Teaching secondary
school aged students

Four Skills

Practical ideas

See listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Researching the Classroom

• Many teachers assume that the most effective way to learn is orally (through listening and speaking). Writing and reading are seen as practice stages in learning. If you have more than one class, you could involve one class in considerably more in-class writing and reading. You could then see if there appears to be a direct effect on their abilities in English. See writing, interactive writing and reading.
• You could vary your approach to each of the skills and see if that affects what the students produce. For example, you could sometimes ask students to first write 'fluently', without stopping to check, before they go back to read and revise what they have done. At other times, you could ask them to plan what they will write and to think carefully about each sentence as they write. You could try similar experiments with the other skills. For reading, ask the students to sometimes read quickly through a text without checking words, and at other times to read carefully. For listening, you could play a text straight through for a general impression before going back for details. At other times, you could play it in small sections. For speaking, you could sometimes ask the students to do a roleplay without preparation, at other times you could ask them to prepare in writing first. Different students will work best in different ways. By experimenting, you can see how individual students respond to each approach.
• If the focus is on one main skill, you can see whether involving the other skills first produces a better result. For example, if you want the students to write something, you could see if their production is improved if they first read and speak about and listen to a text about the topic.
• Identify what you think is the students weakest skill. You could experiment to see if it is possible to improve that skill by directly involving their stronger skills. For example, if the students seem weakest at reading, you could involve them in writing or speaking about a topic before they read about it. If writing is their weakest skill, you could ask them to read and speak about a topic first and to note down useful phrases or ideas for their own writing.