Integrated Teaching To Foster Language Competence

Writer(s): 
Fan Xianlong, Central South University of Technology, China

Members of English teaching circles in China often hear the complaint, "High grades, low ability." While many students are able to pass English examinations, often with very high grades, they are poor at using the language. How to solve this problem is a task for English teachers. In this paper, I will report on how I integrated the development of receptive skills with strengthening productive skills to facilitate students' overall language competence, particularly their speaking ability.

The Students

The group of students described in this paper entered my university in 1994 and 1995 for a three-year masters degree in science. There were eight classes in each grade, of which I taught two. Each class consisted of 31-34 students, who were between the ages of 21-25. This compulsory English course was divided into two 20-week semesters of six 50-minute class hours per week. At the end of each semester, a course exam was given and at the end of the year, students took the English qualifying exam administered by the Province Education Commission. These two exams, similar in construction, are composed of five parts: (1) listening (single sentences, short dialogues, and mini talks), (2) vocabulary (sentences), (3) reading comprehension (six short passages), (4) writing (a 150-word composition), and (5) translation (of a short passage from Chinese into English).

Prior to entering the graduate program, all of the students had passed the Band Six College English Test.(1) For this test, they are supposed to have learned English grammar systematically, gained a considerable vocabulary, and acquired good usage skills. However, there was a striking contrast between the level of the exam the students had passed and their actual level of competence. They knew the mechanics of English and were very good at multiple choice tests (as they were trained to pass these), but very few of them could speak English well.

Analysis of The Students' Problem

The students' main problem lies in a lack of opportunities for application of the language which is caused by two factors, one objective and the other subjective. The first factor rests on the reality that the language is taught in a non-English environment in China, in which the main medium of the language is through written form, and therefore students learn it passively without adequate practice using it.

The second, more important factor, is due to the teaching approach. Although modern approaches to foreign language teaching have been introduced in China, wide and effective application of them is far from true. Moreover, the current test system affects students' learning strategies: All exams and tests of different levels are in written form and oral skills are rarely tested.

Rationale

According to Krashen (1985), language acquisition is far more important than language learning, as it is only acquired language that is readily available for natural, fluent communication. Cognitive psycholinguistic theory states that a foreign language learner's competence in using the language is actually the combination of the learner's receptive skills (listening and reading) and productive skills (speaking and writing). As language acquisition is in fact a process in which input and output affect each other, different language skills are "best assumed to develop simultaneously and to complement each other throughout the process" (Stern, 1983, p. 399). With this in mind, I concluded that integrated teaching would be the most effective.

Using integrated teaching, lessons are conducted in a way that learners' language competence is comprehensively fostered from different sides so as to develop both receptive and productive skills. The whole teaching process is divided into steps which integrate the training of different skills, resulting in an overall improvement of students' language competence. The following describes how the teaching was conducted.

Procedure

As the students were generally poor at speaking, they were required to take turns giving short talks on topics of their choice at the beginning of each class. After that, class time was used to work first on listening and reading to develop students' receptive skills, and later speaking and writing to develop productive skills.

1. Developing receptive skills

Besides conducting all lessons in English, I prepared students for in-depth study of a text by beginning with an oral summary of it. For example, I made a short oral introduction to the passage, "Settling Down in England" (Low, 1985, pp. 23-24; See Appendix), that students would later read. After a quick comprehension check to make sure students understood my summary, they read the passage. In addition to training students' listening skills, this activity set up a framework and context, and therefore helped put students in a receptive mode which made the reading that followed easier and more efficient.

Students silently read the passage against the clock applying two basic reading skills: skimming for overall understanding of the material and scanning for specific information. Next, they used different strategies to deal with difficult language points, which is what I called problem-solving--an aspect of teaching reading (Fan, 1991, p. 626). To deal with syntactic problems (long and complicated sentences), students were guided in their understanding of the sentences rather than performing tedious syntactic analyses, a traditional practice in language teaching in China.

Students applied different methods to handle unfamiliar vocabulary, such as contextual and structural analyses. For example, students guessed unknown words by their context or formation (prefixes, suffixes and stems). As a result, new vocabulary was no longer an obstacle, and their skill of obtaining information from visual clues improved.

Students then practised using key language items by writing original sentences or completing fill-in exercises. Successful acquisition of the learning material, in this case, the reading passage, paved the way for students' active participation in the follow-up speaking and writing activities.

2. Strengthening productive skills: Follow-up work

Follow-up work was carried out in two steps: in-class speaking and outside writing.

The forms of speaking practice depended on the kinds of input information. In the case of a narration, students retold the story or participated in a role-play or an interview. In the case of expository writing, they conducted a panel discussion or a debate. After studying the passage "Settling Down in England," the students made conversations, one playing a British journalist, the other a member of the Danish family, which they presented to the class. The journalist asked relevant questions and the interviewee replied with answers that could be taken from the text, inferred from the writing, or drawn from his/her own imagination.

As follow-up work to reading an expository essay entitled, "Basic Research and Graduate Education" (Yu & Li, 1987, pp. 1-3), groups of students discussed their views on the relationship between research and graduate education. With the intensified input information obtained at the acquisition stage, students showed great enthusiasm in the activity, and different ideas, in addition to that of the author's, were shared in a lively discussion.

