UNIT 3

TOPIC 3
DEVELOPMENT OF THE LINGUISTIC SKILLS. ( LISTENING, SPEAKING,
READING AND WRITING). COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN ENGLISH.

0. INTRODUCTION
1. THE SPOKEN WORD
Interdependence of oral skills
Oral Comprehension. “Listening”
- Strategies
- Stages in a listening lesson and activities
Oral Expression. Speaking
- Strategies
- Stages in a speaking lesson and activities

2. THE WRITTEN WORD

Written comprehension. “Reading”
- Strategies
- Stages in a reading lesson
- Reading activities
Written Expression “Writing”
- Writing skills
- Writing activities
3. INTEGRATTING SKILLS
Advantages of the integrated-skill approach
Integrating the language skills
4. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENE
5. CONCLUSION

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0. INTRODUCTION
The LOMCE in its Preamble says that mastering a second, even a third, foreign language has
become a priority in Education due to of the process of globalization we are living. The
European Union states as a main aim the development of multilingualism for the construction
of the European project. This law strengthen resources for make students achieve the
communicative competence in at least a first foreign language, that means not only to use the
four communicative skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) fluently, but to use them
correctly and appropriately to accomplish communication goals.
This topic deals with the development of the four linguistic skills related to the acquisition of the
communicative competence and their didactic application.
According LOMCE, especial attention should be paid to oral communication and that the
written form of the language should developed in last four years of Primary Education, as only
an introduction to writing will be necessary in the two first years.
To develop LOMCE, the Autonomous Community of Madrid has approved the Decree
89/2014, 24th of Julie, in it, the administration set as one of the objectives of the Primary stage,
the acquisition in, at least, one foreign language, the basic communicative competence which
allows children to express and understand simple messages and to deal with daily situations.

1. THE SPOKEN WORD

Oral communication is a two-way process between the speaker and the listener, the speaker
has to encode the message (speak) and the listener has to decode or interpret the message
(listening comprehension).
The oral ability is of prime importance in Primary Education, especially in the first level of
language learning.
These are de principles of the spoken word teaching process:
 Oral language is usually acquired before writing.
 Contextual support should be used in FLT: facial expressions, intonation, etc.
 Errors are considered as “normal” within the teaching-learning process.
 The information is usually accompanied by repetitions, pauses and paraphrasing.
Oral Comprehension. “Listening”
The ability to respond and understand the spoken language. There are two stages to consider
during the decoding process that students will carry out: the identification of the acoustic
material and the organization and selection of the contents.
To achieve the aims related to this skill, the teacher plays an important role:
- Prepare students for the listening task well before they hear the text itself.
- Encourage pupils to anticipate what they are going to hear.
- Make students concentrate on understanding the message.
- Invite answers from the whole class. Try not to put individual pupils under pressure.
Strategies
Teachers have to teach the following strategies to help students develop the listening skill:
- Predicting what might come next in a spoken message.
- Guessing.
- Use own knowledge of the topic to aid their comprehension.
- Identifying relevant points.
- Recognizing some discourse connectors, patterns and markers (Speech Organization).
- Understanding different intonation models and uses of stress that give clues.

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- Extracting specific information. (Scanning)

