Tema

3.DESARROLLO
DE
LAS
DESTREZAS
LINGSTICAS:
COMPRESIN Y EXPRESIN ORAL, COMPRESIN Y EXPRESIN
ESCRITA.LA COMPETENCIA COMUNICATIVA EN INGLS.
INTRODUCTION
1. THE SPOKEN WORD
1.1. Listening: the development of pupils ability to understand and respond to spoken
language
1.1.1. Listening skills
1.1.2. Planning considerations
1.1.3. Listening activities

1.2. Speaking: the development of pupils ability to communicate in speech

1.2.1. Oral lesson stages and activities

2. WRITTEN WORD
2.1. Reading: the development of pupils ability to read, understand and respond to
written language
2.1.1. A basic model for the teaching of the receptive skills
2.1.2. Reading activities

2.2. Writing: the development of pupils ability to communicate in writing

2.2.1. Writing activities
2.2.2. Writing skills

3. INTEGRATING THE SKILLS

3.1. Reason for integrating the skills
3.2. Integration advantages
4. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
5. BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
In order to use a language effectively we need to have a number of different abilities. We can
identify four major skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
These major skills may be classified in two main ways: in relation to the medium and in relation to
the activity of the speaker. Speaking and listening are related to language expressed through the
aural medium and reading and writing are related to language expressed through the visual medium.
If we make use of the activity of the speaker speaking and writing are active or productive skills
while listening and reading are passive or receptive skills.
It is very important to integrate these skills in our lessons so we will see when and how to do it. We
also are going to study how enable our young pupils to learn them for effective communication and
finally we are going to see a study of communicative competence in our educational system.

1.THE SPOKEN WORD

1.1. Listening: the development of pupils ability to understand and
respond to spoken language
Listening is a hard work for our pupils so it is very important to bear in mind that the activities
must be purposeful and interesting to them. We must also consider our pupils psychological
characteristics.

1.1.1.

Listening skills

1.1.2.

Planning considerations

The four major skills can be subdivided into microskills. The most important listening skills are:
1) predicting
2) extracting specific information
3) getting the general picture
4) inferring opinion and attitude
5) Deducing meaning from the context
6) recognizing discourse patterns
Our job is to train our pupils in a number of microskills they will need for the understanding of
listening texts. This microskills can be divided in two types following Harmer (1983):
-Type 1 skills, (general understanding) which see the text as a whole
-Type 2(specific understanding) are used for detailed comprehension of the text.

Before
1)
2)
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4)
5)
6)
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8)

listening we have to consider a number of steps to take:

Choose the listening
Check that activities are suitable
Adjust the level of difficulty of the activities if you need
Consider the time and the space available
Think about visual aids
Decide the material needed
Know the procedure you will adopt for the listening
Practise reading if you are going to read it aloud

1.1.3. Listening activities

Listening activities follow three stages:
-Pre-listening
-While-listening
-Post-listening
PRE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES
The main aim of this stage is to prepare the students to achieve the most from the passage and to
arouse their interest in what they are going to listen. This can be done through the following kinds of
exercises:
1. Prediction exercises, which increase the amount of language recognised at first hearing:
-Students are told the topic of the listening and are asked to guess some of the words they
think they might appear.
-The teacher plays the first sentences of the tape and ask pupils what they think is going
to happen. Students call out their ideas, which are discussed.
-Students are encouraged to guess what the story is about and develop their ideas.
2. Vocabulary exercises
-Students are given words which might occur in the passage and are asked to listen for
which ones occur and which do not.
-They can do a picture and word matching exercise.
-The teacher give students lists of words and they have to classify them under different
subject headings. The passage they will hear will be about only one of these topics, but
they will not know which until they hear it.
3. Grammar exercises
-A diagram to focus on the syntactic structures that are important to understand in the
passage.
-Gap-filling exercise , involving grammatical structures or vocabulary from the passage
they are going to hear. Students will check the answers from the text.
WHILE-LISTENING ACTIVITIES
They break the ice and help pupils establish some basic facts. For second listening our pupils may
extract much more detailed information from the text. These activities may include:
1. Diagram completion: a diagram gives the main headings and sections of what speaker is
saying, which is useful for guiding students notes on stages in a story.
Charts, are used with passages in which the speaker is comparing or contrasting two things.
More columns may be added according to the number of things that are being discussed.
2.

