are the basic rules. Of course, students can change how many times they want to listen. In this way, I think it helps the students build their confidence in English learning and motivate them to move on. If we just want them to practice listening skills that would be enough. We can also expand exercise upon the material. Meanwhile, we can also provide some reading material for the students. It can be stories, poems, lyrics and plays. A good play could inspire students to read and speak. Lots of students love plays. They like to perform the part they are interested in. Through this way, students are willingly to read and speak out. Listening, reading, speaking could be combined together. We do lots of reading practice together, such as tongue twister, humorous role-play stories, songs, plays etc. How could we start writing? It starts from imitating, such as a sentence they are familiar with, or a poem, a song they have learned. We change some words to rewrite it. We make some funny sentences by following the drill pattern. There are many interesting ways for us to practice these four important skills. Games are popular with children. They should be regarded as an integral part of English teaching. Twenty questions, snakes and ladders to practice speaking skills. Hangman to help student memorize vocabularies. Riddles, Whispering game to practice listening skills. Pictionary to practice speaking and writing. Guessing the story and making up a story, are also good ways for students to practice speaking. As for language learning, the four skills are connected with each other, listening is the beginning part, from listening, we begin to imitate to speak, we can say it, and then we can read it. Then more we read, the more we know much more about the language, with more practice, we can put them into writing. We could find a number of different applications, ranging from spelling to pronunciation to grammar and vocabulary teaching. With all these integrated skills, students could enhance their listening, reading, speaking and writing skills. Teaching English could be really interesting, you are free to use many interesting ways to help students grasp the language. To build their interest, their confidence, their communicative skills, their writing ability.
