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Tema 3.
DESARROLLO DE LAS DESTREZAS LINGSTICAS.
COMPRENSIN Y EXPRESIN ORAL. COMPRENSIN Y EXPRESIN
ESCRITA.
LA COMPETENCIA COMUNICATIVA EN INGLS.

In order to master a language, we need to understand its native speakers and

also to make ourselves understood. This involves being able to encode (speaking
and writing) and decode (listening and reading) both oral and written messages.
Thus, in order to communicate effectively, communicative competence is
essential.
Since the 1970s, the belief that language is a means of communication has
inspired a new approach in English teaching: the Communicative Approach.
Due to its influence, nowadays language is taught and learnt in a very practical
way in the classroom and students practise the four basic skills from a
communicative point of view.

Based on this view, the present essay aims to study in detail the four
basic skills of language, which are listening, speaking, reading and
writing. For this purpose, the topic will be divided into three main sections. In
the first part, we will deal with the spoken word as well as the development of
listening and speaking skills in students when learning a language. In the second
part, we will examine the written word, so that reading and writing skills will be
analysed. In the third part, we will discuss the importance of integrating skills
in order to develop the communicative competence , which is the main
objective of FLL according to LOMCE 8/2013, December 9th.

We deal with an essential topic since successful communication, which is the

basis of understanding among human beings, depends on communicative
competence and the mastery of the four linguistic skills. In addition, The Foreign
Language Curriculum for Primary Education emphasizes the significance of this
topic by including in its objectives, blocks of contents and assessment criteria the
development of listening, speaking, reading and writing with a communicative
purpose as well as paying attention to the components of communicative
competence such as the use of strategies, linguistic and socio-cultural aspects,
etc.

FIRST
Learning a language in Primary Education has a practical objective: to be able
to communicate.
In order to use a language effectively, we need to combine different abilities
or skills. We can identify four major skills when using a language to communicate:
listening, speaking, reading and writing. According to Jeremy Harmer, these
major skills can be classified according to the medium and the activity of the
speaker. In this way, speaking and listening are said to relate to language
expressed through the aural medium whereas reading and writing are said to
relate to language expressed through the visual medium.
If we classify these skills according to the activity of the participants, speaking
and writing are said to be productive skills since they demand some kind of
production on the part of the language user, whereas listening and reading are
receptive skills, since the language user is receiving oral or written language.

In order to achieve a proper learning, it is convenient to take into account

some principles, so that children learn in a natural way: not speaking before

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listening, not reading before speaking and not writing before reading. One of the
reasons to follow this sequence is that the mother tongue is learnt in this way.

According to the Communicative Approach, the four skills must be worked on

at the same time, but not to the same extent. Reading and writing are abstract
activities, and children are not mature enough to deal with abstract concepts.
Therefore, they must be reached at the end of Primary Education and that is why
LOMCE 8/2013, December 9th. has kept this in mind and emphasizes oral skills
over written skills in Primary Education.

After explaining how the four skills are classified, we will go on developing
each skill separately. In order to do so, we will follow Jeremy Harmers medium
classification. We will provide a definition of each skill and its main principles, as
well as the strategies and the stages which must be followed to carry out the
activities in which these skills may be involved.

First, we will deal with the analysis of the skills expressed through the aural
medium via spoken words.

Let us start with the listening skill. Listening can be defined as the ability to
understand and respond to spoken language. This is an essential skill and it
provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and
enables learners to interact in spoken communication.
However, far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listening
activities involve the listeners actively in the interpretation of what they hear,
bringing their own linguistic and background knowledge to bear with the
information contained in the aural text. According to Donn Byrne, it is important
to remember that, as in mother tongue acquisition, a learners ability to
understand language needs to be more extensive than his ability to produce
language.

Let us go on examining the main principles which should be followed in order to

achieve suitable and beneficial teaching-learning listening activities:
a) They must have definite goals, carefully stated.
b) They should be constructed with careful step by step planning.
c) They should demand active participation from the student.
d) They should stress conscious memory work.
e) They should teach, not test.
f) They should have a communicative purpose:

Apart from these principles, listening strategies are another key element
when dealing with the listening skill. These are techniques that contribute
directly to the comprehension and help the way in which input is received. Since
listening is not a passive hearing of sounds but a complex and active process,
teachers must train students in:
a) Identifying the topic.
b) Predicting and guessing information using their prior knowledge.
c) Inferring the meaning from context.
d) Listening for global understanding (listening for gist).
e) Listening for specific information.
f) Listening for detailed information.