Matching of recognising information in a text

-Students can listen to a description and try to draw the picture that the speaker is describing.
-Students listen to a story or instruction which refer to a number of pictures and they have to
put them in the correct order or recognise the process described according to the passage.
3. Written questions
-We can make questions about the passage which should be read and understood by students
in the pre-listening stage. (An average of 5 should be considered the maximum)
4. Following instructions
-Listen and do exercises in which students must obey instructions. They can be great fun, for
instance: tracing a route on a map according to spoken instructions, draw a picture from a
description students hear.
Other activities may be:
-Labelling
-multiple choice questions
-True/false
-spotting mistakes
-gap filling
()
POST-LISTENING ACTIVITIES
Post-listening activities can be thought as a follow-up work. Some of this kind of activities may be:
-chart completion
-identifying
relationships
between
-extending list
speakers
-sequencing
-role play/simulation
-matching with a reading text
-dictation
-summarising
-composition
-Oral summary

-()
The aim of this stage should be the reflection on the language passage.

1.2.

Speaking: the development of pupils ability to communicate in

speech

One of the main aims of Primary Education in Foreign Languages consits in motivating our pupils
towards english learning.
It is useful to begin an English programme by teaching children vocabulary for basic concepts,
aspects such as greetings, classroom vocabulary, colours, conversational routines... and we can also
use English words in Spanish to show them how they already know a lot.
By hearing this language over and over again, our pupils will be able to make utterances in English.
To make this happen we have to prepare our oral lessons carefully.

1.2.1. Oral lesson stages and activities

An oral lesson which aims to teach new items is often divided into three stages, commonly known
as the presentation satage, the practice stage and the production stage. This may be rounded up
with some warming-up, introductory activities and with a final review.
The warm-up take the form of an informal chat aimed at building up and maintaining rapport with
our pupils. It could include writing the date on the blackboard, taking the register... it may also
include several questions to consolidate the lessons aim.
The presentation stage main aim is to present the meaning and form of the new language in
such a waythat pupils will realise the revelance and ussefulnessof the new language items. In order
to do so we must try to provide a clear, motivating, natural and relevant context for the item. Our
main role is informant and we must bear in mind what information to give, when and how.
After new language has been presented in a meangful context, and some imitation and repetition
been carried out, our pupils must be given ample opportunity to practise these items for themselves,
they need:
1) Practice: they must be allowed to used the newly acquired items. There is no substitute for
this, so in large classes, group or pair work will be essential to enable every single pupil to practise.
2) Oral practice: as far as possible they should not be refering to a written text.
3) Guided oral practice: we must encourage our pupils that they have something to say.
4) Meangful oral practice: drills must not always be mechanical.
5) Extensive oral practice: the more, te better
These points can be achived trough different activities:
-reading aloud
-mechanical drills
-guessing drills
-open-ended responses
-information gaps procedures
A typical practice stage might therefore follow this pattern:
-one or two brief drills to allow practice with the form of language.
-one or two controlled communicative activities to consolidate the meaning.
At the production satage our pupils use the language in a freer, more creative ways and check
how much they have learned. We will generally not interfere with our pupils production so it is
important that they should have clear instructions for purposeful tasks. The most common activities
include:
-games
-role plays
-discourse chain
-discussions (...)
-information and opinion gaps
The aim of all this is to develop our pupils ability to speak in English.

2.WRITTEN WORD
2.1. Reading: the development of pupils ability to read, understand and
respond to written language
There are different purposes for reading, we could classify them in the following categories:
1) Reading for action: it means to enable us to perform an activity better: public signs, product
labels and intructions, bills, guides, menus...
2) Reading for information: through the act of reading we acquired culture: newspapers,
magazines, non-fiction books, text books...
3) Reading for entertaiment: reading in this case give us pleasure or relaxation: comics, fiction
books, poetry and drama, fims subtitles...
Our curriculum does not place too many reading demands on our pupils: everything they might
read must be related to their needs and interests. Little by little, we must present our pupils with
longer texts based on words they orally know. Reading strategies are similar to listening strategies as
they both are receptive skills.
Now we are going to see a basic model for the teaching of the receptive skills.

2.1.1. A basic model for the teaching of the receptive skills

Different activities can be used to develop these skills. They are commonly divided into three
categories (Alburquerque, 1990):

-pre-reading
-while-reading
-post-reading
The first stage will have the main purpose of generating the interest to read the chosen text, the
second will be the proper reading and the third will have the aim of putting some information
provided by the text into the wider context of students knowledge.

2.1.2. Reading activities

The most common activities that we may use with our pupils are:
-playing games (bingo, dominoes, spot the difference)
-arrange jumble sentences or paragraphs
-matching pictures to speech bubbles
-sequencing
-skimming for gist: suggesting a title, matching titles and texts...
-scanning for especific information: underlying, team work...

