OP 8 Balanced and Integrated teaching approaches

Inkab Mon May 26 2008, 08:08

Since all the current English tests in Korea are oriented with the evaluating students’ reading and grammar skills, it seems to be hard to employ various communicative methods to improve students’ speaking and writing skills. Despite prevailing restriction on conducting integrated teaching methods, however, different new approaches combining reading and grammar oriented lessons with activities focusing on productive language skills need to be suggested as ways of accomplishing the balanced teaching for current English classes in Korean public schools.

First of all, speaking skills can be developed in the combination of reading activity. A teacher can create more interesting communicative activities based on the contents that they cover in the textbook; therefore, students can review what they learn through content-related activities and reinforce their reading comprehension skills as well as speaking skills. For instance, during the pre-reading activities, students can be encouraged to share their ideas on the issues relevant to the reading texts. Unlike the typical way of reading comprehension, understanding the contents by analyzing each sentence, teacher can design questions that range from those asking specific details in the reading to main ideas of whole paragraph. This activity can be performed while reading the content. Through group discussion in English, students can find out the answers cooperatively and present those in English to peer students.

By integrating speaking and writing activities into grammar oriented lessons, a teacher can achieve more balanced ways of teaching communicative language skills. It is obvious that sufficient grammatical knowledge never seems to guarantee that a person would be able to write fluently or even accurately. Therefore, paradigm for teaching grammar needs to be altered, in which inputs for grammar learning are from more genuine reading and listening sources, and outcomes are produced in the combination with speaking and writing activities. For instance, before teachers give explanation on the grammar rule, students are encouraged to select unfamiliar patterns from the context and discuss it within a group or pairs. After they comprehend the rules from teacher’s explanation, composition practice with the targeted grammatical structures can be the following-up activity by which students are able to perform their writing skills as well.

Even though everybody engaged in secondary English education agrees that there need some innovative teaching approaches to integrate every aspect of English language learning, due to the form of college entrance exam and the obligatory the teachers are supposed to follow during the semester, it is not a easy task to conduct the class in communicative ways with balanced teaching approaches. Nevertheless, teachers should try to improve students’ productive language skills with integrated teaching approaches in order to confer students more chances to perform those skills in a English language class.