3.5. Skills

Competent users of a language are proficient in a range of language skills, though not all of them have the same range of sub-skills. It will be our responsibility to see that the students’ language skills are transferred to the use of English. We will attempt to give students a grounding in the four skills. We may not be teaching them to read, write, speak and listen, but we are teaching them to read, write, listen and speak in English. And because they are dealing with a foreign language we will need to help them with the skills that they are already subconsciously familiar with in their mother tongue.

Of course, it is possible that some students may not be proficient at all the skills in their own language. Then our task will be twofold: to give them confidence in English and to equip them with hitherto unknown skills in either their own mother tongue or English.

We will be asking for an ability to perform in the four skills within the students’ language capability. At lower levels our teaching of skills will be general, becoming more refined as the students become more advanced. Thus, a writing task for beginner might involve the filling in of a form applying for a job: not a complicated writing or reading task, but necessary. Most importantly the student is using the fairly modest language ability he has to be communicatively efficient in one task.

It is now generally accepted that students can take a higher level of English in receptive skills than in the productive skills. Provided that students are helped to tackle listening and reading material they can probably handle texts which are considerably more complex than the sort of language they themselves are able to produce either in speech or writing.

Communicative efficiency in terms of the four skills means that we will expect our students to be able to perform at their given level of English and be efficient at this performance. Using language for the purpose of communication is precisely the purpose that the teacher will encourage in his treatment of the language skills for his students. However, a lot will depend on student needs and the syllabus.

3.6. The syllabus

We know what students need to know about the language they are learning. But before we start to teach them we will have to decide which parts of this knowledge we want them to have and when, how the language is to be organised and what skills we should concentrate on. This organisation is called a syllabus.

Some syllabuses are fairly short lists of grammatical structures or functions. Some are much more detailed, containing lists not only of language, but also of topic and subject matter or activities and tasks. We need to consider these various types.

3.6.1. Structures and functions

In the 1970s a major debate centred on what the focus of the language syllabus should be. Some methodologists advocated abandoning the older grammatical syllabuses (with lists like Verb to be, there is/are, present continuous, present simple) in favour of functional syllabuses (with lists like introductions, invitations, apologies, requests, etc.). The argument was that studying grammar failed to show what people actually did with language. It was suggested that we should teach functions first and the grammar would come later (H. Widdowson, C. Brumfit, D.A. Wilkins, K. Johnson).

It soon became clear, that language functions alone were not a satisfactory organising principle. In the first place, some realisations of functions are in fact little than fixed phrases (e.g., You must be joking! Come off it!). It may be important to learn them, but that is all you learn. In other words, some functional exponents are just single items. You cannot use them to generate more language as you can with grammatical structure.

Another problem lies in how to grade functions. Which function should come first? What order should the grammar be taught in for students to be able to apply it to functions? A purely functional organisation meant that notions of difficulty which had informed earlier grammatical syllabuses could not be used since grammar used to perform one function might be more or less difficult than the grammar used to perform the other. And the teaching of functions raised many problems that grammatical teaching had not previously done. One contentious argument was that by teaching people how the British apologise, for example, you were imposing a cultural stereotype on them.

The consensus that seemed to emerge from the debate was that in language terms grammar was still the best organising principle for a syllabus, but that functional uses could be developed from such syllabuses. A unit on the past simple might end with a lesson about apologising (‘I am sorry, I am late…I missed the bus, etc.); a unit on have to and would like to might include a functional exchange such as ‘Would you like to come for dinner? – I can’t, I am afraid. I have to do my homework’.

Students need to be taught functions, but they need to learn grammar. It is around grammar that functional items can hang on a syllabus.