OP8: the ways to integrate the English skills

Kanghoon Jang Tue May 27 2008, 19:35

To date, most of the English language instruction carried out in public schools has been oriented around reading and grammar skills. How do you think the next generation of teachers in Korea could ensure that teaching approaches incorporate a more even balance (and integration) of skills?

My generation only learns English to understand using reading and grammar skills while we neglect other English skills. Luckily, the new government would like to change our English education system to concentrate on speaking skills more. Therefore, the local next generation of teachers should find the ways to integrate the English four skills such as speaking, writing, reading, listening skills in class. It is not simply to find the methods but if we consider about the integration between reading and writing skills, listening and speaking skills, it would work out in class.

First of all, next generation of teachers have to integrate between reading and writing skills. When my generations studied English in middle/high school, we just learned how to read and memorized many vocabularies in reading materials. However, if there are opportunities to write regarding the same topic, our writing skills would be better and it is easily to integrate between them because we already got some ideas about that while we read that. After that, the teachers should give students feedback that it is good or not. Those activities would be able to boast the integration between writing and reading skills.

Secondly, the teachers should be able to balance between listening and speaking skills in class. We have realized how important speaking skills since many years ago. However, we did not concentrate on that in middle/high school. We just listen to English tape/CD in class without learning speaking skills. That is why teaching English in English is one of the best ways to find balance point between two skills. While in the class, we should understand to speak and have to speak for interactive communication which means that that method would be able to helpful for the integration between listening and speaking skills.

In conclusion, we already knew that we should change our English education system to focus on four English skills together. However, it would be not easy to find the ways to integrate four English skills because we already got used to our old education system. Nevertheless, next teachers should try to improve student’s language abilities with integrated teaching approaches to be better English education and to have competitive global competitiveness