2.2. Writing: the development of pupils ability to communicate in writing

2.2.1. Writing activities
In the early stage of learning English, the pupils will generally write very litle. They are most likely
to be engaged in some form of guided copying to produce words or sentences.
Initial guided writing activities may be oriented at both wor and sentence level. At word-level we
may fing (Brewster, 1992):
-making lists
-making personal dictionaries
-working out anagrams
-completing crosswords
-matching pictures or diagrams
-casifying words under headings
At sentence level:
-writing captions for pictures
-correcting mistakes in written sentences
-writing sentences based on surveys or
-writing speech bubbles for cartoons
questionaries
-sequencing sentences and copying
-matching sentences and copying
-answering questions
After this we should encourage our pupils to produce writing, it should take the form of letters,
invitations or cards, which are easily related to our pupils experiences and needs.

2.2.2. Writing skills

A summary of writing skills should have five headings (Mathews, 1991):

-graphic skills
-stylistic skills
-organisational skills
-grammatical skills
-rethorical skills
1) Graphic skills: include writing graphemes, spelling, punctual and capitalization and format.
2) Stylistic skills: refer to our pupils ability to express precise meaning in a variety of styles or
registers.
3) Organisational skills: involve the sequencing of ideas as well as the ability to reject
irrelevant information and summarize relevant points.
4) Grammatical skills: refer to our pupils ability to use successfully a variety of sentence
patterns and constructions.
5) Rethorical skills: refer to pupilsability to use cohesion devices in order to link parts of the
text into logically related sentences.
All these skills may be reached at by means of the activities metiones before.
Skills are not isolated entities, in fact they are interconnected and should normally treated as such
in the classroom. That is the topic we estudy next: the integration of skills.

3. INTEGRATING THE SKILLS

Integration of skills can be defined as the process by means of which a series of activities of tasks
use any combination of the four linguistic skills.

3.1. Reason for integrating the skills

Carol Read (1991) finds two main reasons for integrating skills:
-to practice and extend the pupils use of a particular language item.
-to develop the pupils ability in two or more skills within a constant context.
Though many combinations of the four skills are theoretically possible some facts must be
highlighted:
-listening will normally precede speaking and reading writing.
-writing is normally final in the sequence.

3.2. Integration advantages

There are a number of important advantages in skill integration:
1)continuity: It leads to continuity because activities are not performed in isolation but rather in
a closely related way.

2)input before output: one activitys input will provide with the language and, hopefully,
motivation for next activity output.
3)realism: A realistic, communicative framework cannot be based in isolated skill work.
4)appropriateness: Language which is used in different opportunities and modes is normally
more appropriate.
5)variety: Activities involving the four skills are more varied and thus foster motivation.
6)recycling: Integration clearly allows for recycling and revision of language.
7)confidence: it gives confidence to the pupil because he can compensate his weaknesses in
one skill with his strengths in other.
Summing it up we can say that skill integration will naturally lead to the acquisition of
communicative competence.

4.COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Chomsky defined language as a set of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a
finite set of elements. However, Hymes thought that Chomsky had missed out some very important
information: the rules of use.
Hymes distinguished four aspects of this competence:
-Systematic potential
-Appropriacy
-Occurrence
-Feasibility
1) Systematic potential: means that a native speaker possesses a system than has potential
for creating a lot of language.
2)
Appropriacy: means that the native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given
situation. All the following have been considered important elements of appropiacy:
1)Participants
6)Topic
11)Code
2)Social relationships
7)Purpose
12)Interaction norms
3)Setting
8)Key
13)Interpretation norms
4)Scene
9)Genre
5)Form
10)Channel
3) Occurrence: means that the native speaker knows how often something is said in the
language and act accordingly.
4) Feasibility: means that the native speaker knows whether something is possible in the
language.
These four categories have been adapted for teaching purposes. Thus, the act 1006/1991, of 14
June (BOE 25 June), which establishes the teaching requirements for Primary Education nationwide,
sees communicative competence for foreign language learners as comprising five subcompetences:
1)
Grammar competence: the ability to put into practice the linguistic units according to the
rules of use established in the linguistic system.
2)
Discourse competence: the ability to use different types of discourse and organize them
according to the communicative situation and the speakers involved in it.
3)
Sociolinguistic competence: the ability to adequate the speech to the specific context of
determined linguistic community.
4)
Strategic competence: the ability to define, correct or in general, make adjustments in the
course of the communicative situation.
5)
Sociocultural competence: this competence has to be understood as a certain
awareness of the social and cultural context in which the foreign language is used.