24 Murcia, 2001, p. 256. According to Larsen-Freeman, it involves three
dimensions. First, structure or form is dealing with how the language is formed. Second, semantics or meaning is dealing with what the language means. Third,
pragmatics or use is dealing with when or why the language is used as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, para. 252-253.
Jeanette S. Decarrico states that “lexical competence is a central part of
communicative competence, and teaching vocabulary is a central part of teaching language” as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, p. 297. It involves some activities that
develop students‟ three mental process memory, storage, and retrieval processes. The purpose is to
promote students‟ deep level process, short-term memory and long-term memory as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, para. 286-289. The activities
focus on the meaning of a word, its part of speech, its word family, word associations, word combinations, collocations, and idioms.
b. Teaching Four Language Skills
Language skills involve listening, speaking, reading, and writing. First, according to Denes and Pinson, listening is a fundamental skill because it
establishes a base for the development of oral language within the “speech chain” as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, p. 70. Joan Morley also writes that it can be
“a vehicle for teaching elements of grammatical structure and allow vocabulary
items to be contextualized within a body of communicative discourse” as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, p. 70. It means, teaching listening is very important to
develop grammar and vocabulary skills. There are four models of listening activities, listening and repeating, listening and answering comprehension
questions, listening tasks for functional purposes, and interactive listening.
25 Second, speaking is the most basic mean of communication. Therefore,
Anne Lazaraton notes that in teaching speaking, “learners should be allowed and
encouraged to initiate communication when possible, to determine the content of their responses and contribution, and to evaluate their own production and
l earning progress” as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, p. 104. Speaking activities
involve drills, discussions, speeches, role plays, conversations, and audio-taped oral dialogues. The focus of the activities can be on either the fluency or accuracy.
Speaking is also related to pronunciation, sound system. Pronunciation involves intonation, rhythm, reduced speech, linking, and word stress.
Third, Anne Ediger explains that reading is “a complex, interactive
process ” because it requires several skills and knowledge as cited in Celce-
Murcia, 2001, para. 154. The examples are automatic recognition skills identify words and text, synthesis and evaluation skills read, compare, think critically,
and decide relevant information, and monitoring skills reflect what is doing, grammar and vocabulary knowledge, formal discourse structure knowledge how
a text is organized, and information is put together, content background knowledge, and monitoring knowledge.
Fourth, Elite Olshtain affirms that “writing is a communicative activity
that needs to be encouraged and nurtured during the language learner‟s course of
study” as cited in Celce-Murcia, 2001, p. 207. It means simultaneous writing activities are very important to support the development of students‟ writing
knowledge and skills. Writing activities involve sound-spelling correspondence matching, tracing letters, words, or sentences, meaningful copying activities,
filling in of forms, brainstorming, listing, clustering, summarizing, and free
