Teaching Foreign Language Skills

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The writers have different ideas on the same topic. They are from different countries and different contexts. I want to write what i learned from all of the writers. The language skills are often divided into two types. They are receptive and productive skills. I want to start with the listening as a receptive skill. Listening is receiving of the sounds and perceiving and comprehending the meaning of the utterances. But it has a dynamic nature has processes such as predicting, checking, anticipating, interacting and organizing by accommodation and association of prior knowledge. If we say in simple way it is hearing and understanding what the speakers say. The listening requires certain sub skills like recognizing words, identifying…show more content…
They are reciprocal-interactive and non-reciprocal listening. Throughout the history of teaching of second and foreign language listening, extracting meaning from texts was emphasized and the teaching how to listen was neglected. But recent research in teaching foreign language listening proposes that listening is taught within two approaches . They are bottom up and top down processing. I want to explain what is bottom up processing. The linguistic knowledge identifies linguistic elements starting from the smallest unit such as phonemes to the larges one like dialogue or complete speech. The smaller units of the language are combined to make the larger parts. There are linear process. The word segmentation skills can be acquired with providing chances to gather and categorize acoustic, phonemic and lexical information. The top down processing is also called metacognitive processing. The backround knowledge, prior knowledge about the topic context are utilized to construct meaning. The backround knowledge activates the schemata and enables the listeners what they heard and…show more content…
If we want to be able to speak a foreign language we should pronounce sounds correctly, use appropriate stress and intonation. The learners speak in a wide range of different genres and contexts. The main aim for teaching speaking skills is to develop communicative competence and efficiency. Learners must improve the ability to make themselves understood. Any given stretch of speech should be in accordance with two parameters. They are the repertoire and the range of situations. The linguistic features include three groups. They are phonological features, lexico grammatical features and discourse features. The speaking has two main types of conversation. They are dialogue and monologue. In monologue the speakers interact with each other for interactional and transactional purposes. The learners can be exposed to comprehensible input in classrooms, reading passages, listening activities, teacher talk etc. The language input can be classified into two types they are content oriented input and form oriented input. The first one can be weather report or a long lecture. The second one can be noticing the use of vocabulary, pronunciation and grammatical structures. The structured output focuses on the learners use of accurate language forms and structures. And the communicative output is to complete a task. Learners use the target language communicatively during the interaction.

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