Comprehensive Masterclass on English Language Teaching Methods, Linguistic Skills, and Didactic Applications

1. Introduction to Foreign Language Teaching and Linguistic Skills

To use a language effectively, we need to interchange different abilities or skills in our lessons such as: listening, speaking, reading and writing. We will study how to integrate these skills into communication. All the skills above may be necessary to our pupils and we will have to consider when and how to introduce them.

2. Listening Comprehension: From Hearing to Active and Selective Understanding

Whenever a person studies a foreign language the first skills to deal with are receptive skills. Among the two receptive skills, listening for the foreign language is the very first one. The comprehension of a language is the ability to understand communicatively what we listen to in the foreign language.

If we want to have authentic communication between two human beings, oral understanding (listening) and an ability to express oneself in a language (speaking) are both necessary.

According to Harmer, the most important listening skills are (PEGRID):

• Predicting: We must encourage our pupils to predict what they are going to listen to.
• Extracting specific information.
• Getting the general picture to get the gist of the message.
• Recognising discourse patterns and markers in communication.
• Inferring opinion and attitude.
• Deducing meaning from context.

Analysing the acquisition of our mother tongue (L1) we realise that the fact of speaking does not take place until proper understanding has occurred. Listening to a language could seem a passive process; however, this is not quite true. Before understanding a language, the listener has to process what he or she hears and this is an active process without any doubt. Understanding implies decoding the message.

For a message in a foreign language to be completely understood, students need to follow the following stages:

1. Identification of vocabulary, grammar, or sentence structures and of course the phonetic contents or sounds.
2. Identification of the keywords, that is to do a selection of the most relevant elements of the message.
3. Retention of the information for the necessary amount of time to answer and develop communication among speakers.

2.1. Methodology to Teach Oral Comprehension (Listening)

To teach how to do a listening exercise we need to bear in mind some of the main principles established in educational decrees. In the section related to methodological aspects, we find many references to the need to maintain our students in a communicative context. To do so, we have to follow a number of principles:

• We should select activities related to the students' interests.
• We need to provide the context of the situation we are going to deal with.
• We must select material of the best quality possible.
• Dialogues are preferable; listening to just one person could be monotonous.
• We should avoid background noises to facilitate understanding.
• The listening task should fit our students' level of the foreign language.

After following these principles, we need to analyse the three phases for making a listening activity:

• Pre-listening: It allows our students to introduce themselves to the context where the listening activity takes place. It helps them to review the vocabulary they are going to hear and even to clarify ideas before listening.
• While-listening: In this stage, students are supposed to focus their attention on the listening itself, to concentrate on the listening task.
• Post-listening: We will develop activities that help us to check the understanding of the listening task and the answers of our students.

According to the level of our students, we can propose two types of listening activities: extensive listening and intensive listening. Extensive listening is interested in the global meaning of the message, whereas intensive listening is focused on specific ideas, specific vocabulary, intonation, or stress. Possible activities for extensive listening include answering questions, and possible activities for intensive listening include cloze texts or multiple-choice exercises.

2.2. Materials

In short, auditory material should be varied, comprehensible, graduated in difficulty, and within a context. In Primary Education, this material can consist of:

• Songs: They are an important source of motivation. They change the routine, reflect popular culture, and act as a stimulus for discussion. They make language learning enjoyable and reinforce the learning process. They are useful for learning vocabulary, pronunciation, structures, and sentence models. Songs must be clearly pronounced, well recorded, easy to sing, and without too much instrumental music.
• Video: It is important to choose the correct technique: recognition, production, or both. There are several reasons for using video in listening skills: it is a motivating type of material, fosters the pupil's imagination, provides visual context, and paralinguistic features (gestures, facial expressions) help comprehension.
• CD player: We can work on many activities such as drills, stories, tales, and recording children's voices.
• Teacher and language assistant: He/she is the basic element from the very first moment he/she enters the classroom. Teachers must have good pronunciation, act as the narrator of a story, tale, or cartoon, read instructions, and give and ask for information.
• Other students: Students can develop mutual respect towards listening habits, and we can correct common errors collectively.

