Tema 3.

 DESARROLLO DE LAS DESTREZAS LINGÜÍSTICAS.

 COMPRENSIÓN Y EXPRESIÓN ORAL. COMPRENSIÓN Y EXPRESIÓN ESCRITA.

 LA COMPETENCIA COMUNICATIVA EN INGLÉS.

In order to master a language, we need to understand its native speakers and also to make ourselves
understood. This involves being able to encode (speaking and writing) and decode (listening and reading) both
oral and written messages. Thus, in order to communicate effectively, communicative competence is essential.
Since the 1970’s, the belief that language is a means of communication has inspired a new approach in
English teaching: the Communicative Approach. Due to its influence, nowadays language is taught and learnt
in a very practical way in the classroom and students practise the four basic skills from a communicative point
of view.

Based on this view, the present essay aims to study in detail the four basic skills of language, which are
listening, speaking, reading and writing. For this purpose, I will divide this topic into three main sections. In the
first part, I will deal with the spoken word as well as the development of listening and speaking skills in
students when learning a language. In the second part, I will examine the written word, so that reading and
writing skills will be analysed. In the third part, I will discuss the importance of integrating skills in order to
develop the communicative competence , which is the main objective of FLL according to The Organic Law of
Improvement on Education 8/2013 (LOMCE) passed on December 9 th

We deal with an essential topic since successful communication, which is the basis of understanding
among human beings, depends on communicative competence and the mastery of the four linguistic skills. In
addition, The Foreign Language Curriculum for Primary Education emphasizes the significance of this topic by
including in its objectives, blocks of contents and assessment criteria the development of listening, speaking,
reading and writing with a communicative purpose as well as paying attention to the components of
communicative competence such as the use of strategies, linguistic and socio-cultural aspects, etc.

FIRST
Learning a language in Primary Education has a practical objective: to be able to communicate.

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 In order to use a language effectively, we need to combine different abilities or skills. We can identify four
major skills when using a language to communicate: listening, speaking, reading and writing. According to
Jeremy Harmer, these major skills can be classified according to the medium and the activity of the speaker. In
this way, speaking and listening are said to relate to language expressed through the aural medium whereas
reading and writing are said to relate to language expressed through the visual medium. If we classify these
skills according to the activity of the participants, speaking and writing are said to be productive skills since
they demand some kind of production on the part of the language user, whereas listening and reading are
receptive skills, since the language user is receiving oral or written language.

In order to achieve a proper learning, it is convenient to take into account some principles, so that children
learn in a natural way: not speaking before listening, not reading before speaking and not writing before
reading. One of the reasons to follow this sequence is that the mother tongue is learnt in this way.

According to the Communicative Approach, the four skills must be worked on at the same time, but not to
the same extent. Reading and writing are abstract activities, and children are not mature enough to deal with
abstract concepts. Therefore, they must be reached at the end of Primary Education and that is why LOMCE
8/2013 passed on the 3rd of May has kept this in mind and emphasizes oral skills over written skills in Primary
Education.

After explaining how the four skills are classified, I will go on developing each skill separately. In order to
do so, I will follow Jeremy Harmer´s medium classification. I will provide a definition of each skill and its main
principles, as well as the strategies and the stages which must be followed to carry out the activities in which
these skills may be involved.

First, I will deal with the analysis of the skills expressed through the aural medium via spoken words.

Let me start with the listening skill. Listening can be defined as the ability to understand and respond to
spoken language. This is an essential skill and it provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language
acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.
However, far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listening activities involve the listeners
actively in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own linguistic and background knowledge to
bear with the information contained in the aural text. According to Donn Byrne, it is important to remember
that, as in mother tongue acquisition, “a learner´s ability to understand language needs to be more extensive
than his ability to produce language”.

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Let us go on examining the main principles which should be followed in order to achieve suitable and
beneficial teaching-learning listening activities:

a) They must have definite goals, carefully stated.

b) They should be constructed with careful step by step planning.
c) They should demand active participation from the student.
d) They should stress conscious memory work.
e) They should teach, not test.
f) They should have a communicative purpose:

Apart from these principles, listening strategies are another key element when dealing with the listening
skill. These are techniques that contribute directly to the comprehension and help the way in which input is
received. Since listening is not a passive hearing of sounds but a complex and active process, teachers must
train students in:
a) Identifying the topic.
b) Predicting and guessing information using their prior knowledge.
c) Inferring the meaning from context.
d) Listening for global understanding (listening for gist).
e) Listening for specific information.
f) Listening for detailed information.

