Topic 3: DESARROLLO DE LAS DESTREZAS LINGÜÍSTICAS

2. RECEPTIVE SKILLS: LISTENING AND READING.

2.1 LISTENING AND READING COMPREHENSION: DELIMITATION
2.2 IMPORTANCE OF THE LANGUAGE INPUT.
2.3 FACTORS THAT FACILITATE COMPREHENSION.
2.4 LISTENING AND READING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.
3.0 PRODUCTIVE SKILLS: SPEAKING AND WRITING.
3.1 SPEAKING AND WRITING SUB-SKILLS.
3.2 SPEAKING AND WRITING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.
4. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE.
4.1 CONCEPT
4.2 COMMUNICATIVE SUB-COMPETENCES.
4.3 THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH.
1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, learning English as a Foreign Language is essential in order to have

better chances in our society.

Due to the influence of the Communicative Approach, our current educational

system has incorporated this functional and communicative potential of
language in its objectives and methodology, the ultimate goal being the
development of the students´ communicative competence, which is one of the
general objectives for Primary Education established in the RD 126/2014 28th
February which establishes the teaching requirements for Primary Education
nationwide

Based on this view, I have chosen the topic ... because it is a good example of
how to work the Communicative Approach under different authors’
perspectives and showing, as examples, communicative activities.

2. RECEPTIVE SKILLS: LISTENING AND READING.

2.1 LISTENING AND READING COMPREHENSION: DELIMITATION

Listening is one of the hardest tasks that students must undergo, is the first skill to
develop in the foreign language learning process.

But as Francisco Valle says in his book ‘’ Lecturas de psicolingüística, I. Comprensión y

producción del lenguaje’’ written in 1990 by Alianza, the relationship among sounds, or
among words, is deeply connected with meaning.

The sounds and pieces of speech heard and held in the short-term memory are
compared with and related to items stored in the long-term memory. As a result of
these processes, the meaning of the message is discovered. Moreover we have already
 known how other non-verbal knowledge, skills and strategies participate in the
understanding of the messages.

As Christine Nuttall says in her book ‘’ Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language’’
published in 1996 by Heinemann, ‘’The objectives of the reading class are to enable
students to read without help, unfamiliar authentic texts at appropriate speed,
silently, and with adequate understanding’’.

But we must take into account that we do not see every single letter when reading, not
even every single word, but identify the general shape of the word and some of their
letters and skip over the short ones.

How can we help our students to understand a listening or reading activity?

Let’s go now to see the necessary characteristics for the language input that the
students receive through listening and reading.
2.2 IMPORTANCE OF THE LANGUAGE INPUT.

As Krashen says in his book ‘’Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning’’
published in 1981 by Longman, the input should be at a slightly higher level than the
students are capable of using, but a level that they can understand .
Krashen distinguished between two types of language input. Rough tuning is that language
which is naturally adapted to a comprehensible level, as in the case of a parent speaking to
children, whereas finely-tuned language is that which has been systematically selected to
work those items which student has studied. The communicative approach uses finely-
tuned language during controlled practice and rough-tuning language for free practice

2.3 FACTORS THAT FACILITATE COMPREHENSION.

The fact of knowing the purpose of listening/reading contributes to comprehension. It

has to do with motivation: if someone knows why to listen/read, and what for, motivation
will keep them listening/reading, even if they do not understand everything heard/read.

Expectation is the second factor that helps to comprehension. It is related to the fact of
making predictions about what comes next and the activity is a process guided by those
expectations. It includes foreseeing the topic, words that are thought to be going to
appear, etc.. We must be aware that understanding a message does not mean to
understand every single piece of information transmitted.

2.4 LISTENING AND READING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.

To be competent in a linguistic skill implies the ability to apply it with different purposes,
in different situations, and in different ways.
The first distinction we can make in comprehension activities is between those that
require an intensive or an extensive listening/reading.
  On the one hand, in Extensive listening/reading, the aim is to get a global
understanding of the information. Extensive listening examples: matching pictures,
sequencing a story, answering questions, following instructions (listen and colour, listen
and do...).
Extensive reading examples: when reading a novel for pleasure, or an opinion article at
the newspaper

 On the other hand, in Intensive listening/reading, students are asked to pay

attention to specific points of the text/listening in detail with the aim of collecting and
organising the information it contains. Thus, passages should be short and practiced
several times in order to facilitate understanding.
Intensive listening examples: specific search for sounds, completing a text as
they listen…

Intensive reading examples: the directions to get to a place.

