Teach English in BahuZhen - Linyi Shi

Nowadays, many people try to learn foreign language because of different reasons. It is really difficult to learn second language. Therefore, people who want to learn a new language must be directed well. As there are different must be learned things and many skills are required, teachers need to be extra careful about these issues. In language acquisition, there are two main skills, receptive skills and productive skills. They are called integrated skills. It stays focused on reading- listening which are receptive skills, and writing-speaking which are productive skills. It is also based on communicative language teaching methodology which aims teaching second language by using interaction that means you need to be exposed to language most of the time. In this essay, we will deal with the definition of these skills, the reason-importance-aims-ways of combining them, and why a teacher mst combine these skills. Receptive skills are, as we said above, reading and listening that learners need to understand the language not need to produce it. In a short way, we can say they are input, the information that learners get. To use the second language in a correct way, you have to take input with real communication situation. This helps learners to get useful knowledge. Productive skills are writing and speaking that learners need to use the learned language. Namely, they produce the language. We must see the output that learners produce. With these two skills, our objective is to make them use the language that they acquire by learning receptive skills. As a teacher, we want our students acquire the language in a correct way. As a result of this, our students can use the learned language in a correct way. So we have to understand the significance of these skills. You need to have good listening and reading skills in order to create good speaking and writing skills. To have full acquisition of the second language, the importance of improving these skills must be acquired first. Our aim must be combining these four skills since they are all connected to each other. The reason doing this is to achieve full, correct and useful acquisition of language. In order to communicate with a person, we need to listen and understand him or her to speak. So we must have good listening skills to create good speaking skills. To write something, for instance a letter, mail, paragraph about specific topics, we need to know the rules of writing. So we need good reading skills so we can see how to write. As these skills are connected each other in some ways, as a teacher, we must combine them. The significant question is how! How can we combine them? Assuming that we are doing listening in our course and the listening is about asking directions and giving directions. Too much listening of the same script can be boring. Therefore you need to arrange the things you want your students acquire. First let students listen to the conversation just trying to understand the general idea. After first listening, you can ask “What do you get from the conversation?”, “Do you know most of the words you hear?”, “Which words you don’t know?” etc. Also we need to think about time. We need to spend it in correct way. You can write the unknown vocabulary on the board and you should add some which your students might not know. After doing this, play the audio again. But this time ask them to catch the structures and what they are about. After listening, write the structures they say on the board. You can work on both unknown vocabulary and structures. Play the video for the last time and ask students to be careful about accuracy and fluency of the conversation. Mosly listening three times is enough. If necessary, you can give the written script. But before doing this, it is better to ask them to do a role-play by remembering the structures and vocabulary they hear. After doing this role-play activity, you can give the written script and ask them to read it carefully. Ten you want them to make a real dialogue by remembering things that they read. With this activity, there is a combination of listening and speaking skills. You can find a number of activities that helps you to combine them. I just give an example. Assuming that we are doing reading in our class. We are reading a passage about “Endangered Species”. First, make your students read the passage and just try to understand what it is about. While talking about the passage, you can point out the unknown vocabulary and grammar structures. Then you can make them read again and search for the important things and events. After doing that, you can look at the questions prepared before, and there ca be various activities such as gap filling, multiple choice test, vocabulary meaning matching, answering wh-questions. After all don, you can ask your pupils to write a paragraph about the same topic using same vocabulary and structures. In this way, you can integrate reading and writing skills. Of course, there are lots of ways to do this. All teacher wants their pupils learn and produce the second language in a better way. To achieve this goal, teacher must combine these skills. You can do various combinations of these four skills. As a teacher, we all want the best output from our pupils. So we need to give the best input. Without input, there is no quality production. There is no quality input if there is lack of output. You need to have real communicative skills. To have qualified classes, teacher must combine these skills. First, they must get significance of it, and they can see the importance leads them to aim of combining. We all need good communicative skills since we must have good skills for language acquisition. When teachers get the idea of the significance of integrating skills, they can achieve the real learning objectives.