An Integrated-skill Approach To Teach English Texts

Teaching English aims at cultivating students' linguistic competence and communicative competence. In order to achieve those purposes, English teachers should not only help students have a good command of linguistic knowledge, but also focus on skill training, and involve students in communicative activities.This thesis proposes an integrated-skill approach to teach non-English majors' intensive reading through English texts. It mainly follows the guidance of schema theory and the integrated-skill training model. Schema theory holds the view that readers' background knowledge plays a prominent role in comprehending a new text. Rumelhart (1980) holds the view that "the role of background in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory." According to schema theory, a reader can understand a new text only when he utilizes previously acquired knowledge. Therefore, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader's background knowledge and the text.Furthermore, according to the integrated-skill training model, English teaching should lay equal emphasis on all four skills and develop all four skills integrally while focusing on particular skills at different stages of learning. Although there are cases where individual skills may be treated individually, the principle of integration is considered to be very important. The students, as a whole, should be trained adequately with all linguistic skills.Thus the following pedagogical principles can be employed in the process of teaching English texts. These principles consist of using existing background knowledge combining global reading with elective reading ( reading for gist and reading for specific information), cultivating different skills at different stages,creating an active teaching and learning atmosphere, teaching language in context and training integrated skills.The practical procedures of the application of integrated-skill approach to teaching English texts are divided into three stages. The first stage is called pre-reading stage. At this stage, the teacher tries to activate the learners' existing knowledge to comprehend the new text if it is on a familiar topic to them. However, if the text is on an unfamiliar topic, the teacher should provide students with relevant background knowledge because they play a vital role in reading processing according to schema theory. Also at this stage, the teacher should train students' listening skill, especially listening for the general gist of the text. The second stage refers to the while-reading stage. Under the guidance of interactive model, the teacher requires students to get the specific information to confirm their predictions, to guess unknown words from context, to make reasonable inference and to find out the topic sentence in the process of reading. These activities are designed to train students' reading skills. Active and efficient readers should be good at utilizing these strategies when they are reading. And the last stage is the post-reading stage. This stage focuses on language development and cultivating students' speaking and writing skills. The teacher sets real-life situations for students to train their communicative competence. Also their four skills can be trained integrally at this stage because focusing on one skill usually leads to practice in another, depending on the learner's aims, motivation, attitude and method adopted by the teacher.