Simulations such as the above provided stimulating, meaningful, and somewhat realistic communicative contexts. Actively making use of these opportunities to express themselves in the target language, students tried idiomatic expressions relevant to different speech acts, such as greeting, starting and ending a conversation, departing, requesting, and suggesting.

For homework, students wrote a newspaper article about the Danish family in Britain or their own experience of travelling/moving to a new place. Having done the multiple pre-writing activities in the receptive stage, students reported that they found it easier to do their out-of-class writing assignment.

Since the lessons were student-centred and task-oriented, the students were actual users of the language in all learning activities. The teacher's role became that of "designer" of the teaching plan, and "conductor" of the teaching activities and above all, a facilitator of the language acquisition process.

Outcome

Though it is hard to measure exactly how much success this teaching method achieved, its effectiveness can be seen in the students' performance in the examinations they took during and at the end of the course. All 130 students of the two groups in 1994 and 1995 (65 in each group) trained this way passed them successfully. However, the pass rate of the other classes not trained under this teaching model was 82-88%. In the English qualifying examination held by the Province Education Commission in 1996, the 65 students from my classes in 1995 scored an average of 79.6%, while the average score of all the students in the province was 65.1%.

The students' progress was particularly noticeable in their speaking and writing skills, their two poorest aspects originally. At the beginning of the course, many students were so nervous that they trembled when asked to answer a question or to speak to the class. It was not uncommon to hear them greet the class with, "Lady and gentlemans" and say. "Although . . . but" together in a sentence. Gradually however, they became more and more confident when called upon to answer questions and began to practise speaking English during the class break or in their spare time. The change in the students' attitude towards speaking signifies in itself the success of the teaching. With their increased practice, students' oral skills greatly improved. Most of them could continuously speak for more than five minutes, expressing themselves clearly, some even fluently and spontaneously.

Writing also improved greatly. There were far fewer grammatical and pragmatical mistakes and more idiomatic expressions. By the end of the year, many students were able to write English abstracts for their academic papers and even the papers themselves.

The positive outcomes of this approach suggest that it was effective in developing learners' language and communicative ability, and increasing their confidence as competent speakers of English.

Note

1. This is the highest level of the three graded English exams conducted in colleges and universities nationwide in China by the State Higher Education Examination Commission. The other two, Band 3 and Band 4, are compulsory for three- and four-year colleges respectively.

 

References

Fan, X. (1991). "Using the Process Approach to Reading in an EFL Classroom," Journal of Reading, 624-627. Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association.

Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman Group Ltd.

Low, O. (1985). First certificate in English course. London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.

Stern, H. H. (1983). Fundamental concepts of language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yu, Z., & Li, P. (1987). Advanced English text. Hefei: China Sci-Tech University Press.

 

 

Appendix

 

Settling Down in England

 

My husband and I are Danish. As a matter of fact, many of my ancestors were English. I was born in England and was originally of British nationality. My parents were killed in a car crash when I was a baby, so I was brought up in Denmark by my grandmother and educated in Danish school so that Danish is really my native language.

We arrived in England last February at five o'clock on a Wednesday morning after an appallingly rough crossing. Waves which seemed as high as mountains rocked the boat from side to side. We were both sick on the journey and fine drizzle met us as we disembarked. To make matters worse, Klaus, my husband, left his camera on the ship; I lost a gold bracelet, (which has never been found to this day) and we nearly forgot to tip the taxi driver, a surly individual, who grumbled about our luggage and seemed to be in a thoroughly bad temper. Few visitors can have experienced such an unfortunate beginning to their stay, and we certainly felt like going straight home again.

We stayed for a week in a hotel and were then lucky enough to find a furnished bungalow in the suburbs of London. It is not as convenient as our flat in Copenhagen, but it is less expensive than some we saw advertised. Klaus is studying at the local Technical College and in addition, he often attends public lectures at the University of London on as many subjects as possible, chiefly to improve his English. He is a qualified engineer who has been employed for several years in a factory. Our two children have joined us, and they are being educated in an English private school. I am working as a part-time nurse in a hospital, and I have so much to do that I have almost no leisure time.

Most of the neighbours are kindly, but not as sociable as people at home. They tend to ask dull questions, such as: "What is the weather like in Denmark?" or "What kind of games do you play?" We are occasionally paid some odd compliments. I remember the time when a well-meaning old lady told us, "You have such delightful manners. I always think of you both as quite English." I think she meant this as the height of flattery.

We have made a few close friends, who often invite us to their homes. One of them, who is a widower living on the other side of London, even fetches us in his car on Sunday mornings and brings us back in the evenings. Little Kristina, our small daughter, calls him Uncle Sunday. He speaks Swedish and has an elderly Swedish housekeeper, who has been looking after him for more than twenty years, so we chat for hours in a language that is in some ways similar to our own.

Our children can already speak English more fluently than we can. They obviously feel superior to us, and are always making fun of our mistakes, but spelling causes all of us many headaches.

(First Certificate in English Course)