But I thought the teacher was the expert:

how student talk and overlap in the four skills can bring the world into a language classroom. K. Stein Standing in front of twenty, thirty or even forty students for an English class in which all of those in the room are supposed to somehow practice their communicative English skills in the span of 90 minutes or less can be a daunting challenge for any teacher. If that same class is taught in a teacher centered manner, with a unidirectional flow of information, the students will have little chance to experience the rich and dynamic ways in which language is used outside of the classroom. Providing ample time for students to interact with each other through task based activities or topic based discourse not only allows students to practice the roles that are usually reserved for the teacher such as correcting mistakes and to provide scaffolding to facilitate conversation, it exponentially increases the amount of time each student can engage in communication. According to Swains output hypothesis, one of the benefits of giving learners a chance to produce language is to allow for hypothesis testing (Ellis, 1997). Through output, learners have the chance to see if the way in which they use language leads to effective communication. If the communicative act is not successful, or if the learners receive other feedback through the act of negotiating meaning, they can recognize the gap between their own language and the target language, a potentially important part of the SLA process (Pica 1996). But not all output is the same. A student discussing a book with a teacher and the same student discussing the same book with a group of friends will of course interact in very different ways. So it is not surprising that L2 learners also exhibit different communication styles and patterns when talking in the L2 with teachers versus other students. In fact, without the pressure involved in the teacher/student dynamic, students in small groups talk more and use a wider variety of language as compared with teacher led discussions (Long 1985)(Pica 1994). Setting up the classroom so students
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have the chance to use English during communicative exercises with each other allows for learners to engage in more realistic and richer communicative exchanges while simultaneously helping learners turn conversation meaning into a source of comprehensible input (Pica 1994). In my own classes, I have noticed that pair or small group work in which students engage in personally directed conversations results in an increased level of motivation where motivation is measured by the level of active participation. This is true of all level of learners, from the very beginning students who struggle to put together simple sentences about the foods they like and dislike and often rely on formulaic chunks of English, to the more advance students who can discuss more abstract topics such as environmental issues or psychology. When students feel that they have This higher something personal to say to a peer, they are much more willing to engage in the sometimes lengthy task of negotiating for meaning. tolerance level for difficulties within a communicative act and the development of communicative competencies will help serve the students when they come face to face with novel non-classroom situations or discourses for which they have little contextual knowledge. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the skills of speaking and listening can benefit from small group work. What is not so obvious at first glance is how the skills of reading and writing might benefit from small group work or serve as a means of communications between learners of English. Perhaps people might even think that reading and writing are secondary skills and need not play a prominent role in an English course focused on communication. But when it comes to using English, the importance of Often a persons written skills will have a Cover writing cannot be discounted.

large impact on their social and economic choices (Hinkel, 2006).

letters when applying for jobs or personal essays when applying for educational opportunities are just two examples of how writing skills can have a disproportionate effect on a learners future choices. In a world where over a quarter of the population is, "already fluent or competent in English," (Crystal, 2003) learners of English will find little value in their hard earned language abilities if they are unable to read and write. And even in a communication based classroom, writing and reading can be used as
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mediums for students to communicate with each other and to increase the amount of time students work within the target language. Reading and writing are often used in tandem. What one person writes,

another person must read in order for the information to be communicated. But most often class work writing is directed at an audience of one, the teacher. While this might allow for detailed and focused feedback, it limits the range and total amount of feedback available to any one student and traps written assignments within the register and genre constraints of the student/teacher social dynamic. In a given day, a native speaker of English might use written English in a number of ways which currently falls outside of a EFL or ESL course syllabus. Recently I asked a class of thirty-five third year high school English students in Japan to provide a list of ways in which they use writing in their daily lives outside of school. Students lists included: notes to friends and family members, to do lists, notes in the margins of novels, instant message chats on a cell-phone, and collections of restaurants they wish to visit and why. All of these types of writing could be brought into the classroom as writing activities and all of these activities could produce writing directed at other learners in the classroom as opposed to directed at the teacher. Further steps could also easily be added to increase the number of language skills being used. For example, after a student's writing is read, it could then be paraphrased and shared verbally with a third or fourth student who might then be encouraged to write a short note to him or herself about the content. Building on the idea of "notes to friends or family," from the student generated list above, I ran a fifteen minute time constrained activity in which students left short notes to other members of the class making simple requests which had to then be answered in writing. The following is one note from the class: Daisuke to Kenta: Teach me what we studied in yesterdays history class. Reply Kenta to Daisuke: Read page 34 to 65!

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The notes allowed the students not only to practice writing simple commands, they helped students come to understand the difference between polite requests and the less polite command forms that might be used in an informal written discourse between friends. The practical nature of the task and its similarities to how students actually use writing in their daily lives resulted in a higher use rate of dictionaries and a higher rate of active participation than most writing exercises in the class. In addition, the students were able to engage in an activity which required them to use both writing and reading skills. While this activity might appear too basic for a more advanced class, I would argue that even in an advanced EAP class, students could still benefit from short writing activities which mirrored how they might use writing in academic situations other than formal papers, such as requesting data from a fellow graduate student/researcher or leaving and responding to comments on an academic blog. In daily life, all four of the language skills regularly interact in ways that is often missing within the classroom. Perhaps we read a novel and moved, make notes in the margins; we tell our friend about it verbally and then lend it to our friend when finished; a few weeks later we send emails back and forth about how our reactions to the novel differed. True, it would be easy to delineate each of the acts in this chain of events into one of the four skills. But that would be missing out on the fact that all of these acts are in some way enmeshed with those that come before and after. Paul Nation succinctly points out that there is something unique about each of the four skills which makes them different from the others and that in order to improve at a skill a learner must spend quality time practicing it (Nation, 2007). Now let's return to the hypothetical class of 40 eager By letting the students use the four students all hoping to practice their communicative skills that we were faced with at the beginning of this paper. skills to communicate with each other in ways that more closely reflect how language is actually used outside of the classroom, we can provide more of the time needed to develop any one particular skill. But perhaps just as In importantly, we can help students learn how to negotiate meaning, turn output into input, and explore a wider array of genres and registers. doing so, perhaps students will begin to see each other not only as fellow
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learners, but as sources of rich linguistic interaction. If they do, it will knock one more hole in the wall which continues to separate classroom and everyday English.

Sources: Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language (2nd Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ellis, R (1997) Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press Hinkel, E. (2006), "Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills." TESOL Quarterly, 40 (1) pp. 106-131 Lightbown, P. M. (2003), "SLA research in the classroom/SLA research for the classroom." Language Learning Journal, 28 pp. 4-13 Long, M. H. (1985), "Group Work, Interlanguage Talk, and Second Language Acquisition." TESOL Quarterly, 19 (2) pp. 207-227 Nation, P. (2007), "The Four Strands." Innovations in Language Learning and Teaching. 1 (1) pp. 1-12 Pica, T. (1994), "Research on Negotiation: What Does it Reveal About Second-Language Learning Conditions, Processes, and Outcomes?" Language Learning, 44 (3) pp. 493-527 Pica, T. (1996), "Second Language Learning Through Interaction: Multiple Perspectives." Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 2 (1) pp. 1-22

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