The Communicative Approach and the Learner-centred Approach

emphasize the active role of the learner. Therefore, lessons must be planned

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in a way that ensures childrens involvement in classroom activities. A listening

lesson, in order to be effective, must follows 3 stages, which are:
- Pre-listening stage: It is a preparatory phase. The aim of the activities
carried out at this stage is to prepare students for what they are going to hear
and create expectation. This can be achieved through activities such as
predicting content from a title, commenting on pictures or photographs, asking
for the students opinion on the topic, pre-teaching key words (vocabulary) and
grammar exercises, among others.

- While-listening stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to
develop listening strategies and keep the students active. These tasks can be
either extensive or intensive listenings. On the one hand, in extensive listening
activities, global understanding is encouraged, for example: matching pictures,
sequencing a story, answering questions, following instructions (listen and colour,
listen and do...). These activities are appropriate for the first levels. On the other
hand, intensive listening activities are tasks that require a specific search for
information of any kind (sounds, words, intonation patterns, etc.) as well as
dictations, gap-filling activities, finding differences between two versions of a
story, etc.

- Post-listening stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to
check comprehension and evaluate. Following on the listening passage, a lot of
activities are possible: extending lists, summarising, matching with a reading
text, performing role plays, practise pronunciation, vocabulary and structures
from the text, etc.

After having explained the listening skill, we will go on to address the speaking
skill. Speaking can be defined as the ability to communicate in speech, which
has to be appropriate to specific contexts. The main aim of oral production is to
speak fluently, that is to say, the speaker should be able to express his ideas with
clarity, correction and without too much hesitation. In order to achieve this
objective, the student should go from the initial stage of imitation to the final
stage of free production.
Nevertheless, there are often silent periods which cannot be interpreted as
learning absence. According to Stephen Krashen, the ability to speak fluently
comes with time, after the acquirer has built up a certain linguistic competence
by understanding the input.
In addition, errors are normal, because as Chomsky states, they are positive
evidence that learning is taking place.

It is important to bear in mind that speaking involves three areas of

knowledge:
- Mechanics or the use of the right words in the right order with the correct
pronunciation.
- Functions or the knowledge of the purpose of the speech act.
- Social and cultural rules and norms or the importance of the context.

As mentioned before, in order to achieve oral fluency, learners must go from

the initial stage of Imitation to the final stage of free production. This means that
they have to follow three stages. The first and second stages are preparatory for
the third stage, in which real communication takes place:
- Imitation: As we know, the first step is the imitation of the model. In this
stage, they will mainly repeat either from the teacher of from recorded material.
To be successful, they need to be fun, lively and varied, for instance drills:
substitution, repetition drills.

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- Practice: The students can practice in pairs the verbal form already
presented. These activities will be controlled by the teacher although some
variation is allowed. There are two levels within this stage: On the one hand,
there is controlled practice, in which students will use correct and simple
language within a situation or context performing activities like telling the time
looking at a clock or asking questions about pictures. On the other hand, there is
guided practice, which will often be done either in pairs or small groups,
performing activities like practicing a model dialogue with possible variations or
making surveys.

- Production: This is the most genuine communicative stage as the students will
have to put in practice in a creative way all he has learnt, without the teachers
control. In this stage, the development of the discursive competence, that is,
coherence and fluency, will take place. At this stage communicative activities
take place and the range is endless: playing card games, giving mini-talks, role-
play, problem-solving, drama... Most of them are based on the information gap
principle.

SECOND
Now that we have considered the spoken word, we will move on to analyse
the skills expressed through the visual medium via written words,that is, reading
and writing.
Let us start with the Reading skill. Reading can be defined as an interactive
process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in
comprehension.

