3

DEVELOPMENT OF THE BASIC LINGUISTIC SKILLS: LISTENING,

SPEAKING, LREADING AND WRITING. THE COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE IN ENGLSIH.

Good morning, my names is… and the topic I’ve chosen to develop for this exposition is

topic number one according to the following index:

1. Introduction

2. Oral skills

3. Written skills

4. The communicative competence in English

5. Conclusion

6. Bibliography and websites

7. Legislation

1. INTRODUCTION

Let me start with the introduction…

Language is an essential part of being human. We spend an immense amount of time

speaking, listening, reading and writing. According to the LOMCE 8/2013, December 9th, and

more specifically the Decree 108/2014, July 4th, the main aim of English Language Teaching

is developing students’ communicative competence, which not only refers to the ability to

use the language, but also to aspects related to the communicative context. According to

the communicative approach, learning language successfully comes through having to

communicate real meaning.

Moreover, learning English make our students able to perceive the diversity of our society,

to accept differences as an enriching factor and to develop understanding and tolerance to

other cultural identities.

Along this topic, we are going to analyse the oral and written skills and how to develop

them in the English class, as well as the communicative competence. The intrinsic difficulty
of the written medium, along the differences between the oral and written language, means

that written understanding and production are introduced later than oral skills, so at basic

levels, teachers should keep this sequence: listening-speaking-reading-writing.

2. ORAL SKILLS

The most obvious difference between oral and written language is the physical form: speech

uses the form of air-pressure movements and the written language uses graphs that are

marks on a surface, and as a consequence, listening is different from reading. Speech is

immediate, dynamic, transitory and interactive. Writing is static and permanent, it has

unique graphic features, the grammatical structure is more correct and the ideas should be

clear.

Knowing the differences between speech and writing will allow the teacher to design

activities according to the difficulty of the skills that must be developed. Speaking and

listening are oral skills; reading and writing are written skills.

The intrinsic difficulty of the written medium, along the differences between the oral and

written language, means that written understanding and production are introduced later

than oral skills, so at basic levels, teachers should keep this sequence: listening-speaking-

reading-writing.

According to Lidfords, oral language is a complex system that relates sound to meaning,

and is made up of three components: the phonological component, the semantic

component and the syntactic component.

o The phonological component involves the rules for combining sounds.

o The semantic component is made of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning

that may be combined to make up words.

o And the syntactic component consist of the rules that enable people to combine

morphemes into sentences.

Let’s see the main characteristics of the oral language. First, we could say that the oral

language provides expressive possibilities: when speaking we can vary the tone, the

accent, the speed to underline the most important word of our speech or to show an

attitude, our interest, irony or scorn, like when we say great! or grate!
Oral language also let us use gestures and body language, which are an important

reinforcement of the message.

Besides, the spontaneity of oral language make a person build simple constructions and

regarding the degree of speaker’s understanding, we can use pause, repetitions or

rephrasing.

Finally, oral language includes many incomplete sentences, with more frequent active

forms and less subordination.

Knowing the characteristics of oral language allows the English teachers to design

programmes which will develop oral ability in an appropriate way.

Besides, the foreign language teacher mustn’t lose sight of the fact that oral communication

is a two way process between the speaker and the listener. In a conversation, speaker and

listener are constantly changing roles. This particular kind of interaction, listen-respond-

listen, is not easy for our young students, so it’s necessary to ensure that the two skills are
taught in an integrated way.

In order to analyse the oral skills, we will deal first with the listening skills.

Listening is not a passive hearing of sounds, it is a complex receptive process. Following

the natural order model, most pedagogical experts as Stephen Krasen, believe that listening

should precede speaking. Clearly, we cannot expect our pupils to produce a sound which

does not exist in their mother tongue or using the intonation of a native speaker without

first providing them with a model of the form they have to produce. The logical step, then,

is to help our students achieve oral fluency by first developing their ability to listening.

In general, a listening lesson follows these three stages: the pre-listening stage, the while-

listening stage and the post-listening stage.

The pre-listening stage consist on a preparatory phase where students will be motivated,

contextualize and prepared for the listening task.

In this stage, we can develop activities such as

o Predicting content from a title.

o Commenting on pictures of the story.

While-listening stage is when students perform tasks designed to develop listening

strategies. These tasks can be extensive or intensive listenings.

Extensive listenings are activities for global understanding such as

o Matching pictures.

o Sequencing a story.

o Answering true or false or multiple choice questions.

o Following instructions.

Intensive listenings require a specific search of sounds, words or facts within a context. Some

examples of activities would be

o Ear-training activities, to distinguish sounds, stress and intonation patterns.

o Finding differences between two versions of a story.

o Labelling.

o Extracting specific information.

o Dictations.

o Completion-type activities where students have to complete a song or a dialogue.

o Identifying numbers, letters, mistakes, sounds…

o Game-like activities such as bingo.

