Four Skills In Teaching English

The four skills in English; listening, speaking, reading and writing, are all important parts and what we need, to understand the English language and being able to communicate in it. But how could you work with these skills in the classroom to make the best out of them? What could be important to think about? The four skills do not necessarily have to be worked with each at separate times, you could combine them and do different projects which involve more than one. The schools today often work after a communicative approach which says that all the four skills should be integrated in each other and worked with together (Celce-Murcia, 2001, p.8).

Listening

Listening is the first skill to start with when teaching English, together with speaking

The teacher can start by introducing easier reading such as songs, games and other familiar subjects the children know of (Keaveney & Lundberg, 2014, p.86, 94). Can also be done by reading books on different levels. As Keaveney and Lundberg (2014, p.87) suggest the teacher can read a famous story and the children can follow in their own book or paper and are encouraged to read with the teacher as a dialogue whenever they feel ready which will make them more active when reading. Hadaway (2002, p.197) suggests that reading poetry could be good since many poems are short and amusing and short poems can feel less heavy than long texts. One advantage when teaching reading in a second language is that the learners most likely already know how to read in their first language and they probably have some strategies for it which help when learning to read in a new language (Pinter, 2006, p.68). During the field study day some of the students mentioned that they read English books but it was hard since they did not know all of the words and could have a hard time understanding some bits. As a teacher it could therefore be important to make sure that the students read books on their level, so they do not lose their interest. Also make the students aware of the ability to understand content from the context and not stop at every single word they do not understand. The teacher I interviewed said that the students read “Robinson Crusoe” in 5th grade and had a book talk afterward which was very popular among most of the children. I think this shows some of the importance of choosing the right literature for the children to read. One of the abilities in the syllabus for English is to: “understand and interpret the content of spoken English and in different types of texts” (Skolverket, 2011, p.32). This makes it clear that the teacher should introduce