UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD

Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado

Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

TASK 3

SUMMARY

DIDACTICS OF ENGLISH

PRESENTED BY:
JULIETH ALEJANDRA MONTOYA
ID: 1127233409

MILLY ANDREA MUÑOZ

TUTOR

GROUP: 551026_12

NATIONAL OPEN AND DISTANCE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES ECEDU
BA IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
APRIL 3rd, 2016
 UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD
Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado
Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

The Cambridge guide to teaching English of other languages by Ronal Carter and David
Nunan explains the concepts of the four skills. Basically, it gives and orientation to how
each of this skills should be taught without necessarily going in depth through the
explanation, and what has been the most important approaches that has influenced each of
the skills.

To begin with, the unit introduces the first skill which is Listening: Listening is by far the
most important skill there is in language, it is where everything starts in a learning process,
that does not mean that one should only be exposed to listening to learn a language but on
the contrary as the unit mentions, listening is used in conjunction with other skills as
speaking.

However, we all can have different forms to understand oral language, in fact, we
understand words, concepts and ideas differently, so this due to different processes that are
assimilated in different ways i.e. there are bottom-up processes and top-down processes,
the principle of each process is the first one pretty much emphasizes on how the
information as a whole is understood and then broken down to understand how words
sound in several grammatical, lexical, or phonological aspects, and then we have top-down
processing, which is like breaking the language down into parts before we can be exposed
to, this may happened through predictions by introducing new vocabulary, showing
pictures, etc, in order to use students’ prior knowledge for any listening task.

According to the author is important as teachers to integrate different strategies to help

students on acquiring the listening skill, as teachers we need to integrate listening activities
that are meaningful for students, know their weaknesses to help them with strategies that
can help them succeed, and make sure to integrate other skills with listening, finally and
 UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD
Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado
Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

nowadays of great importance is to include technology on their process, this is a great input
that can enhance their listening skill, but always making sure is meaningful for them.

The second skill is reading, it works under the concept of the three P’s, which are the
Practice, the Product and the Process. This is how reading is often looked at. The first P,
the practice is linked to reading as part of everyday life situation from schooling to just
reading to ads on the street. The second P, the product refers to the understanding meaning
from written texts and as for the third P, the process we look at it as the role of the student
in building meaning from a text either exposing its details or drawing on conclusions in
written form.

In the practice part of reading, first, the author focuses on the use, which is important as
teachers to help them be aware of their needs and roles as readers and as teachers, we need
to be aware on their likes in different social settings. In the second part it is mentioned the
focus on the text, which the author describes the importance for students to know the
structure of a text in order to understand a reading, this can be done from simple tasks such
as understanding the sound of words, to advance reading in which they’ll need to work on
more complicated structures, all this in order to understand and be aware of a story or text
structure. Reading as process focuses on the importance as teachers not to see errors as
mistakes but as a way to help students on understanding the right way to say the words, also
we need to make sure that they get familiar content; this makes sure they get fluent in their
process, in advanced reading is of great relevance to include pre, while and post reading
activities that can help students feel engage and enjoy what they are reading.

The third skill is speaking; it just focuses on oral production, in other words, language with
a communicative purpose. Along with Listening, Speaking is also the second most
important skill, we can relate this to a situation in which we cannot produce sounds or
 UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD
Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado
Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

words or merely speak if we have not listened to how the words sound in first place.
Essentially, we need to hear and listen before we speak.

Nowadays speaking has taken an important part in L2 teaching, because before it mainly
focused on grammar- translation, and on pronunciation. There has been different
approaches related to teaching oral skills, from audiolingualism that focused in repeating
and memorizing to task-based approach that focuses on the authentic use of the language.
One approach that has been very important has been psycholinguistic skills-processing
model that talks about the importance of four processes when acquiring a language:
conceptualization, formulation, articulation and self-monitoring.

In development of L2, speech is difficult to just focus on accuracy, fluency and complexity,
because if you pay attention to just one aspect, this will lead to the other aspects getting
weak, that is why as teachers we need to find ways to incorporate the 3 of them on the
students speaking process, as an example of this is when students recycle language or when
students repeat tasks, this can help students remember what they used and feel more sure
and engaged in communicating. In speaking is difficult to say how tasks can affect the
student’s fluency, accuracy and complexity, because they just provide the conditions for
learners to communicate, but it would be important in the future to see how they can be
integrated with the help of different combinations and sequences of activities that can help
learner used them but step by step.

And last skill the chapter describes is Writing, It describes how writing was conceived to be
taught as another language skill after the 70’s when writing was only taught for practicing
handwriting, writing or answering to grammar and reading exercises.

Writing is an important skill that needs to be taken into account, but it has always been seen
as a way to evaluate student’s processes and a way to tell students of their errors, this was
 UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD
Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado
Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

the traditional teacher-centered classes, that nowadays has evolved to learned-centered

classes that focuses more on the cooperative tasks in which students can help each other to
achieve a goal in writing, or as an individual task where students feel free and choose what
they want to write about. Other way that we can see how writing has evolved is that
teachers are now more prepared when teaching writing and students are more aware of
what is required by the school.

When teaching writing in an ESL classroom is important as teachers to include activities in

which students can work in groups or cooperate with each other, make sure to integrate
other skills with writing, because the other skills can help to complement the writing tasks,
help learners to be autonomous and write about what they like, include meaningful material
that helps them in their process and last to add technology in the writing tasks, because it
has revolutionized the writing processes.

In conclusion all the four skills are of great relevance when acquiring a language, is
important to integrate all the four skills when teaching, because one skill is the complement
of the other, also as teachers we need to make sure that the activities are meaningful for
students to use and recycle what they learned, like that they can use what they acquired on
their everyday lives.
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL ABIERTA Y A DISTANCIA – UNAD
Nombre escuela: Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación, Pregrado
Nombre programa: Licenciatura en inglés como lengua extranjera

REFERENCES

 Ronald Carter, David Nunan. (2010). The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to
Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge University Press.