The Communicative Approach and the Learner-centred Approach emphasize the active role of the
learner. Therefore, lessons must be planned in a way that ensures children’s involvement in classroom
activities. A listening lesson, in order to be effective, must follows 3 stages, which are:

- Pre-listening stage: It is a preparatory phase. The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to
prepare students for what they are going to hear and create expectation. This can be achieved through
activities such as predicting content from a title, commenting on pictures or photographs, asking for
the students’ opinion on the topic, pre-teaching key words (vocabulary) and grammar exercises,
among others.
- While-listening stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to develop listening
strategies and keep the students active. These tasks can be either extensive or intensive listenings. On
the one hand, in extensive listening activities, global understanding is encouraged, for example:

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 matching pictures, sequencing a story, answering questions, following instructions (listen and colour,
listen and do...). These activities are appropriate for the first levels. On the other hand, intensive listening
activities are tasks that require a specific search for information of any kind (sounds, words, intonation
patterns, etc.) as well as dictations, gap-filling activities, finding differences between two versions of a
story, etc.
- Post-listening stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to check comprehension
and evaluate. Following on the listening passage, a lot of activities are possible: extending lists,
summarising, matching with a reading text, performing role plays, practise pronunciation, vocabulary
and structures from the text, etc.

After having explained the listening skill, I will go on to address the speaking skill. Speaking can be
defined as the ability to communicate in speech, which has to be appropriate to specific contexts. The main
aim of oral production is to speak fluently, that is to say, the speaker should be able to express his ideas
with clarity, correction and without too much hesitation. In order to achieve this objective, the student
should go from the initial stage of imitation to the final stage of free production.
Nevertheless, there are often silent periods which cannot be interpreted as learning absence. According
to Stephen Krashen, the ability to speak fluently comes with time, after the acquirer has built up a certain
linguistic competence by understanding the input. In addition, errors are normal, because as Chomsky
states, they are positive evidence that learning is taking place.

It is important to bear in mind that speaking involves three areas of knowledge:

- Mechanics or the use of the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation.
- Functions or the knowledge of the purpose of the speech act.
- Social and cultural rules and norms or the importance of the context.

As I mentioned before, in order to achieve oral fluency, learners must go from the initial stage of
Imitation to the final stage of free production. This means that they have to follow three stages. The first
and second stages are preparatory for the third stage, in which real communication takes place:

- Imitation: As we know, the first step is the imitation of the model. In this stage, they will
mainly repeat either from the teacher of from recorded material. To be successful, they need to be fun,
lively and varied, for instance drills: substitution, repetition drills.

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 - Practice: The students can practice in pairs the verbal form already presented. These
activities will be controlled by the teacher although some variation is allowed. There are two levels within
this stage: On the one hand, there is controlled practice, in which students will use correct and simple
language within a situation or context performing activities like telling the time looking at a clock or asking
questions about pictures. On the other hand, there is guided practice, which will often be done either in
pairs or small groups, performing activities like practicing a model dialogue with possible variations or
making surveys.
- Production: This is the most genuine communicative stage as the students will have to put in practice
in a creative way all he has learnt, without the teacher´s control. In this stage, the development of the
discursive competence, that is, coherence and fluency, will take place. At this stage communicative
activities take place and the range is endless: playing card games, giving mini-talks, role-play, problem-
solving, drama... Most of them are based on the information gap principle.

SECOND
Now that I have considered the spoken word, I will go on to analyse the skills expressed through the
visual medium via written words,that is, reading and writing.
Let me start with the Reading skill. Reading can be defined as an interactive process that goes on
between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension.

Reading comprehension is a receptive skill and therefore shares common features with listening. The
main common feature is that reading is an active process in which the meaning of graphs should be
decoded so the student must develop some reading strategies. In other words, teachers can help their
students to become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during and after
reading. We can distinguish the following reading strategies: previewing, predicting, skimming and
scanning, guessing from context and paraphrasing.

