Integrated-skills courses give students greater motivation that converts to better retention of principles of effective speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
There are several reasons why courses weren’t always integrated in the first place:
1. In the pre-Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) days of language teaching, the focus on the forms of language almost predisposed curriculum designers to segment courses into the separate language skills.
2. Administrative considerations still make it easier to program separate courses in reading and speaking, and so on. It should be noted, however, that a proficient teacher who professes to follow principles of CLT would never conduct a “reading” class without extensive use of speaking, listening, and writing in the class.
3. There are certain specific purposes for which students are studying English that may best be labeled by one of the four skills, especially at the high intermediate to advanced levels.
The following observations support such techniques which involve the integration of skills.
1. Production and reception are quite simply two sides of the same coin; one cannot split the coin in two.
2. Interaction means sending and receiving messages.
3. Written and spoken language often bears a relationship to each other; to ignore that relationship is to ignore the richness of language.
4. For literate learners, the interrelationship of written and spoken language is an intrinsically motivating reflection of language and culture and society.
5. By attending primarily to what learners can do with language, and only secondarily to the forms of language, we invite any or all of the four skills that are relevant into the classroom arena.
6. Often one skill will reinforce another; we learn to speak, for example, in part by modeling what we hear, and we learn to write by examining what we can read.
7. In the real world of language use, most of our natural performance involves not only the integration of one or more skills, but connections between language and the way we think and feel and act.
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