| INTEGRATING SKILLS: THE CASE OF TODAYS’ ENGLISH
(Nzey Tumul Florent, Professeur Associé à l’Institut Supérieur
Pédagogique –Kinshasa-Gombe
and Byemba Wabulasa, Assistant à l’I.S.P. de Gombe - B.P. 3580 -
Kinshasa-Gombe)
RESUME
Ce travail essaie de suggérer
quelques voies qui peuvent faire sortir les professeurs d’anglais en général et
ceux du Congo-Kinshasa en particulier des sentiers battus des types traditionnels des
leçons.
Sous la lumière des connaissances des
spécialistes, il avance des procédés pratiques pouvant engager l’élève dans
différentes activités, lui exigeant souvent de recourir à d’autres aptitudes,
tantôt verbales et non - verbales, tantôt auditives et graphiques dans une leçon
unique.
En fait, il démontre comment des textes
tirés d’un livre, à savoir Today’s English souvent dédaigné par des
professeurs, peuvent être exploités à bon escient en concevant des tâches
intéressantes permettant à l’élève de passer sans à-coups d’une aptitude à
une autre pendant la même leçon, cette dernière devant être comprise comme
l’étude d’un texte dans son entièreté.
ABSTRACT
This paper is an attempt at suggesting
some practical ways which can take English teachers in general and Congolese English
teachers in particular away from the trodden path of the traditional lesson types. In the
light of specialists’ expertise, it puts forth practical procedures of engaging the
student in a wide variety of activities, often requiring him to use other skills, both
verbal and non-verbal, aural and graphic in a single lesson.
In fact, it demonstrates how reading
passages from a book, namely Today’s English ,often despised by
teachers, can be exploited meaningfully by devising interesting tasks in order to help the
learner move smoothly from one skill to another during the same lesson, a lesson being
understood here as the exploitation of a whole reading comprehension extract.
INTRODUCTION
In scientific meetings, conferences,
seminars and even in books of language teaching, special emphasis has usually been put on
the four main language aspects, otherwise referred to as language skills. These include
listening, speaking, reading and writing.
As a result, there has been a
proliferation of teaching materials on how to teach each of the skills.
Our purpose in this paper is not to engage
in a theoretical discussion of these skills - a task which has already been carried out by
distinguished specialists such as Krashen, Nunan, Littlewood, to name only a few, but to
attempt to integrate them in a practical way in a language classroom. It should therefore
be obvious that our current interest has largely stemmed from what has been recently
termed " the communicative approach " to language teaching
which lays a special emphasis on the learner’s communicative ability rather than on
any of the individual macro skills. This implies that " it is not enough to
teach learners how to manipulate the structures of the foreign language. They must also
develop strategies for relating these structures to their communicative functions ... We
must therefore provide learners with ample opportunities to use the language themselves
for communicative purposes." ( Littlewood, 1981 : X-XI ).
Among other things, Nunan advocates the
design and development of communicative language tasks as one of the ways of achieving
learners’ communicative competence. He gives two reasons for his viewpoint :
" In the first place, few tasks involve only one skill. It is rare that one
only reads, or listens, or speaks, or writes. Therefore it is often difficult to assign
tasks to one skill label or another. Secondly, I hope to encourage teachers to think more
about the integration and sequencing of tasks. " (Nunan 1989 : 2)
According to Byrne (1976 : 114) it is
worth making the point that the underlying mechanism, providing annexes of activities
which bring different skills into play as and when they are appropriate, is not especially
complicated to operate and existing teaching materials can be adapted for this purpose.
As a matter of fact our concern has
stemmed from the complaints of many a Congolese teachers, qualified or not, of English in
the upper level of the secondary school about the inadequacy of the course books in use.
We intend to show to our colleagues, among other things, that a textbook should be
considered as a menu rather than as a dish. That is, a textbook is a reference document
that should be used selectively and usually needs supplementing and adapting. Moreover, a
textbook depends actually on what you do with it rather than what it is. In other words,
some textbooks which have been regarded as inappropriate by one teacher have been used to
good effect by another.
Another reason that has militated in
favour of such an initiative is the cost of textbooks in general and those of English in
particular. Besides, the latter are not usually available in many countries, especially in
French - speaking ones like Congo. Therefore if textbooks adaptation is important
everywhere, this proves to be of paramount importance in the latter countries.
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