Week 11: Integrating Skills

This week's readings focused mainly on the "four skills" and how we are to integrate them in ou classroom. While reading Kuma's chapters 9 and 10, and then Brown's chapter 17, I was able to make a full circle connection of the two topics.

While chapter 9 was an overview of contextualizing input, this is a very important factor when it comes to the "four skills" and integrating them. If we (or our L2 learners) have difficulty differentiating the different linguistic input, and when something is or isn't cohesive, stressed, or appropriate, how can we expect the proper integration of the skills? These four skills are-- listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As Kuma quotes, it is important for us as educators to "go beyond the limitations of commercially available textbooks that are still based on the separations of language skills, and learn to exploit various resources and channels of communication such as newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet" (238). While textbooks can serve as a guide, it's important to know that we can not become prisoners of them. It is important for us to extend our knowledge of the textbook and become aware of how important one language skill, interacts with another... and another. "The integration of language skills is a logical continuation of the emphasis on contextualizing input embedded in linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational contexts" as Kuma states, is very important to remember. The combination and integration of all four of the language skills builds upon the contextualization of the input.

How we go about integrating these skills, and the methods available to us is what is mainly discussed in Brown's chapter 17. The types of instruction and learning that may happen are: content-based, task-based, theme-based, experiential, and episodic. I believe that these models help serve as a good foundation for teachers to build up from. Being able to incorporate these different models, to meet the needs and differences of the learners that will make up our classrooms is of upmost importance. As we've learned time and again, the diverse learners we will come across year and after year will continuously change, and we must be prepared to teach them. Some models are better used for our introverted learners, other for our extroverted learners, others for our analytical learners, other for our audiolingual learners, and so on. It's important to find the balance of instruction and learning when it comes to the integration of the four main language skills.