Introduction
The Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Standards generally explain what scholars should know and be capable to cope with the English language at the grade stages. The averages offer the objectives for education and student learning fundamental for gaining success in all educational spheres, not just language skills classrooms. Even though the essentials are not a program or a stipulated sequence of commotions, school units will use them to enhance a local school program that will meet students’ requirements. The language skills – Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening – are exclusive as they are procedures that students use to study and make logic of their speaking. Students never read “reading”; they study history, science, math and other subject matter spheres as well as on the subjects for their attention and activity.
Similarly, undergraduates never write “writing”; they use writing to state their skills experience and thoughts and to notify or amuse the surrounding people. As a result of the exceptional origin of the language skills, all tutors in any school will use the Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Standards. The standards classify the skills, methods and tactics applied by successful readers and writers; consequently, all tutors will help their scholars in learning them by the means of numerous classroom states of affairs in all the areas under discussion. The Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Standards also offer parents and society participants with data about what students should be familiar with and be capable to perform as they advance through the studying curriculum and at commencement. With an obviously stated aim offered by the standards, parents, scholars, tutors and community members become associates in studying achievement. (Loosen, 1997)
Teaching language skills
Writing
The perfect tutors of writing are foreign language tutors. They are the single ones who are able to renovate writing to the writing classroom as most English educators are more addicted to the educating of thoughts, eloquence, and some have even acquired the drivel of impostors that grammatical rules can not be educated, only taken up. There is clear evidence that writing classrooms should educate good writing skills but lots are skeptical that regulatory canons will create the accurate and crunchy application of language skills. (Cheng, 2004)
The reality of the substance is that creating up a text by the means of numerous drafts has been approximately as long as the written word. Far from being a squander of time, it appears to be an essential part of the procedure by which proposals are enhanced, formed, arranged and treated. The brink-and-mortar similarity assumes that writers, having first discontinued off at the regional Home Depot, come to the symbols task with all the construction substances that are required, and then it’s just a substance of arranging obsessions in a workmanlike approach. But the fact is that, the suitable critical opinion capabilities to make those significant conclusions of agreement, consistency, and approach to manufacture grammatically correct, graceful text are approximately never all there in the starting. Writing is a lively, non-linear procedure where what is written is frequently an incentive for new thoughts, and where, as in a trip of finding, the writer starts at one point and may wind up somewhere one never planned. (Byram, 2001)
Basic prescriptions demonstrate surface skills of the compound work that is included in the writing educating. Writing is part of contacting that comprises the abilities of listening, speaking, and reading. It is clearly known for a protracted time by the means of work by L. Flower, for instance, that it is not language rules but way of thinking that differentiates the weak from the capable education, and thinking necessitates more than a set of grammatical regulations. More lately, Linda Best’s article, “The Nature of Developmental Writing: A Cognitive Explanation with Practical Implications,” goes on supporting this perception. The article sums up the innovative exploration in which she evaluated the thinking procedures between a group of developmental apprentices and a grouping of first-year writing scholars. These students were educated to speak in words while writing their papers so that data about the origin of an essay could be gathered and investigated. What she stated is that as far as meaningful what a paper requires containing, “declarative skills,” both developmental authors and freshman writers have the same skills, but the developmental writers are short of the capability to pertain these regulations. They write in rote, de-coordinated way. They are informed and clearly realize what they should do but they do not know how to do it. The first-year study authors not only relate regulations of grammar, changes, and punctuation, but also attach their texts to other spheres. (Roever, 2001)
Reading
All of the existing study in communication emphasizes the significance of reading in background, of education thinking experience, not just rules of grammar. At Montgomery College the conjectural mold is process inscription, which we use in the developmental through the reading courses for fresh-men. Most scholars come to study with serious reading lacks that persevere even subsequent to they get all of the courses, but this is not meant to denote that students are not studying and will not, in time, self-accurate. Not being capable to use grammatical rules is not as solemn a matter as the self-doubt and insecurities scholars have about statement. Taking into explanation the expressive life of the undergraduates and stating good relations is as significant as the matter of the discussed discipline.
The reasons of scholars’ difficulties with contacts are numerous and compound. It provides an illustrational and auditory customs, applying more and more shortcuts with the verbal word in creating connotation – which is accurately the contradictory of the digressing and intensifying origin of reading. It’s a painstaking assignment to bring students to the tip of being resolving scribblers. The preliminary tip has to be relational. Research highlights the significance of the tutor-student contacts in “emotional learning,” which is classified as “students’ approaches toward content and the tutor”. If these relations are not triumphant, students who are capable to study will not apply the material studied – which is to note that there is more to education than authoritarian matter. (McQuade, 1986)
Students usually regard teachers as more than just information suppliers. Students wish tutors to help them feel perfectly about themselves and experience in control of their surrounding. This is reliable with scholars’ need to thrive in the classroom.
Speaking
As for the matters of speaking, it is necessary to mention, that there are three types of speaking situations exist, in which the people may find themselves:
- Interactive,
- Partly interactive, and
- Non-interactive.