- Getting the general picture (Skimming)
- Understanding implicit comprehension inferring opinion and attitude (Speaker´s attitude).
- Deducing meaning from the context.
When creating materials and activities, it is essential take into account pupils' needs and
interests, as well as their level and psychological characteristics. In terms of motivation, ICT
resources are very useful and are also and excellent resource to expose students to different
listening activities. The activities need to be graded. As well lessons need to follow an order.
Stages in a listening lesson and activities
1. Pre-listening activities: To stimulate pupils’ interest in what they are going to listen to.
They could contain: Looking at and talking about pictures; looking at a list of items; making lists
of ideas, suggestions: reading a text; reading questions; predicting, speculating; etc.
2. While-listening activities: To break the ice and help our students set up some basic details.
They could contain: Matching pictures with what is heard; marking/checking items in pictures;
putting pictures in order; picture drawing; carrying out actions; labelling; true/false; etc...
3. Post-listening activities: They are complementary activities about what they have already
listened to and to amplify what they have done before.
They could contain: Filling in charts; dictation; putting texts into order; summarising; jigsaw
listening; role play/simulation; identifying relationship between speakers; etc...
Oral Expression. “Speaking”
The ability to communicate orally, evolving from the imitation to express their own ideas.
Students need to be in a confident environment and to no be afraid of making mistakes.
In primary schools two main types of speaking activities are used. One type are songs, chants,
and poems; they help pupils to master the sounds, rhythms, and intonation through simple
reproduction. The other type are games and pair work activities based on a given model; they
encourage the pupils to begin to manipulate the language within a fairly controlled situation.
Strategies
Instructors help their students to develop their speaking skills providing authentic practice that
prepares students for real communication situations and that help them to develop these skills:
1. Producing sounds (phonemes, stress and intonation)
2. Expressing elementary grammatical structures.
3. Using the language in an appropriate way.
4. Using extralinguistic strategies to help transmit the message.
Stages in a speaking lesson and activities
1.- Presentation: At the beginning the teacher selects the new language and presents it as
clear as possible. The focus is also on pronunciation, spelling and grammar.
We must try to provide a clear, motivating, natural and relevant context (situational, linguistic).
Our main role is inform; we can use Mime or Total Physical Response. We should not forget
realia.
2.- Controlled Practice: The students play the main role in this stage. The teacher must give
the students the opportunity to practise the items by themselves so that they can assimilate
and memorise the new language.
Production of language is very carefully guided and controlled by the teacher, so that correct
form and meaning are consolidated.
Activities: Drills; short dialogues (relevant and appropriate language in realistic situations).

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3.- Free Practice or Production Activities: We must give our pupils the opportunity to
experiment on their own and allow them to see how much they have understood and learnt.
A different aim is to provide motivation and feedback about the learning/teaching process.
Activities: Role play and situation; reaching consensus, relaying instructions, communication
gap games and other games; discussions.

THE WRITTEN WORD.

Written language can be defined by these features: there is no immediate feedback, it is
transmitted through visual media, it has a longer life than the spoken language, the context of
the production is different that the context of reception (ideas should be clear, due to the lack
of interaction between writer and reader), it has unique graphic features (spelling, punctuation)
that make its degree of elaboration is higher than the spoken language and the grammatical
structure of written language is more correct than oral language.
ICTs have changed some of this features in many situation, such us: the immediate feedback
we have mentioned before.
Written expression, in some languages such as English, has an added problem, the
discrepancy between the oral and written forms. This usually causes problems for learners.
Written understanding and production happen later than oral skill. The typical order in
appearance is: Listening – speaking - reading – writing
Writing in the beginners levels should remain at word or simple structure level.
Written comprehension. “Reading”
Reading is a process that involves decoding form the alphabet to a text. It must be taught from
a communicative point of view; we read to be informed, to enjoy ourselves or to maintain social
relationships.
Strategies
In order to make reading interesting, it is important to keep in mind:
1. When choosing texts consider not only their difficulty level, but their interest.
2. While the children are reading the text, move around the class providing support to pupils.
3. Do not encourage pupils to read texts aloud unless this is to learn a play or recite a poem.
As well as the oral skills, students will use different techniques to develop their reading ability:
 Predicting.
 Skimming.
 Scanning.
Stages in a reading lesson
The procedure in a reading comprehension lesson should be divided in three stages:
1. Pre-reading: this consists of motivating the students, to familiarise with the topic and to look
at previous knowledge. It is necessary to create expectations. Describing photographs or
covers of the text, informal dialogues about the topic, prediction of the content or giving a
tittle may be activities used at this stage.
2. While-reading: this consists of giving the students a purpose to achieve. Activities such as:
skimming, scanning, making inferences, labelling pictures, etc.
3. Post-reading: the main aim of these stage is to internalise the language of the text.
Activities at this stage are usually integrated with other skills. Activities may be: answering
comprehension questions, checking that the while-reading activities are correct, etc.
Reading activities