These reading strategies should be used appropriately depending on the reading stage the student is
at. Next, I will describe the main stages in reading activities, which are:

- Pre-reading stage may serve as preparation: assess students´ knowledge, give students the
knowledge, clarify, make students aware of the type of the text and the purpose reading and motivate
them. E.g. using the title, predict content, looking at pictures, skimming to find the main idea,
brainstorming. The main aim during this stage is to develop the skill of predicting.

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- In the while-reading stage, students check the comprehension as they read. The teacher gives the
students points to search for: getting the general idea of the text or specific information. The first case is
called extensive reading; the other is intensive reading. It may include suggesting a title, underlining the
required information, answering questions and chart filling. The main aim during this stage is to develop
the skills of skimming, scanning and inferring meaning from context.
- As for the post-reading stage, a follow-up work can be considered. The main aims are to internalize
the language of the text and to integrate skills. Integrating skills promotes the learning of real content
and is highly motivating for students.

Once reading in English has been considered, I will focus on how to write in English. Writing skill is more
than the production of graphic symbols, as symbols have to be arranged according to certain conventions.

According to Matthews, we may distinguish five subskills related to writing: graphic skills, that is writing
words correctly including aspects such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling; grammatical skills, the
ability to use a variety of sentence patterns and constructions; stylistic skills, the ability to express precise
meaning in a variety of styles and registers; rethorical skills ,the ability to use cohesion devices in order to
link parts of a text; organisational skills, writing ideas with coherence and summarize relevant points.

Writing correctly in a language requires a lot of practice and is a slow ability to acquire. For that reason,
in Primary Education it should be done in a guided way. The strategies that a student should learn are,
among others, writing words and elementary linguistic forms correctly, writing appropriately according to
the context and writing with coherence.

In the early stages of learning English, students will generally write very little. Moreover, the
youngest ones may be still coping with some features of the writing process in their native language.
Therefore, we must be especially sensitive to the different writing demands which we may find in our
classroom and the different strategies of supporting their writing. It is highly recommendable that students
will spend most time completing tightly controlled written exercises to practice their English, such as
completing sentences, unscramble words/sentences, gap-filling or dictations. Like many teaching
techniques that go out of fashion for a while, dictation is making a comeback, especially due to the revision
undertaken by Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri, who looked at the subject and found dynamic alternatives
to the dictation of large chunks of uninteresting prose by a boring teacher. In addition to these controlled
activities, sometimes students will also be encouraged to produce free writing, although they will need a
lot of support.

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 Four stages must be followed when teaching to write:

- Copying: students copy material provided by the teacher: texts, sentences, etc. Copying is of great
pedagogical value because it helps students reinforce spelling or sentence structure and it also helps them
to retain words. Some examples of copying may include listing, classifying words into categories, putting
lists of words in alphabetical order, etc.
- Practice stage: It must begin as a guided copying at word-level: making a list, a personal dictionary,
crosswords, matching labels to pictures, anagrams, then progress to sentence-level: writing speech
bubbles for cartoons, sequencing sentences and copying, correcting mistakes and finally, if we want our
students to write fluently, they will have to learn how to write paragraphs. This is commonly done by
providing a model from which to work, e.g. our students see a text and then use it as a basis for their own
work. Jeremy Harmer calls this exercise “parallel writing”.
- Production stage: Students will be encouraged to produce writing. At this level, this skill will demand
sentence, text structure, organization of ideas…

THIRD
After having examined the spoken and the written word, I will turn to the definition of integrated skills
as well as to the concept of communicative competence. Integrated skills can be defined as the process by
means of which a series of activities or tasks use any combination of the four linguistic skills.

If we think about how we communicate in everyday life, we notice that, in general, we do not use
these skills in an isolated way: we combine them. Thus, in the English class, we have to do the same and
design activities that integrate several skills.. The integrated-skill approach involves the teaching of the
language skills in conjunction to each other, and exposes learners to authentic language. Integrating the
language skills promotes the learning of real content and is highly motivating to students.