Interactive speaking circumstances involve face-to-face dialogues and telephone conversations, in which we are interchangeably listening and speaking, and in which we are required to have a chance to ask for explanation, repeating, or slower talking from our dialogue associate.
Some speaking circumstances are partly interactive, such as when pronouncing a speech to live listeners, where the conversation is that the listeners do not disrupt the talking. The speaker, however, can watch the listeners and ascertain from the looks on their faces and body language whether or not he or she is being interpreted and understood.
Some situations may be completely non-interactive, as, for example, studio record for broadcast
The following skills should be acquired by any language courses visitor, and experienced tutors generally train all of these:
- Articulate the clear sounds of a language distinctly enough so that people were able to differentiate them. This involves noting voice differences.
- Use stress and rhythmic samples, and voice patterns of the language distinctly enough so that companions could clearly hear what is said. (Kingen, 2000)
- Apply the right word forms. This usually means, for instance, changes of the tense, case, or gender.
- Put all the words in correct order.
- Be able to use dictionary, and steadily increase the active vocabulary.
- Make obvious to the listener the main sentence components, such as topic, verb and subject.
- Form the key ideas, in order they were separated from the supporting ideas.
- Make the conversation hang jointly so that people were able to follow what one is saying.
Listening
Listening comprehension is the accessible capability in the oral style. It is clear, that to communicate effectively, people need to understand what they are told, or what they hear.
In the first language, people have all the abilities and backdrop skills and practices which are essential for understanding what is heard, so people evidently are not even conscious of how compound the process it is. Here are some factors given, which are essential for listening to the second language. (Chalhoub-Deville, 2001)
It is considered, that only two possible listening situations may exist:
- Interactive,
- Non-interactive.
Interactive listening states of affairs involve face-to-face dialogues and phone conversations, in which people are alternately listening and speaking, and in which people have a possibility to ask for explanation, repeating, or slowing of the speech from our conversation associate. Some non-interactive listening situations are listening to the radio, or TV broadcasts, movies, or sermons. In such situations people generally do not have the capability to ask for explanation, and.other clarifying actions.
Language tests
Relating the matters of language tests, it is useful to highlight, that tests are usually universal for the whole country, and inspite of the fact that curriculum is also general; it is often subjected to personal modifications by a tutor. Thus, small tests may be designed taking into account the preparation level of a student or a group of students. The procedure of language testing which is applied, at any time leans to reproduce the regard of language and the way it is applied at the current time. What is being tried and the type of task or item category selected as a means of examining can be anticipated to show the impact of current opinion on what language capability is and what accurately we are doing when we apply to communication and language in our everyday life. Communicative language examination changed out of a shift in language educating / studying hypothesis and attitude away from a principally schematic concentration towards one that highlighted the significance of language which is used.
It is generally stated, that the normal framework for test designing is grounded on a number of plans which were extremely essential world-wide and increased general receipt in the language jobs. These involved the Threshold Level, a demonstration of the communicative advance which has had an extensive and prolonged result on classroom practice and test plan. (Leloup, 2001)
The framework usually offers language test designers and those comprised in creating assessments the probability of moving jointly towards a joint language testing structure that is inspired by the core charges of the concept of citizenship, while at the same time permitting them to preserve their own testing customs and to improve in them whatever conforms to taken professional experience.
It is important to highlight, that there are not unavoidably any right replies in language testing in a complete meaning. No test technique need be essentially better or worse than any other. The selection of technique is made on the foundation of a whole variety of features and in the light of rejoinders to a number of inquiries. For instance:
- Is the test of general ability or does it checks mainly what has been studied during a course?
- How much time is obtainable for the test passing?
- What level of recital is supposed?
- Is the aim to increase and grade scholars?
- Are the consequences to be used analytically?
Conclusion
In conclusion it is necessary to mention, that the test design partially depends on the experience and convenience of a tutor. It means, that some intermediate tests may have place, correspondingly to the studied material. (Roever, 2001)
References
Byram, Michael, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning. London: Routledge, 2001.
Chalhoub-Deville, Micheline. “Language Testing and Technology: Past and Future.” Language, Learning & Technology 5.2 (2001): 95.
Cheng, Liying, Yoshinori Watanabe, and Andy Curtis, eds. Washback in Language Testing: Research Contexts and Methods. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
Jenkinson, Edward B. What Is Language? And Other Teaching Units for Grades Seven through Twelve. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967.
Kingen, Sharon. Teaching Language Arts in Middle Schools: Connecting and Communicating. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.
Leloup, Jean W., and Robert Ponterio. “ON THE NET : Language Testing Resources.” Language, Learning & Technology 5.2 (2001): 4.
Loosen, Franz. “A Concrete Strategy for Teaching Hypothesis Testing.” The American Statistician 51.2 (1997): 158.
McQuade, Donald A., ed. The Territory of Language: Linguistics, Stylistics, and the Teaching of Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.
Popp, Marcia S. Teaching Language and Literature in Elementary Classrooms: A Resource Book for Professional Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.
Roever, Carsten. “Web-Based Language Testing.” Language, Learning & Technology 5.2 (2001): 84.