Reading comprehension is a receptive skill and therefore shares common

features with listening. The main common feature is that reading is an active
process in which the meaning of graphs should be decoded so the student must
develop some reading strategies. In other words, teachers can help their students
to become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before,
during and after reading. We can distinguish the following reading strategies:
previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, guessing from context and
paraphrasing.

These reading strategies should be used appropriately depending on the

reading stage the student is at. Next, we will describe the main stages in
reading activities, which are:
- Pre-reading stage may serve as preparation: assess students knowledge,
give students the knowledge, clarify, make students aware of the type of the
text and the purpose reading and motivate them. E.g. using the title, predict
content, looking at pictures, skimming to find the main idea, brainstorming. The
main aim during this stage is to develop the skill of predicting.
- In the while-reading stage, students check the comprehension as they
read. The teacher gives the students points to search for: getting the general
idea of the text or specific information. The first case is called extensive
reading; the other is intensive reading. It may include suggesting a title,
underlining the required information, answering questions and chart filling. The
main aim during this stage is to develop the skills of skimming, scanning and
inferring meaning from context.
- As for the post-reading stage, a follow-up work can be considered. The
main aims are to internalize the language of the text and to integrate skills.
Integrating skills promotes the learning of real content and is highly motivating
for students.

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Once reading in English has been considered, we will focus on how to write in
English. Writing skill is more than the production of graphic symbols, as symbols
have to be arranged according to certain conventions.

According to Matthews, we may distinguish five subskills related to writing:

graphic skills, that is writing words correctly including aspects such as
capitalization, punctuation and spelling; grammatical skills, the ability to use a
variety of sentence patterns and constructions; stylistic skills, the ability to
express precise meaning in a variety of styles and registers; rethorical skills ,the
ability to use cohesion devices in order to link parts of a text; organisational
skills, writing ideas with coherence and summarize relevant points.

Writing correctly in a language requires a lot of practice and is a slow ability to

acquire. For that reason, in Primary Education it should be done in a guided way.
The strategies that a student should learn are, among others, writing words and
elementary linguistic forms correctly, writing appropriately according to the
context and writing with coherence.

In the early stages of learning English, students will generally write very
little. Moreover, the youngest ones may be still coping with some features of the
writing process in their native language. Therefore, we must be especially
sensitive to the different writing demands which we may find in our classroom
and the different strategies of supporting their writing. It is highly
recommendable that students will spend most time completing tightly controlled
written exercises to practice their English, such as completing sentences,
unscramble words/sentences, gap-filling or dictations. Like many teaching
techniques that go out of fashion for a while, dictation is making a comeback,
especially due to the revision undertaken by Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri,
who looked at the subject and found dynamic alternatives to the dictation of
large chunks of uninteresting prose by a boring teacher. In addition to these
controlled activities, sometimes students will also be encouraged to produce free
writing, although they will need a lot of support.

Four stages must be followed when teaching to write:

- Copying: students copy material provided by the teacher: texts, sentences, etc.
Copying is of great pedagogical value because it helps students reinforce spelling
or sentence structure and it also helps them to retain words. Some examples of
copying may include listing, classifying words into categories, putting lists of
words in alphabetical order, etc.

- Practice stage: It must begin as a guided copying at word-level: making a list, a

personal dictionary, crosswords, matching labels to pictures, anagrams, then
progress to sentence-level: writing speech bubbles for cartoons, sequencing
sentences and copying, correcting mistakes and finally, if we want our students
to write fluently, they will have to learn how to write paragraphs. This is
commonly done by providing a model from which to work, e.g. our students see a
text and then use it as a basis for their own work. Jeremy Harmer calls this
exercise parallel writing.

- Production stage: Students will be encouraged to produce writing. At this level,

this skill will demand sentence, text structure, organization of ideas

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THIRD
After having examined the spoken and the written word, we will turn to the
definition of integrated skills as well as to the concept of communicative
competence. Integrated skills can be defined as the process by means of
which a series of activities or tasks use any combination of the four linguistic
skills.

If we think about how we communicate in everyday life, we notice that, in

general, we do not use these skills in an isolated way: we combine them. Thus, in
the English class, we have to do the same and design activities that integrate
several skills.. The integrated-skill approach involves the teaching of the
language skills in conjunction to each other, and exposes learners to authentic
language. Integrating the language skills promotes the learning of real content
and is highly motivating to students.