2.3. Activities

From the great number of listening activities that we can find, we are going to select some as examples. From the very first levels, we can choose listen and repeat, very useful for a first contact with the foreign language; listen and identify, usually linked to using images; listen and draw; listen and colour; listen and match; listen and put in order; listen and classify. Most of them are used to consolidate vocabulary and identify new words and structures. In higher levels, we can use listen and guess activities, listen and complete the information, listen and answer multiple-choice questions, or complete a cloze text.

When planning all these listening activities, we have to prepare them following some advice:

• Motivate our students, generate interest by introducing the activity and creating the need to know about the topic of the listening.
• Introduce the main linguistic structures to make them familiar and easier to identify, ensuring global understanding.
• Ask questions about possible solutions or possible answers to previous questions. This allows us to create expectations, interest, and the need to check predictions.
• Develop the activity through multiple listening passes (first listening, second listening and writing, listening and checking).
• Debate the answers with the students before revealing the correct ones.
• Add complementary activities to support the ideas of the listening, promoting oral language use.

3. Speaking: From Imitation to Free Production

Speaking is a productive skill; it implies production on the part of the speaker. For this reason, a student needs to have previous input and learning stages before speaking in the foreign language. To develop this skill, our students need to listen to the foreign language as much as possible, and we as teachers should take advantage of this by using English in our classroom as much as possible.

Among the many methodologies that we can find nowadays, we should focus our attention on those that underline the importance of oral language. Modern methodologies highlight oral skills above written skills, demanding the production of written texts only at a second stage of learning—not recommended for Primary Education levels where students have not yet mastered the language.

According to the educational curriculum, our main purpose is to develop communicative competence in our pupils. To do so, we must introduce oral production into our classroom activities. Nevertheless, teaching students to speak English is sometimes hard work due to various difficulties. First, we should avoid frustration in our students to cultivate a comfortable feeling towards the foreign language. We should respect the silent period of each student and wait for their knowledge to mature. In the early stages, repetition allows them to feel confident enough in oral production, and step by step, they will be able to produce sentences and speak fluently.

3.1. Methodology to Teach Oral Production (Speaking)

We need to identify the different phases that speaking production requires:

1. Assimilation phase: The stage to create the appropriate communicative context, introducing new vocabulary, letting students assimilate new structures, lexical meanings, linguistic expressions, and socio-cultural aspects. We should use short micro-dialogues, visual elements, mimicry, and model sentences.
2. Controlled phase: Students take part and interact with the teacher and peers. We pay attention to sentence repetition, error checking through self-correction or peer-correction, and guide them towards accuracy.
3. Creative phase: In this stage, we allow our students to make mistakes. The goal is to make them feel confident enough to use the foreign language regardless of errors, realizing their own speaking abilities.
4. Free practice phase: Students use oral language independently to communicate. The goal is to reinforce communication through dramatization, role-play, and debates with minimal teacher control.

3.2. Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills

Students should be taught effective speaking strategies:

• Using minimal responses: To encourage learners to participate and build up a stock of conversational replies.
• Recognizing scripts: Learning to recognize different communication situations (greetings, apologies, invitations).
• Using language to talk about language: Overcoming misunderstandings in communicative interaction.

Ways of learning a foreign language include acquiring a set of rules (Krashen's distinction between acquisition as a subconscious, natural process and learning as a conscious, formal process), learning by memorizing, forming habits through imitation, and discovering learning strategies.

4. Written Component of Foreign Language: Reading and Writing

To use a language effectively, we need to integrate reading and writing alongside listening and speaking. Reading implies learning vocabulary, sentence structures, and linguistic expressions, providing essential exposure to the socio-cultural context of the foreign language speakers.

4.1. Reading: Techniques of Global and Specific Comprehension

One of the main objectives of written comprehension is to acquire the necessary abilities to develop written production. We cannot write in a foreign language if we do not read in it first.

According to Harmer, the most important reading skills (PEGRID) are:

• Predicting: Encouraging pupils to predict text content.
• Extracting specific information.
• Getting the general picture to grasp the gist.
• Recognising discourse patterns and markers.
• Inferring opinion and attitude.
• Deducing meaning from context.

Two main reading techniques are skimming (extensive reading for general meaning quickly, without focusing on unknown words) and scanning (intensive reading looking for specific information and keywords).

