Apart from language itself, there are four language skills that students need to learn: listening, reading, writing and speaking.
It may be that it is more important for your students to learn one particular skill. For example, an intellectual property attorney might want to focus on reading documents
and speaking. Personal assistants might say that speaking and listening are important skills for them to learn. The amount of time you spend on each skill can vary but they
should all be covered to some extent.
Skills can be broken down into written reading and writing and oral speaking and listening. Another, more common, way of classifying the skills is as productive skills
and receptive skills. The receptive skills are reading and listening: the students receive and understand the input; the productive skills are speaking and writing because they
involve the students in producing language.
However, skills are not entirely separate. We rarely use one skill in isolation. When we speak, we also listen to what others say to us; we read an e-mail and write a reply, we
might at the same time ask the person sitting next to us how to spell a certain word – this action will involve listening and speaking. Exceptions might be a day at home
reading a favourite novel or watching a film. However, we often talk about what we have read or watched, at a later date. A teacher will attempt to integrate the skills in
order to mimic the real world.
You will find that students do not have a uniform level across all the skills and all the elements of language. Students are inevitably stronger in some areas than in others.
Some students have a musical ear and can pronounce words and phrases well. Others have a good grasp of grammar or vocabulary. Students are usually stronger in
receptive skills than in productive skills meaning that they can understand more than they can produce. This is entirely understandable if you compare it to our competence
in our own language; for example we could watch a play by Shakespeare and understand what is going on without being able to produce that type of language. We
can also read and understand most of a legal document but we would have difficulty writing one ourselves. It is our role to cater to the varying needs of students, wherever
possible.
1.14 Free and controlled language practice
Language can generally be practised in two ways: controlled or free practice. In controlled practice, the teacher will choose a language structure that they want their
students to focus on. For example, you might want your students to use the present perfect have + past participle to talk about experiences. You might organise an
activity whereby students ask and answer questions such as:
Student A: Have you ever been to Mexico? Student B: Yes, I have.
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Student A: Have you ever eaten snails? Student B: Yes, I have.
Student A: Have you ever climbed a mountain? Student B: No, I haven’t.
This type of activity involves students in a discussion but the language is very controlled and is pre-determined by the teacher. Such activities are useful at lower
levels or where the objective is to get students producing language automatically without having to think about it too much.
Whilst controlled language practice will help with automatic reactions, it does not replicate real-world conversations. The example above is very false, it appears to be
an interrogation and there is no sharing of information. In real-life, student A might reply: “so what did you think of Mexico? I might be going there on holiday myself”.
Teachers should try to incorporate activities that imitate real-life conversations in the classroom as much as possible in order to prepare students for conversations in the
real world.
In free language practice, students use all and any language they know to express themselves. An example of free language practice is a classroom debate on smoking
in public. Students give their opinions, others agree or disagree, and counter arguments are put forward. There are no limits on the language that can be used,
except for staying polite There is a greater emphasis on this type of activity at higher levels. For more examples of free language practice, see Chapter 4, Speaking.
Alternatively, the teacher might create situations where certain language is likely to be used. For example, when talking about holiday plans, future tenses will probably be
used; in an interview simulation, the present perfect I’ve never worked in a shop before and simple past I worked for the council from 2000 to 2004 will probably be
used. We can predict what might be used but the actual language output is very unpredictable and can contain almost any language the students know. This is
sometimes known as freer practice. This type of task is useful to practise a language structure that has been presented recently where it is unnecessary to engage the
students in controlled practice.
1.15 Activities that provide controlled and freer language practice
