LECTURE FIVE

SKILLS AND SKILL ACQUISITION

By Alec

1. Language teaching, a skill

The teaching of English differs from the teaching of many of the other subjects in the school curriculum. English, at least in its early stages, does not consist, as subjects like history or chemistry do, of a body of information to be imparted by the teacher to the students. There is information to be acquired. Of course, whole libraries of it, information on grammar, on phonology, on semantics, on syntax, and so on, but certainly not at the stage we are at here. Remember that you are teaching English, not about English. A student can know all about English and yet be unable to follow an ordinary conversation between English people or speak half a dozen sentences as English people would say them. The people who only learn/teach about English make the mistake of regarding English as a subject (just like geography or physics), which is certainly not, instead of as a skill or an ability like swimming or tennis, which it is. You learn to swim by getting into the water and swimming; you learn football by going and kicking a ball. And you learn to speak English by speaking it and not by being told about it.

You will, of course, learn to swim or play tennis better and more quickly if you are helped by a teacher who know the theory of swimming or tennis, who realizes the difficulties that have to be overcome, the enemy that has to be beaten and who knows the best method of overcoming them. Now in learning a language, the enemy of the language to be learned is the language in possession. In other words, the student always finds that his mother tongue acts as a hindrance in the learning of a new language. For many years he has been accustomed to certain speech habits, habits of sound information, of word order, of sentence structure. At every turn the learner is beset with the temptation to follow his natural inclination and, for the speech sounds, stresses, word order and idiom of English, substitute the sounds, order and idiom of his own language. What the teacher has to do is to replace the ingrained language habits of the student’s native language by the, perhaps, quite different ones. Here is another strong argument for the direct method. If the pupil has his own language in the forefront of his consciousness—as he must by the translation method—he cannot escape from the bonds of its language patterns. This influence of the mother tongue can be very subtle and very far-reaching.

The vital thing, then, for the beginner is not so much instruction as practice: practice in listening to English therefore is not, or ought not to be, a matter of learning rules of grammar, but of practicing speech patterns or sentence patterns until they become automatic and are no more matters of conscious thought than breathing is. In other words, the learner should acquire his English as the child learns its own mother tongue, not by conscious thought about grammar but by imitation.

2.      Language skills

Wittgenstein states “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” In simple terms, there are four skills: listening (and understanding), speaking, reading, and writing, but a more detailed and satisfactory division of these skills would be threefold:

(1)      Motor-perceptive skill

Motor skills are those concerned with the articulation of speech sounds (oral) and the forming of letters (manual), while the perceptive skills are to do with the recognition of speech sounds (aural) and marks on paper (visual).

(2)    Organizational skill

Organizing the units of a language (grammatical, sound or lexical units). The productive and receptive aspects of these skills can be called generative and analytic respectively.

(3)    Semantic skill

This concerns itself with meaning. Acceptable words in acceptable patterns do not by that fact alone have meaning; they still have to be used in the right context. The semantic skill is both receptive and productive.

3.      The four skills

Traditionally, we talk about the four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Speech is the groundwork, all the rest are built up from it. Through speech, the pupil learns the habit of using words in the correct sentence-patterns and phrase-patterns; he can learn this in no other way. We cannot see or learn the pattern of a sentence clearly if-we-look-at-the-word-one-at-a-time; but in speech we learn this:

We/look/at the/words one/at/a time

and that is the pattern of the sentence.

Listening is a part of speaking and is just as important. I listening, the sentence-patterns of English are to be found in the way the words run together. They are often made very clear by the stress that the speaker puts on important words.

One of the boys did it.

or in the way in the way in which the speaker’s voice goes up and down: for example, in the question-pattern

                                       yet?

   Have                                

           you               him

                   seen

We learn our own language by listening; it is the only method a baby uses in the first stages.

Reading is a difficult skill to learn because once again the sentence-pattern is the most important thing, but it is hidden by the printing of the separate words. A good reader does not look at each word separately, but he gathers at one look each part of the sentence-pattern:

   He gathers/     at one look/     each part/     of the sentence.

But the little child is compelled at first to look at almost every letter to be sure of its shape. It is the teacher’s aim to make the stage as short as possible.

Writing the last skill the child requires, and in our teaching it follows the other skills.

4.      Skill training

Skill is systematic and coordinated pattern of mental and/or physical activity, usually involving both receptor processes (senses which receive stimuli) and effector processes (muscles and/or glands which provide responses). Skills may be perceptual, motor, manual or dominant aspect of the skill pattern.

Language skills are systematic; they are mental and physical. For detailed methods and approaches, you can refer to you textbook and read chapters 9, 10, and 11, which is also your homework.