LANGUAGE SKILLS DEVELOPMENT (LSD)
Language training as a profession involves challenges, growth, joy and fulfillment to trainers who enjoy their job. The joy of teaching language lies in the pleasure of seeing students grow in linguistic proficiency and successfully meeting their communication needs and interests. The concept of language development includes various aspects like cognitive, social and literacy development. Learning a language can be attributed to mastering a set of skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing – that are used in the language. Let’s have a detailed discussion of each skill.
Listening: this has a central role in language teaching. There are three types of phases in learning the skill.
Pre-listening – these are activities which create in the minds of the learners, expectations and interests in what they are going to listen to.
While-listening – these are activities to create a general understanding. They may include marking or checking items in pictures, true or false responses, gap filling, predicting, spotting mistakes and so on.
Post-listening – they are activities which aim at reflecting on the language, mainly on the relevant points about grammar and vocabulary. Examples would be – chart completion, summarizing identifying relationship between speakers, role play or simulations.
Speaking: it focusses on the development of a pupil’s ability to communicate in speech. The process can be categorized into three phases.
Presentation – in this phase, several ways are adopted to make the pupils speak. Displaying flashcards or pictures to introduce new vocabulary, singing a particular song in which a structure appears again and again, or with other similar activities.
Practice – this is in the form of an activity conducted in groups or in pairs. There is no reference to any text here. This kind of activity involves an extensive and guided oral practice where it is ensured that each person has something to say.
Production – this is the next stage in speaking, where pupils are allowed to use the language in an uninhibited manner. Distinct and clear instructions are given so that the task has a very fruitful outcome for the partcipants.
Reading – this skill is needed to get information as well as for entertainment, without which it is not possible to pursue education or get into any vocation in life. There are three stages.
Pre-reading – this phase primarily tries to generate interest in the minds of the pupils that is provided to them to read.
While reading – in this phase, the pupil is taught to make an inference from the text that is provided to read.
Post-reading – this phase deals with relating the information derived from the text with the wider context of the students’ knowledge.
Writing: this is a skill that has a difficulty level more than the other language skills. The activities involved varies as per the age of the pupil and may include tasks at word-level, such as making lists, completing crosswords, matching halves of sentences etc.
Finally, they are prepared to write letters, invitations, reports and other complex forms of writing. This particular skill involves spellings, punctuation, grammar, stylistic, rhetorical and organisational skills.