4.2. Writing: From Controlled Practice to Free Production

Writing is the last skill to be developed, requiring prior knowledge of vocabulary, sentence structures, and connectors. Three stages are differentiated in teaching writing:

1. Controlled practice: Students put scrambled texts in order or rearrange paragraphs to familiarize themselves with structures and connectors.
2. Guided writing: Providing models, such as letter-writing templates or visual references.
3. Free writing: Spontaneous writing of sentences and short texts independently.

Writing also involves five subskills according to Matthews (1991): graphic/visual skills, grammatical skills, stylistic/expressive skills, rhetorical skills (cohesion devices), and organizational skills (sequencing ideas).

5. Description of the Phonological System of the English Language

Phonetics is the science concerned with the study of the speech process, including perception, transmission, and reception of speech sounds. Phonology discovers the rules that organize sounds into a language system.

5.1. Segmental Features

Vowels are articulated with no obstruction to the voice and act as syllable nuclei, whereas consonants involve some obstruction to airflow. The articulation of segmental features makes reference to six main factors: air stream, vocal cords, soft palate (nasal vs. oral), place of articulation, manner of articulation, and position of the lips.

5.2. Suprasegmental Features

Suprasegmental features include stress (prominence of a syllable in terms of length, loudness, and force), rhythm (stress-timed rhythm in English versus syllabic rhythm in Spanish), and intonation (pitch levels used to express emotional, grammatical, informational, and psychological meanings).

6. History and Evolution of Foreign Language Teaching Methods

Foreign language teaching methods have evolved significantly over time:

• Grammar-Translation Approach: Focused on reading knowledge, memorizing rules, and translating literary texts.
• Direct Method: Emphasized active use in the classroom, inductive grammar learning, and avoiding the mother tongue (Palmer and Jespersen).
• Audio-Lingual Method: Rooted in behaviorism (Skinner), focusing on habit formation, pattern drills, and mimicry.
• Humanistic and Communicative Approaches: Shifted the focus to learner-centered instruction, emotional factors, and communicative competence (Hymes, Wilkins, Canale, and Swain). This includes methods such as Suggestopedia (Lozanov), The Silent Way (Gattegno), Community Language Learning (Curran), the Natural Approach (Terrell and Krashen), and Total Physical Response - TPR (Asher).

7. Lexical and Semantic Fields, and Vocabulary Teaching Techniques

Language is a network of systematic relationships. Lexical fields group words by context, while semantic fields organize the conceptual relations between words (synonymy, antonymy, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships). Necessary lexicon covers socialization (greetings, introductions), obtaining and giving information (questions), and expressing emotions/attitudes (volition, agreement, feelings, opinions).

Techniques for teaching vocabulary include introducing new words through flashcards, realia (actual items), antonyms, synonyms, and scales, and practicing them through role-play, group work, and word games (bingo, crosswords, hangman).

8. Morphosyntax and Elementary Communicative Structures

Morphosyntax combines morphology (word forms and structure via morphemes) and syntax (grammatical arrangement of words into phrases and sentences). Sentences are analyzed via five structural elements: Subject, Verb, Object, Complement, and Adverbial. Sentence types include declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory structures.

9. Literature, Text Typologies, and Songs in the Foreign Language Classroom

Literature serves as a powerful tool in the foreign language classroom to foster communicative competence and cultural awareness. Texts can be classified into narrative, descriptive, argumentative, explicative, and dialogic typologies. Furthermore, songs, chants, rhymes, and action songs act as excellent poetic vehicles that stimulate psychological memory mechanisms (Piaget's egocentric language and Krashen's acquisition processes), improving pronunciation, rhythm, vocabulary, and cultural learning.

10. Conclusion

Over the years, foreign language teaching has totally changed. Nowadays, it is really important to attain communicative competence in the teaching-learning process. To develop good foreign language teaching, educators must integrate the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and adapt methodologies to suit learners' individual needs, fostering diversity, reading plans, and ICT integration.

11. Bibliography

• Harmer, J. (1983). The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.
• Krashen, S. (1983). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon Press.
• Hymes, D. (1972). On Communicative Competence. Penguin Books.
• Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing.