Teaching English Toolbox

Language Skills Overview

Bing: Cute cat barking up the wrong tree

There are books written about each individual skill (reading, writing, speaking and listening) and much research from the past on each of these individual skills. Yet in today's world, it is perhaps more relevant to think about "integrated skills" and "multimodality" and "multiliteracy" as we no longer "just" listen to a recording, we might read along at the same time, or we may watch a video with captions and have body language to help us understand! Yet the four skills do help us to understand some basics of teaching, which help us then to put the multimodal dynamic pieces together!

Think about the following:

  • Skills can never be taught in isolation: when we speak to someone, we also listen; when we write, we may look up words and read them; when we watch TV, we might use captions! Thus studying them in isolation helps us understand some basic categories, but there is a dynamic interplay amongst many different factors in teaching language.
  • Communicative competencies take much more than basic skills - when we speak, we might use our body language to enhance meaning; when we write to someone, we might include a little sketch; when we read, we might take notes to be able to summarize to someone else!
  • Rather than thinking about the four skills, we can consider "Multimodal Literacies" which are more reflective of what actually happens when we are exposed to and learn languages though these are much more complex! 
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  • Students in Zurich are asked to refer to the local curriculum, LP21. D-EDK/Deutschschweizer Erziehungsdirektoren-Konferenz. 2015. Luzern: Lehrplan 21. https://www.lehrplan21.ch/.
  • The local curriculum is based on the older Common European Framework of Reference. 
  • The Companion Volume is the newer tool: Council of Europe. 2020. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment –The New Common European Framework of Reference Descriptors. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.
  • The American Council of Foreign Language Teaching has "World Readiness for Learning Foreign Language Standards" which are slightly different than the CEFR aims but are a useful breakdown for analysis.