In the post-listening stage, students performs tasks connecting what they have listened to

with their experience. For instance, teachers can use some activities such as

o Talking about what they have heard.

o Role-play.

o Practising pronunciation.

o Making a summary.

o Deducing opinions and attitudes.

o Deducing meanings from context.

o Dictation of a part of the texts.

o Practicing vocabulary and structures from the text.

Post-listening activities are usually integrated with other skills.

Regarding to the speaking skill, it consist of an active process that implies several

subcompetences:

o Producing sounds.

o Expressing elementary grammatical structures.

o Using language in an appropriate way.

o Using extralinguistic strategies to help transmit the message.

In order to achieve this objective, students should go through the next three stages:

imitation, practice and free production.

After the students have been exposed to a comprehensible input, the first step is the

imitation of a model. In this stage the teacher monitors the students’ oral work employing

several imitation techniques like choral work, individual work and drills.

Donn Byrne suggests the following procedures for choral work:

o Provide a clear model.

o Select the material for choral repetition.

o Control the choral responses and the rhyme to follow.

o Listen out for mistakes.

o And correct mistakes.

The steps for following individual repetition are the same as for choral repetition, but the

teacher has more opportunity to pay attention to individual pronunciation problems,

intonation patterns or structural mistakes.

The use of drills in the imitation stage is very useful, since the need to build up confidence

while using a new language and practicing intonation and sounds. We can differentiate

three types of drills:

o Mechanical drills are the simplest type. ( T: I like playing tennis. S: I like playing

tennis ).
o Substitution drills: the teachers provides the basic pattern and a word for the

student to use ( T: I like apples. Grapes. S: I like grapes ).

o Tranformation drills are used for practicing changes: from affirmative to negative

or interrogative, from singular to plural… ( T: He likes cheese. S: He doesn’t like

cheese ).
 o Meaningful drills consist on introduce an element of fun in the drill exercise like

guessing, to motivate them. For instance, in pairs a student have to guess the

favourite colour of his classmate: S1: Is it blue?, S2: No, S1: Is it red?.

After this initial level takes place the practice stage to achieve the correct learning of a

structure though activities under teacher’s control. Pair work is a very good method to

practice in a lively way what has already been learnt. During this stage it is necessary to

correct the pronunciation, intonation and grammar structure mistakes. Some of the activities

teachers can use in this stage can be:

o Guided dialogues, where students practice a model dialogue where some variations

are possible.

o Making questions, which is a simple way of giving the students meaningful <question

and answer> practice.

o Language games: where students need to use language to achieve and objective.

o Reciting and singing: songs provide an amusing way to fix “chunks” of language.

After the students have practiced a linguistic form, the teacher must provide them with

opportunities to use language by themselves. The free production stage is the most

communicative because the students have to put into practice what they have learnt without

the teacher’s control and in a creative way. The teacher doesn’t have to worry about

mistakes, because the students are developing the discursive competence, it is the

coherence and the fluency. It would be better to make notes of the mistakes and comment

on them after the activity instead of interrupt the linguistic flow. The best way to practice

the free production is in groups though activities such as

o Information-gap activities: where there is a gap of information that student must

find.

o Role-play, where students interact in imaginary situations.

o Problem-solving like riddles or guessing games.

o Giving and following instructions.

o Describing personal experiences.

o Communicative games as the hangman.

 3. WRITTEN SKILLS

We have analyse the oral skill and we are going to continue with the written skills: reading

and writing. Reading comprehension is a receptive skill that consist on a complex active

process in which the meaning of graphs are decoded. To be able to read comprehensively

the students need to develop some reading strategies:

o Obtaining the general idea of the text.

o Locating specific information.

o Understanding instructions.

o Deducing what is not explicit in the text.

o Predicting possible information.

o And recognizing functions and discourse patterns like and, but, then… in order to

became more efficient readers.

In real life, people generally read something because they have a desire to do so and a

purpose to achieve. In the English class should be the same. The methodology of teaching

reading must reflect these facts about real life. We will not get students to interact unless

we ensure that their desire to read has been awaked.

The procedure in a reading comprehension lesson will be divided in three stages: the pre-

reading stage, the while-reading stage and the after-reading stage.

The pre-reading stage consists of motivating the students by relating the topic to their

personal experiences. The aim of this stage is to create a desire to read in the students.

Some of the activities that could be used are

o Identify the topic of the text.

o Predict possible information.

o Use previous knowledge about the topic

o And answer general questions about the students’ experience.

During the while-reading stage students need a purpose to achieve. At first, young learners

will use visual information to provide a context for understanding the written words. They

can train reading skill though spelling and word-recognition activities and associating the
visual form with the written words. Later, they will become more confident in reading and

they will students train the intensive reading and the extensive reading.

The intensive reading consist of being able to find specific information from the text. This

ability can be trained though activities such as

o Recognizing key words.

o Associating meaning.

o Answering reading comprehension questions.

o Reading and listening at the same time.

Though extensive reading activities the students train the ability to obtain the general idea

of the text and their fluency. Useful activities would be

o Suggesting a title for the text.

o Matching titles with short texts.

o Giving opinions about the text.

o Completing sentences.

o Guessing meanings from the context.

o Reading aloud.

