TEACHING THE FOUR SKILLS

                                                    TEACHING THE FOUR SKILLS 

 INTRODUCTION: 

  The aim of teaching English to students is to help them to use it whenever they need it. In order to use English the learner has to listen and understand and should speak with clarity. He must be able to read a passage and understand it and should write with a purpose. In all these activities he makes use of the language skills listening, speaking, reading, writing. So the teacher should teach these skills in the class so that the learner may develop these skills and use English whenever he needs it. 

LANGUAGE SKILLS:

     Language is a tool of communication and it is used for both receiving and sending messages or information. Communication can be oral or written. Oral communication involves the listening skills and written communication involves reading and writing. Reading and listening are receptive skills and speaking and writing are productive skills. Three a successful communication needs all these four skills besides gestures, signs etc. 

LISTENING SKILLS: 

     Listening precedes speaking and paves the way for this student to develop oral fluency and accuracy stop only if the learners are familiar with English sound system and can articulate English sounds, they can listen to English speeches and understand them. While listening a learner decodes a message and understands it.The teacher can help the students to develop their listening skill by giving extensive and intensive listening practice. In extensive listening, the student is exposed to year wide variety of sounds and structures that helps him to listen and understand English later in real life situations. Intensive listening in concerned with just one or two specific items. Both the extensive and intensive listening can be practiced with the help of the recordings that the teacher himself makes or with the tapes that accompany certain text or in the language labs. 

PHASES OF LISTENING:

     The three phases of listening skills are the initial phase, when the child develops the skill of listening to various sounds and differentiates them. In the middle phase the child develops the skill of comprehending continuous speech. In the final stage the skill of listening reaches the top and rapid speeches and commentaries are understood. 

SPEAKING SKILLS: 

 A student should be able to recognize your sound before he gets the ability to produce it. Only if listening is followed by practice at the grammatical and lexical levels, the learners will be able to communicate orally. So listening attention should be sharpened because it helps speaking. In order to give practice to students in speaking, the teacher can start with dialogues and ask your pair of students to converse on simple context situations. In order to teach oral English, the students can be asked to read loud air passage in the class. While our student reads aloud, the others reveal his reading cryptically and interrupt him and make him repeat a phrase or a sentence. Only if this reading aloud practice is done well, it can hold the attention and interest of the whole class otherwise the students will be bored. Speaking is an important activity but the teacher should not force the students to speak unless they are ready to speak because speaking is a productive skill that takes a longer time to emerge. 

TECHNIQUES TO DEVELOP SPEECH: 

     The main techniques for speaking skills are reproduction technique, question answers, role play by performing actions, by showing a film, by given an outline story and through oral composition. 

READING SKILLS: 

     Reading is a decoding process that involves many physical, intellectual and often emotional reactions. Becomes meaningful only if the student understands the meaning of the graphic symbols by recognizing the semantic content of the graphic symbols and the sounds they represent. Two kinds of reading are reading aloud and silent reading . It is good for the students to develop the skill of reading aloud. But the teacher should give more attention to develop the students skill in silent reading because the students who want to learn English have to read a lot so as to have a knowledge of the language and only silent reading helps him to do it at some speed. The teacher should teach the students the mechanics of reading and train them to increase the speed of their reading. 

IMPORTANCE OF READING: 

    Reading is one of the four major skills of English. This skill is the most favored and most practiced skill in the English class. Reading is a complex process which involves many processes such as physiological, physiological, linguistic, intellectual and emotional aspects. As Bacon says, reading makes us a full man. It enhances our experience and helps us to gather world wide information. Reading indicates the knowledge of the language. It is a source of recreation and it gives the reader pleasure and profit. Reading introduces a child to the surrounding world. Reading aloud helps the child to acquire good pronunciation. Reading affects the students personality and it is a source of self-education. As the skill of reading is of unique importance in the life of a person, the teacher should help the learners in the life of a person, the teacher should help the learners to develop their reading skill by giving certain specific activities. 

TYPES OF READING: 

     Intensive reading: Intensive reading or critical reading is done when students try to gather facts or arrive at some conclusions on the basis of facts. This is done with thinking and comprehension . Hence it is know as critical reading. Extensive reading: Extensive reading is a kind of wide reading based on the large field where the desired information is gathered for a survey or report. This is an advanced stage in reading , which emphasizes the expansion of vocabulary and advanced skills of comprehension. It is silent reading and is need based. This kind of reading is known as reading for information. 

WRITING SKILLS: 

     Learning to write is learning to use English grammar with ease and facts in some sequential order as tools. Writing involves both accuracy and fluency. So the teacher should teach the students the mechanics of writing like handwriting, sleeping, capitalisation, punctuation, word order, word division, sentence structure and construction before they develop ease and fluency in writing. The main aim of teaching writing skill to the students is to help him to express himself effectively in good English. In the beginning classes the teacher should give more copy writing to the learners and at the later level, the students may be given exercises varying from controlled and guided paragraph writing to free writing of essays on familiar topics. But correction of learners writing is an important part of the teachers work

MECHANICS OF WRITING: 

     Writing is an active skill. It is putting the speech in the form of letters. In writing the ideas are gathered and experiences or narrated. The mechanics of writing should be learned before the pupils sit down to writing. The ideas and key sentences are used in the paragraph appropriately. In the mechanics of writing the student first learns to write the letters of the alphabet. The children or taught the print script first. Then they are trained in cursive writing. They are taught where to begin each letter, which way to move and how to connect the strokes. This is a slow process in the beginning. But the children will pick up if they learn it in the right way. They are trained to make these strokes automatically and to connect one letter with another to form words.

 PROCESS INVOLVED IN WRITING: 

 Teaching writing to students is a complex process, involving many activities such as initial probing onto experience organisation of ideas into meaningful sequences and expression of thoughts and feelings with confidence and ease.

 GOOD HAND WRITING: 

 When the student writes, the teacher should teach and help him to develop a good handwriting which means, the letters must be distinct and legible. Writing should be simple and neat and the letters in each line should be of uniform size and there should be proper spacing between the letters in the word, words in the line and the lines in a page. 

OTHER GENERAL CONSIDERATION:

 The weaknesses in writing generally seen in a composition are inadequacy of lexical range, misapplications of words and phrases, grammatical faults, miss-spellings, faulty punctuation and use of words that are out-dated. The teacher should take practical steps to remedy these weaknesses. 

CONCLUSION :

 As language is an integrative activity, it is wise that the English teacher teaches the language skills integratively, that is more than one skill at a time. The language skills can be developed integratively by giving dictation to the students, asking them to listen to a passage and then asked to read the next part of the passage on the blackboard and at the end asked to write answers for the questions on the topic or they may be asked to summarize the passage. Students can be engaged in role play activities and they can also be made to do cloze exercise.