Different Ways in Which Skills Can Be Combined For Teaching (Essay Sample)

Teaching Basic Skills in Children
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Different Ways in Which Skills Can Be Combined For Teaching
There are various methods of teaching skills in the classroom. The most basic skills taught in class are listening, speaking, reading and writing. This paper will discuss the different ways in which these essential skills can be taught in class. These skills can be taught separately or combined. Since these skills are dependent on senses, it is prudent to teach them in combination since human beings use more than one sense at a time. Teaching skills in combined form saves time and makes it easy for students to connect various skills faster than teaching them separately.
In teaching reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, a teacher can use many approaches depending on the students’ ability, level of understanding, age and availability of teaching and learning materials. The various methods can be classified into two: the student centered approach and teacher centered approach. Teachers use the student centered approach. This paper will explore the combination of listening and speaking then go ahead to discuss the teaching of reading and writing.
Listening and Speaking
In a classroom, speaking and listening skills are particularly essential during communication between the teacher and students. In teaching listening skills, the teacher may read a story aloud and allow students to listen to the story keenly. In the process, the students will get the main ideas, and the instructor may ask the learners to tell the class what they have understood in the story. The teacher should provide language rich activities, materials and an enabling environment. In practice, the students may take turns to describe the story in order to have enough rehearsals in speaking.
According to Kyriacou (1998), teachers spend a considerable deal of time talking in class. In the process, the students spend a lot of time listening. It is therefore, essential that students learn listening skills so that they make the most out of the teacher’s speech in class. Another way of teaching listening is giving student tips on proper listening. As teaching continues, the teacher may give the students basic tips like upright posture that may enhance the listening skills of the students. Upright posture and focus on the speaker is one essential listening skill. The teacher may use appropriate gestures to emphasize this point. At the same time, students ask questions and discuss with fellow students. This calls for teaching of speaking skills. As students engage in listening to the teacher, the teacher encourages students to ask any related questions. The teacher can correct poorly framed questions and provide a suitable guideline on how to structure sentences, use of intonation and stress in speech.
Listening is a basic that is beneficial for various learning processes. The basic steps in listening are hearing, understanding and judging (Flohr & Paesler, n.d). The teacher should therefore, consider the students who may have hearing problems and give assistance. For example, if a student cannot hear properly, he or she should sit at a position in class that is closer to the teacher. Flohr & Paesler (n.d.), state that the process of listening has three stages. Pre-listening is where the teacher makes the students aware and activates their prior knowledge. While-listening approach means that the instructor or teacher gives students visual support or guiding questions and post-listening is when the students become active and work with what they heard. The teaching of listening and speaking skills needs to be approached by interest, variation and motivation. For instance, the teacher should motivate slow learners and give them time to learn at a reasonable pace.
The most powerful way of teaching listening and speaking is through real experiences. Students need to be taught various skills in the classroom and furthermore, give the students time to experience the learned skills. The teacher may provide activities outside the classroom that require students to practice their acquired skills, games and discussions form a superb example for this.
Reading and Writing
The principles of teaching are not different when it comes to teaching reading and writing. The only difference may come in the application of the teaching approaches. The constant instructional aims and goals remain the same in the teaching of reading and writing(Calhoun, 1999). In the lesson and unit design, the following are noteworthy: building vocabulary and helping students gain confidence.
According to Nation (2008), an essential part of teaching reading skill is the ability to recognize written forms and connect them with their spoken forms and meanings. The teacher therefore, should help learners recognize these written forms give them meaning. Since reading and writing are similar, the learners should learn how to write and read simultaneously. The students should be given liberty to scribble on a piece of paper and given an early exposure to writing. . Activities adopted in the teaching of these skills are exercises in reading and writing, the teacher may ask students to read a certain story aloud in turns and give comments, corrections and praise to the attempts from the students.
Students can be exposed to reading different stories with different vocabulary in order to develop their language and ability to recognize different written words. Once students are able to read, then they can be introduced to writing. In essence, writing is trying to represent their thoughts and ideas on paper. According to teaching treasures website, there are four main methods of teaching reading namely phonics, "look and say”, language experience approach and context support method. P...