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There are many of them, for instance: Playing games (Dominoes, Bingo, Spot the difference),
sequencing, matching pictures to speech balloons, skimming (suggesting a title, matching titles
and texts), scanning (underlining specific information), underlining.
Written Expression “Writing”
It is the ability to put thoughts into words, encoding them using the alphabet. It is a skill that is
acquired step by step, moving from the spelling level to more complex tasks that involve
students in the production of guided and free texts. It is important the time is spent building up
the language, they will need a model on which they can then base their own efforts.
Writing is the most difficult of the four skills, firstly because in English there is a disagreement
between the phonetic and the written levels and secondly because it demands a level of
correction in spelling. Teacher should try to be sensitive in the correction and not insist on
every error being highlighted.
Writing Activities
Learners have a limited command of the language, acquired orally at first. Consequently, they
will need a gradual progression and a proper guidance starting with simple task. The normal
sequence is: coping, controlled practice and free production.
1. Activities oriented at word level: Classifying word, making lists, making personal
dictionaries, completing crosswords, working out anagrams, matching labels to pictures, etc.
2. Activities oriented at sentence level: Writing captions for pictures, writing speech balloons
for cartoons, writing sentences based on questionnaires, putting sentences in order, etc.

3. INTEGRATING THE SKILLS

The purpose of language learning is to improve the speakers' four skills of listening, speaking,
reading and writing. Integrating these skills is a process when we do a sequence of exercises
with our students using different skills, transferring information from one skill to another.
Advantages of the integrated-skill approach
Learners rapidly gain a true picture of the richness and complexity of the English language as
employed for communication.
English becomes a real means of interaction and sharing among people. This approach allows
teachers to track students' progress in multiple skills at the same time. Integrating the language
skills also promotes the learning of real content.
Integrating the language skills
An example:
1. Identifying the key words in a reading text about the climate of North America.
2. Using the key words to write a summary of the text.
3. In pairs, asking and answering questions about the climate of North America.

4. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
Dell Hymes established a new concept in language theory: the communicative competence. It
is defined as what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a
speech community.
For Chomsky, competence simply implies the knowledge of the language system. Hymes
maintained that Chomsky´s theory was incomplete, and that communicative and cultural di-
mension should be incorporated.
Canale and Swain expanded the previous description of Hymes establishing four dimensions
of the communicative competence (Subcompetences):
1. Grammatical competence

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2. Discursive competence
3. Sociolinguistic competence
4. Strategic competence
These four skills are complemented by socio-cultural competence, which implies the know-
ledge of certain cultural facts to understand the message completely.
Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted
that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good
classroom practice. This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical competence was
commonly given top priority.
The pedagogical implications derived from it has been said above are:
 Teacher should aim at effectiveness in the fours skills (listening, speaking, reading, writ-
ing)
 Present new items of the language in a specific context to help understanding.
 Communicative purpose is encouraged from the very beginning, through verbal and non-
verbal language.
 The teacher should let students know about traditions, social conventions an the ways of
life of the people who speak the target language.
To achieve this communicative competence we must develop our student's verbal and non-
verbal skills. During the early stages of the foreign language learning, special attention should
be paid to student's non-verbal communications. During these stages children go through a
period called “Silent Period” in which the child is exposed to the language but in which there is
not oral production..
In this period the child receives and stores large amounts of information, so it is not a passive
period. The information gathered will be the basis of the posterior learning. So, during this
stage it is fundamental to help our students to develop their gesticulating capacities.
According to R.D. 126/2014, February 28th, we have to bear in mind Socio – cultural Aspects
and Intercultural conscience in learning a foreign language; this makes reference to the ability
to use the Ianguage in accordance with the rules of the society among others.

5.CONCLUSION
Language teaching is based on the idea that the goal of language acquisition is communicative
competence: the ability to use the language correctly and appropriately to accomplish
communication goals. The desired outcome of the language learning process is the ability to
communicate competently, not the ability to use the language exactly as a native speaker
does.
Teachers should aim at effectiveness in the fours skills, present new items of the language in a
specific context, communicative purpose is encouraged from the very beginning and let
students know about traditions, social conventions and the ways of life of the people who
speak the target language.
As teachers, we also have to be aware of the importance of the information and
communication technologies for our students. And we should try to incorporated them in our
lessons, taking advantage of them, due to they are quite attractive and useful to young people
and because they allow teacher bring to the classroom real communicative situations
Include also something about the use of ICTs and in blingual schools the use of the twinning
schools projects to create real communicative situations.