In my year planning, I organize the session around the 45 minutes taking into account
the RC 7/2014 of 15th of July which implies the instructions for the organization of the
schools of Primary Education during the 2014-2015 school year, and work with different
activities and the contents are repeated many times, I do it through different games
and in this way the students learn playing
Some authors speak about two other reading sub-skills: skimming and scanning. We can
talk about scanning when the aim of reading is to extract a specific piece of
information (the date of an exam, or the name of the city in which an accident has
occurred). And skimming is the skill applied in order to get a general idea of what a text
is about.

A listening or reading lesson, in order to be effective, must follow 3 stages, which are:

- Pre-listening/reading stage: It is a preparatory phase. The aim of the activities

carried out at this stage is to prepare students for what they are going to hear/read
and create expectation and motivation. First I present activities in order to
contextualize the class, such as predicting content from a title, commenting on
pictures or photographs, pre-teaching key words (vocabulary), for instance through
flashcards, among others.
- While-listening/reading stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is
to develop listening/reading strategies and keep the students active . These activities
are done during or immediately after the time they are listening or reading. These
activities may include in the case of listening: following on a map the directions given
in the text; identifying the thief according to the descriptions given by the
 witnesses... And in the case of reading: suggesting a title, underlining the required
information, answering questions and chart filling.
In this stage I work the listening to obtain a general meaning, to look for information
and to look for some details, and I do it several times depending on the students
needs. Also I adapt the activities following the order of 16th July of 2001 by which
the education to students with special needs is regulated in Infant and Primary
Education.

- Post-listening/reading stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to
check comprehension and to evaluate. Some examples of post-listening are: extending
lists, summarising, matching with a reading text, performing role plays, etc. And in the
case of reading: report to another group, write a response, talk about the story in
groups, and write their own version of the story changing elements...
Games are also important, because students can work in groups developing the moral and
civic education based on the cross-curricular contents established by the Order of 20 th of
December 1994 of Conselleria of education of the Valencian Government.
The Communicative Approach emphasizes the active role of the learner. Therefore,
lessons must be planned in a way that ensures students’ involvement in classroom
activities.

3.0 PRODUCTIVE SKILLS: SPEAKING AND WRITING.

3.1 SPEAKING AND WRITING SUB-SKILLS.

When planning lessons, teachers must consider what different sub-skills must be
treated.

And the criteria to select them must take into account those situations that they may
experience outside school. For instance: to maintain usual conversations, to speak on a
phone, to give an accurate description of something relevant, to make request, to explain
their opinions or to write short texts explaining situations.

We must insist again on the importance of integrating the four skills in the lesson
planning. But let us focus on production activities, whose main aim must be the students’
acquisition of fluency and communicative competence.

3.2 SPEAKING AND WRITING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.

As in receptive skills, production activities must follow three stages. The first one is:

Presentation: it has the objective of introducing the issue and providing some model to
be imitated, whilst at the same time students have the opportunity to appreciate how the
language item is used. I usually provide a clear context where the new language is
introduced, for instance, using games with flashcards and word-cards as well. We can try
to get a student to produce what we are looking for, which would be motivating for the
others, using the title, predicting content, looking at pictures, or brainstorming.

Controlled practice: At this stage students are asked to use new items of language in
different contexts and I control the students’ utterances. Practice can take place in
many different ways: Drills can be mechanical or meaningful, which give students a
certain choice of language production. A very simple substitution drill can consist, for
instance, in finishing a sentence substituting the place complement: For example:
Every afternoon I go to..... the park.
......the city centre.
Other similar drills are the opposition ones, in which a word, expression or clause must
be replaced by another one meaning the opposite.
Moreover Dialogues are very common practice in foreign language classrooms. Is very
usual to introduce them as a model in which the language elements being treated in the
lesson appear contextualised.
The students can prepare their own dialogues, applying the elements being studied and if
they only have to change a few elements within the given dialogue, it will be a controlled
practice.
They also can use the ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the Council of Europe in
an effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism, recording their dialogues and
including them in the Dossier, which is a collection of samples of their work where they
record their learning achievements.
This is a tool that allows students to create strategies to learn developing the learning to
learn competence following the Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament
and the Council of 18th December on key competences for lifelong learning.

There are many other possibilities like dictations, suggesting a title, underlining the
required information, answering questions and chart filling, questions and answers, word
order exercises, games (puzzles, crosswords, riddles, etc...) in which different linguistic
aspects can be practised.

Production: at this stage students practise the previously presented language items in a
freer way, using them as a vehicle for communication. In this way, learners will integrate
the new language into the previously known. Teacher’s supervision will not be so close
during the communicative stage and this stage constitutes a tool in order to achieve the
objective of getting the desired communicative effect.
Communicative activities can be classified in: reaching a consensus, relaying instructions,
communication games, problem solving activities, talking about yourself activities and
role- plays and also discussions.
In the case of writing, we can report to another group, write a response, talk about the
story in groups, and write their own version of the story changing elements...
All these activities have in common that they focus on the content, not on the form of
language. And language is used in a way fairly similar to real-life situations, with a
communicative purpose and in a varied way.

4. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE.
4.1 CONCEPT

Once the four skills stages have been presented, it may be appropriate to develop the
concept of Communicative Competence.

Chomsky defined competence from a linguistic, grammatical, point of view, as the deep
and unconscious knowledge of rules that govern language that let the speakers produce
grammatical sentences.

Dell Hymes criticised Chomsky’s theory, and as he says in his book ‘’On Communicative
Competence’’, written in 1971 and published by Penguin in order to learn a language a
native speaker does not only need to utter grammatically correct forms, he also has to
know the rules of use (where and when to use a language, and to whom) comprising the
grammar, discursive, sociolinguistic, strategic and socio-cultural competence. Thus,
Hymes replaced Chomsky´s notion of Linguistic Competence with his own concept of
Communicative Competence

4.2 COMMUNICATIVE SUB-COMPETENCES.

Language competence alone is not enough to achieve the speaker’s or receiver’s

communicative aim, it is necessary the development of different sub-competences The
D108/2014, which establishes the teaching requirements for primary education, bases
the development of the students’ communicative competence in the foreign language on
the Canale and Swain’s classification of the communicative sub-competences. Then, we
can constitute just a different way of explaining Hyme’s sub-competences that implies:

 Grammar competence: It refers to the ability to put into practice the linguistic
units according to the rules of use established in the linguistic system, for
instance, the mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary.

 Discoursive competence: The ability to use different types of discourse and

organise them according to the communicative situation and the speakers involved
in it, using cohesion and coherence.

 Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to adequate the utterances to the specific

context according to the accepted usage of a particular linguistic community.

 Strategic competence: The ability to define or make adjustments in the course of

the communicative situation, and the capacity to use verbal and non-verbal
strategies in order to make communication effective.
  Sociocultural competence: certain knowledge of the social and cultural context in
which the Foreign Language is used.

4.3 THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH.

The Communicative Approach to the learning of languages is based on a conception of

language as a means of communication and, thus, focuses the lesson planning on the
preparation of communicative contexts. According to this approach, one of the main roles
of the teacher is to create communicative needs in the students.

As David Crystal says in his book ‘’ The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language’’ written
in 1987 and published by CUP, the concept of communication implies that something new
is transmitted. There must exist a gap of information between what the interlocutors
know, and the communication intercourse must help to close it so that both speakers
have the same information. This is called the information gap principle of
communication. We can identify 3 communication principles that the classroom activities
must accomplish to promote meaningful learning:

1. activities should involve real communication.

2. activities should promote the use of language for carrying out meaningful tasks.
3. the language used must be meaningful to learner.
Where the importance is not focused on the accuracy, but on fluency

I have adapted some activities from the Carol Read’s book’’ 500 activities for the
Primary Classroom’’ written in 2007 and published by Macmillan Education’’ like making
questions to the class-mates in order to find out any piece of information that they need
later or exchanging letters with other schools, especially if they are in an English
speaking country,... all these activities have in common that the students, if adequately
motivated, have the need to write, read, speak or listen ignoring what comes next, as it
occurs in real life communication.

Conclusion

In this topic, I have analysed the spoken word as well as the development of
listening and speaking skills in students when learning a language. Then, I have
examined the written word, and the achievement of the reading and writing skills.
Finally, I have discussed the importance of integrating skills in order to develop the
communicative competence , which is the main objective of FLL according to LOMCE
126/2014.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used

Bibliography.
 Nuttall, Christine (1996)‘’ Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language’’ Heinemann,
 Valle, Francisco (1990) ‘’ Lecturas de psicolingüística, I. Comprensión y producción
del lenguaje’’ Alianza
 Krashen, Stephen (1981) ‘’Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning’’ Longman
 Hymes, Dell (1971): On Communicative Competence. Penguin
 Read, Carol (2007): 500 activities for the Primary Classroom. Macmillan
Education’’
 Crystal David (1987) ‘’the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language’’. CUP
LEGAL FRAMEWORK.

1. Organic law 8/2013, 9th December, for the improvement of

educational quality (LOMCE)
2. RD 126/2014 of 28th February.
3. D 108/2014 of 4th July
4. Order of 20th of December of 1994 about Cross Curricular Contents.
5. Order 16th July of 2001,
6. Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament and the
Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong
learning.
7. RC 7/2014 of 15th of July
8. ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the Council of Europe in
an effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism

MAIN CONCEPTS