Studying the language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) separately has enabled me to focus on the terminology and importance of developing each skill in a language learner in order to achieve communicative competence.
I can’t help but notice the overlap in the language aspects from one modality to the next. For example, activating prior knowledge before a learning activity enhances students’ ability to apply known ideas, integrate new ideas and participate in listening, speaking, reading and writing tasks. Expanding learners’ syntactic, world, socio-cultural, topic and genre knowledge improves students’ language learning in all four skill areas. A student’s reason for engaging in a language activity is also common across modalities. For instance, a student’s goal may be to get information by listening and/or reading; or to convey information by writing and speaking.
Although teachers may set lesson and assessment objectives that focus on one language skill, there is almost always another modality involved. For example, the activity of interviewing a partner with a list of questions and then introducing each other to the rest of the class may have a speaking skill objective as the focus for development and/or assessment; however, reading the questions, listening for answers, and writing the answers on the paper are also involved.
I think integrating more than one language skill in learning activities makes the activities more authentic, interesting and provides more opportunities for students to expand their language development.
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