Communicative Skills Essay

Language teaching is based on the development of the four communicative skills which are discussed separately to highlight the importance of each one, in that way, instructors could deal with them in a balanced way. To achieve this, it is really important that teachers plan a series of tasks that help develop these communicative skills; these could be done thanks to a variety of techniques and strategies carried out through an efficient methodology which guarantee an effective outcome. In this occasion, the following text is going to focus on the development of the receptive skills, reading and listening, making emphasis on the reading skills.

One of the first skills developed while growing up is listening; Jeremy Harmer, “How to teach English”

In order to decide which activities teachers should use, they have to select an appropriate text that suits their learner’s needs and then create appropriate tasks to enable practice in the areas need it. When choosing developing skills texts, it is highly recommended to choose authentic articles rather than texts created for teaching purposes; Berardo (page 61, 2006), describes the language of these type of texts as “artificial and unvaried, concentrating on something that has to be taught”, which “make them very unlike anything that the learner will encounter in the real world and very often they do not reflect how the language is really

The first task provides students scanning ability practice, where through a multiple choice exercise; they have to quickly read through the text to extract specific words or data that will help them develop the reading for specific information sub-skills. For this task, they will have approximately five minutes to complete it; time setting is really important in the procedure of these activities because it helps the students understand the objective of the sub-skill, especially when students are developing the reading for gist