According to Donn Byrne, in order to integrate skills, it is essential to use

varied groupings when designing integrated activities because they offer many
opportunities for listening, speaking, reading and writing. Some activities in
which skills are integrated are role-play, dictations or project works, which
involves some research and some group discussion about the topic until
eventually, the students write the final product. Therefore, it is very useful for
integrating skills

Summing it up, it could be said that skill integration will help to the acquisition
of communicative competence. This term was coined by Dell Hymes and it
was deliberately contrary to Chomskys Linguistic Competence, who tried to
explain how a child learns a language. For Chomsky, competence simply implied
the knowledge of the language system. Hymes maintained that Chomskys
theory was incomplete, and that a communicative and cultural dimension should
be incorporated. According to him, a speaker does not only need the ability to
use grammatical structures, but also to learn how to use those structures in a
community (appropriateness). In other words, Hymes stated that in order to
learn a language, a native speaker does not only need to utter grammatically
correct forms (as Chomsky thought), he also has to know the rules of use, that
is, where and when to use a sentence, and to whom. Thus, Hymes replaced
Chomskys notion of Competence with his own concept of Communicative
Competence, and distinguished four aspects:
Systematic potential: A native speaker possesses a potential for creating
language.
Appropriacy: A native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given
situation, in a particular context.
Occurrence: A native speaker knows how often something is said in the language
and act accordingly.
Feasibility: A native speaker knows whether something is possible in the
language, although some structures are grammatically correct, they are not
possible in the language.

These four categories have been adopted for teaching purposes.

Later on, linguists Canale and Swain expanded the previous description of
Hymes, establishing five subcompetences of the Communicative Competence. As
a result of this, the act 1006/1991 of 14th June (B.O.E. 25 June) establishes the
teaching requirements nationwide and sets up that Communicative Competence
for Foreign Language Learners comprises five subcompetences:
Grammar competence: It refers to the ability to put into practice the
linguistic units according to the rules of use established in the linguistic system,

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for instance, the mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students

should be able to cope with difficulties in phonology, orthography, vocabulary,
word and sentence formation.
Discourse competence: The ability to us different types of discourse and
organise them according to the communicative situation and the speakers
involved in it, using cohesion and coherence. Students should be able to
distinguish the different devices to use in oral and written language.
Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to adequate the utterances to
the specific context according to the accepted usage of a particular linguistic
community. Students should be able to understand the social context in order to
express and understand social meanings properly.
Strategic competence: The ability to define or make adjustments in the
course of the communicative situation, and the capacity to use verbal and non-
verbal strategies in order to make communication effective. Students should be
able to use strategies to cope with grammar problems , with sociolinguistic
difficulties as well as with discourse difficulties in general.
Sociocultural competence: A certain knowledge of the social and
cultural context in which the Foreign Language is used. Students should get at
least some command of the basic social and cultural features of L2 in order to
communicate appropriately.

Conclusion
To conclude, we would like to remark that, as proven in this topic, it is
important that the activities and techniques we use in the classroom aim to
develop the four skills of language in students so that they can take part in any
communicative situation. Therefore, we should try to achieve communicative
competence in our students, aiming activities to develop oral and written
comprehension (listening and reading skills) and oral and written expression
(speaking and writing skills).
In this topic we have analysed the spoken word as well as the development of
listening and speaking skills in students when learning a language. Then, we
have examined the written word, and the achievement od the reading and
writing skills. Finally, we have discussed the importance of integrating skills in
order to develop the communicative competence , which is the main objective
of FLL according to LOMCE 8/2013, December 9th.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:
Halliday M.A.K.(Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday): Spoken and written
language. Geelong University Press, 1976.
Savignon, S.: Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom
Practice New York: McGraw Hill, 1997.
Dell Hymes On Communicative Competence in Sociolinguistics Penguin,
London, 1972.
Halliwell, S. Teaching English in the Primary English Classroom Longman,
London, 1992.
BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teachers Guide. Penguin English.
HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.
LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching.
Oxford University Press.
VARELA, R. et al. (2003): All About Teaching English. Centro de Estudios Ramn
Areces.