Speaking about integrating skills, first of all, it’s important to determine
what that means. Integrated skills refer to the interaction of the four main language skills all together during the learning process. As we know these skills are: listening, writing, speaking and reading. I think that these four skills are all part of normal language proficiency and use. They can also work together in language acquisition, and the phrase “integrated skills” is commonly used to describe curricula that develop the skills in parallel fashion. To my mind, integrating the skills allows teacher to build in more variety into the lesson because the range of activities will be wider. Instead of just having listening, the students can have speaking, reading and writing practice. This can raise their motivation to learn English. There are several lessons of the 8th form as an example of integrated ones. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to interview the teacher, but I can say that the teacher demonstrated high level of techniques which she used to integrate skills. These techniques helped not only to develop students' listening, writing, speaking and reading skills, but also to make the lessons more diverse and interesting, increasing learners’ motivation. However, integrating the four language skills can be challenging for the teacher. There are some problems that may arise. A teacher should have the good understanding of discourse, and to be able to use textbooks flexibly. This can also be time-consuming, requiring a lot of preparation. Another limitation is the problem of designing suitable materials that take account of students’ different skill levels. The four skills tend to develop at a different pace: receptive skills are stronger than productive skills, for example. The teacher whose lessons we observed mainly used “Gateway” textbooks by David Spencer, Macmillan. Although the textbook is full of written tasks, it clearly has a lack of tasks based on integrating of skills. That is why the teacher had to improve the existing tasks herself. In general, she combined reading or writing with speaking to make activities more communicative and encourage learners to discuss in class. For example, in the 8th form, students studied the future tense. After they completed several written tasks, the teacher asked the students to pair up and create a dialogue based on this grammar topic (for example, the first learner asks the question “What are you going to do on the weekend?” and the second learner answers, then they change roles). Another example of integration I observed in the 9th grade. First, the teacher wrote a statement on the “Keep a healthy and balanced diet” and asked the pupils whether they agree with it, who is on a diet and why should people follow a diet, and also shared her ideas. Then the students wrote an essay on this topic. As A. Raimes (1983, “Tradition and Revolution in ESL Teaching”) states, “listening and speaking are, regardless of who the people using the language are, at least as important as the other skills to communicate”. Byrne (1991) states that “one should keep in mind that writing, speaking, reading and listening skills are normally integrated in real life”. The term integrated skills is frequently used as if it were almost synonymous with reinforcement. Viewed in this way, the process of integrating language skills involves linking them together in such a way that what has been learnt and practiced through the exercise of one skill is reinforced and perhaps extended through further language tasks which bring different skills into use. Here, the use of any skill may quite naturally lead to the use of other.