According to Donn Byrne, in order to integrate skills, it is essential to use varied groupings when
designing integrated activities because they offer many opportunities for listening, speaking, reading and
writing. Some activities in which skills are integrated are role-play, dictations or project works, which
involves some research and some group discussion about the topic until eventually, the students write the
final product. Therefore, it is very useful for integrating skills

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 Summing it up, it could be said that skill integration will help to the acquisition of communicative
competence. This term was coined by Dell Hymes and it was deliberately contrary to Chomsky´s Linguistic
Competence, who tried to explain how a child learns a language. For Chomsky, competence simply implied
the knowledge of the language system. Hymes maintained that Chomsky´s theory was incomplete, and
that a communicative and cultural dimension should be incorporated. According to him, a speaker does
not only need the ability to use grammatical structures, but also to learn how to use those structures in a
community (appropriateness). In other words, Hymes stated that in order to learn a language, a native
speaker does not only need to utter grammatically correct forms (as Chomsky thought), he also has to
know the rules of use, that is, where and when to use a sentence, and to whom. Thus, Hymes replaced
Chomsky´s notion of Competence with his own concept of Communicative Competence, and distinguished
four aspects:

 Systematic potential: A native speaker possesses a potential for creating language.

 Appropriacy: A native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given situation, in a
particular context.
 Occurrence: A native speaker knows how often something is said in the language and act
accordingly.
 Feasibility: A native speaker knows whether something is possible in the language, although some
structures are grammatically correct, they are not possible in the language.

These four categories have been adopted for teaching purposes.

Later on, linguists Canale and Swain expanded the previous description of Hymes, establishing five
subcompetences of the Communicative Competence. As a result of this, the act 1006/1991 of 14 th June
(B.O.E. 25 June) establishes the teaching requirements nationwide and sets up that Communicative
Competence for Foreign Language Learners comprises five subcompetences:

 Grammar competence: It refers to the ability to put into practice the linguistic units
according to the rules of use established in the linguistic system, for instance, the mastery of
grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students should be able to cope with difficulties in phonology,
orthography, vocabulary, word and sentence formation.
 Discourse competence: The ability to us different types of discourse and organise them
according to the communicative situation and the speakers involved in it, using cohesion and coherence.
Students should be able to distinguish the different devices to use in oral and written language.

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  Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to adequate the utterances to the specific context
according to the accepted usage of a particular linguistic community. Students should be able to
understand the social context in order to express and understand social meanings properly.
 Strategic competence: The ability to define or make adjustments in the course of the
communicative situation, and the capacity to use verbal and non-verbal strategies in order to make
communication effective. Students should be able to use strategies to cope with grammar problems ,
with sociolinguistic difficulties as well as with discourse difficulties in general.
 Sociocultural competence: A certain knowledge of the social and cultural context in which
the Foreign Language is used. Students should get at least some command of the basic social and cultural
features of L2 in order to communicate appropriately.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to remark that, as I have proven in this topic, it is important that the activities
and techniques we use in the classroom aim to develop the four skills of language in students so that they
can take part in any communicative situation. Therefore, we should try to achieve communicative
competence in our students, aiming activities to develop oral and written comprehension (listening and
reading skills) and oral and written expression (speaking and writing skills).
In this topic, I have analysed the spoken word as well as the development of listening and speaking
skills in students when learning a language. Then, I have examined the written word, and the achievement
od the reading and writing skills. Finally, I have discussed the importance of integrating skills in order to
develop the communicative competence , which is the main objective of FLL according to LOMCE 8/2013.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:

 Halliday M.A.K.(Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday): “Spoken and written language”. Geelong
University Press, 1976.
 Savignon, S.: “Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice” New York: McGraw Hill,
1997.
 Dell Hymes “On Communicative Competence in Sociolinguistics” Penguin, London, 1972.
 Halliwell, S. “Teaching English in the Primary English Classroom” Longman, London, 1992.
 BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. Penguin English.
 HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.

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 LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.
 VARELA, R. et al. (2003): All About Teaching English. Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces.
 Organic Law of Improvement on Education 8/2013 (LOMCE) passed on December 9th
 Royal Decree 126/2014 passed on February 28h which establishes the minimum requirements of
Primary Education nationwide.
 Decree 2016 passed on July 21th which establishes the curriculum in Primary Education and the
evaluation in The Autonomous Community of Castilla y Leon.
 Decree EDU/593/2018 passed on May 31th which establishes the
attention to diversity in The Autonomous Community of Castilla y Leon.
 Decree EDU / 1330/2009 passed on June 19th, which established the teaching of the second
foreign language in the third cycle of primary education, in schools supported by public funds in
the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León.

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