Finally, the objective of the after-reading stage is to provide practice of the language. The

activities are usually integrated with other skills and these are:

o Answering comprehension questions.

o Summarizing the text.

o Discussing the topic.

o Making crosswords with the key words of the text.

o Drawing a picture related to the text.

o Writing another end for the story.

o Preparing a role-play exercise.

Regarding to writing, it is the most difficult of the four skills. First, because there is a

disagreement between the phonetic and the spelling. Secondly, because it demands a level

of correction in spelling, order of ideas, style… that the oral level does not have. However,

writing has an advantage over speech: we have time to write and rectify what we have

written if we need to.

The writing skill should be seen as a process that is acquired step by step. Developing writing

skills should move from the spelling level to more complex tasks that involve students in

the production of guided and free texts.

As teachers, our main objective will be to make our students able to communicate ideas and

feelings in writing. Moreover, we must teach them to write words properly as well as how

to write their ideas with coherence.

The stages we need to follow to teaching to write are copying, controlled practice and free

production.

To introduce the written form, we should start with copying activities, which are useful to

retain words and to reinforce spelling and structures.

Copying can vary from simply writing down the word to meaningful copying. Meaningful

copying means that thinking is involved in the copying process. Examples of meaningful

copying are:

o Listing words.

o Putting words in alphabetical order.

o Classifying words in categories.

o Substitution tables.

o Spelling activities.

o Games like bingo or the hangman.

Later, we would move on the controlled practice stage, where teachers should guide and

point out inaccuracy. In this stage we can work several types of activities:

o The parallel writing: students have a model and they have to write a similar one.

o Dictations.

o Answering questions about reading comprehension.

o Consolidating grammar.

o Sentence-linked activities.

o Translating.

Finally, written production in Primary Education should still be guided, so in the last stage

we will work on
 o Communicative activities: like writing instructions, writing short letters, recipes or

diaries.

o Summarizing

o Filling forms.

o Play communicative games as the hangman.

o Guided compositions

o Project works.

4. THE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Finally, we are going to define the Communicative competence, which consists on the

ability to communicate effectively in a variety of daily-life situations. Hymes coined this term

in contrast to Chomsky’s theory competence. For Chomsky, competence simply implied the

knowledge of the language system. Hymes maintained that Chomsky’s theory was

incomplete, and that a communicative and cultural dimension should be incorporated. A

speaker does not only need the ability to use grammatical structures, but also to learn how

to use them in a community.

The communicative competences consist of five sub-competences: the grammatical

competence, the discursive competence, the sociolinguistic competence, the strategic

competence and socio-cultural competence.

o The grammatical competence is the correct use of the linguistic code.

o The discursive competences is the ability to relate and combine grammatical forms

in order to achieve coherent texts.

o The sociolinguistic competence is the ability to produce and understand messages

relating to the social context, participant and purpose.

o The strategic competence refers to the participants’ verbal and non-verbal

strategies.

o And the socio-cultural competence, which implies the knowledge of certain

cultural facts which are of key importance for us to understand a message

completely.

This communicative competence and its subcompetences seeks to help children to provide

opportunities for gaining real language in real use.

Finally, the concept of communicative competence is also present in our education system.

The LOMCE highlights the importance of developing oral and written skills in Primary

Education; and the Decree 108/2014 establishes four blocks of contents for the area of

foreign language to develop our students’ communicative competence.

5. CONCLUSION

To conclude, in this topic we have analysed the teaching and learning of the four linguistic

skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Knowing the differences between oral and

written language and their main characteristics allows the English teachers to design

programmes which will develop oral and written abilities in an appropriate way.

During the learning process we need to create a friendly environment in the class and use

positive reinforcement to encourage students to use the language, facing mistakes as

something natural and as a positive evidence of the training.

As teachers, we must remember that the main objective in the English class will be to

develop our students’ communicative competence, which consists on the ability to

communicate effectively in a variety of daily-life situations. According to the communicative

approach, learning language successfully comes through having to communicate real

meaning, because as Benjamin Franklin said: tell me and I forget, teach me and I may

remember, involve me and I will learn.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WEBSITES

o Byrne, D. (1988) Oral Teaching English. Longman.

o Finch, G. (2000), Linguistic terms and concepts. London: Macmillan Press

o Harmer. J., (2001), How to teach English. Longman.

o Littlewood, W. (2007), Communicative Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

o Richards J. and Rogers, T. (1986), Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching.

Cambridge.
o Council of Europe (2001), Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:

learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge University Press

o www.britishcouncil.org

o www.liguapress.com

7. LEGISLATION

o Organic Law of Education 2/2006, May 3rd

o Organic Law 8/2013, December 9th, for the improvement of quality in education.

o Royal Decree 126/2014, February 28th, which establishes the basic curriculum for

Primary Education.

o Decree 108/2014, July 4th, which establishes the curriculum and develops the general

organization of Primary Education in the Valencian Community.

o Law Decree 3/2017, September 1st, the current law in force which regulates

multilingualism about the linguistic program in the Valencian Community.