integration & separation of elt skills

Integration & Separation of ELT Skills | Pinkie | November 29th, 2000

Here in northern Spain we've got pouring rain and gale-force winds. Good thing about bad weather is that there's no sun to tempt you away from your desk!

I've got two rather basic and general queries: perhaps someone out there can help.

1) Who are the chief originators of the idea that the different components of language competence (the "skills", I suppose) can't be learnt separately, or at least are learnt more effectively in integrated fashion?- Can anyone direct me to a balanced review of opinions/evidence on this?

2) Rather similarly, who are the chief originators of the view that non-child learners of a second language tend to learn it in a predictable order, to some extent independently of what they're taught? Is this basically a Krashen thing? And again, can anyone direct me to a balanced review of opinions/evidence on this?

Perhaps there's a single book that covers both issues in reasonable detail?

Many thanks,

Pinkie
Spain

Integration & Separation of ELT Skills | Murray Keeler | November 30th, 2000

Pinkie/Rita,

On the first question:

I've never seen reference to particular proponents of this idea as having originated it. It would seem to be a corollary of more 'holistic' approaches to TESOL (ie not grammar-translation or audio-lingual). It could be described as the default position, whereas separating the skills for discrete focus is based on the assumption that there are aspects of individual skills that specific learners from specific language backgrounds will need to focus on e.g. intonation for my students here. A good analysis of 'micro-skills' involved in the 'macro-skills' of reading, speaking etc is:

Nunan, David. 1989. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom, Cambridge Cambridge University Press ELT.

On the second point. I think it's definitely a Krashen thing - the natural order hypothesis. A good examination of Krashen and his methodology is in McLaughlin (McCarthy?) "Theories of Second Language Acquisition." Perhaps someone else can help out on the reference. It may be out of print by now, though.

Best

Murray Keeler
Azerbaijan

Integration & Separation of ELT Skills | Steve Mann | November 30th, 2000

Pinkie,

Thanks (as ever) for your interesting contributions to this discussion list.

I wanted to reply and say that I think this is a classic TESOL swinging thing (rather like top-down or bottom-up). In the 80's there were a number of articles which made the word integration prominent. Now it is okay again to talk about separate skills and stategies. A quick search at ELTJ's search site reveals numerous articles which feature integration in the title or abstract and reveals that this was something of a buzzword of the late 80s and early 90s. One of these is the Selinker and Tomlin article that is probably the best statement of the issues in separation or integration. I have copied the abstract below.

Ever one to jump on the bandwagon, I wrote a paper saying that the real issues of integrating were not so much about 'the four skills' but the integration of research and pedagogy through AR (predictable I know) and also integration of teacher's ideas and situated accounts through web and discourse like CD (Co-operative Development). You can find this article (for what its worth). If you don't have time to follow it up it starts:

"Like the Gang of Four in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the four (separate) skills have become a little suspect. In fact, I rewrote a Methodology course for Aston University about two years ago and some of my colleagues, I think, thought it was a little 'old hat' to have separate units on reading, writing, listening and speaking. Partly as a response to their suspicion, I changed the titles to listeners, readers, writers and speakers. I also included a government health warning saying that it was a very mild form of separatism and that it was mitigated with heavy dollops of integration!"

ELT Journal, Volume 40, Issue 3: July 1986, An empirical look at the integration and separation of skills in ELT, Larry Selinker and Russell S. Tomlin.

By considering a particular problem area in ELT research - the integration/separation of 'the four skills' - we argue that an increased concern for empirical methodology will necessarily bring ELT theory into closer conjunction with teaching practice. In this article we report five case studies which all aim to show that an empirically grounded and insightful ELT theory is indeed possible. In so doing, we uncover several hypotheses which control pedagogical decision-making, but which do not appear to be explicitly stated, and for which substantial evidence is lacking. One unfortunate result is that other potentially useful strategies for teaching remain ignored. We argue that increasing the rigor of observations of skill integration/separation opens the way for more systematic exploration of the principles that underlie the material presented in these case studies.

Finally, we note that in these studies, important decisions affecting students' time and learning are not grounded in fact or in principles that pedagogical decision makers consciously consider. Nor apparently is the raising of such questions even contemplated. We note the three types of non-empirical rationale for current decision-making in the area of skill integration/separation. We contend that the best pedagogical decisions for students can be made only by taking into serious account systematic observations of student performance in specific learning situations in which differing integration/separation schemes are used.

Pages 227 - 235. ELT Journal, Volume 36, Issue 3: July 1982: An evaluation of integrated service English teaching, Jeff Siegel and Lilia S. Dube.

The integrated approach to teaching service English at the university level involves dealing specifically with the language requirements of the students' other subjects of study. The results of two studies presented in this article indicate that this approach may improve both the students' general academic performance and their attitude towards service English classes.

Steve Mann

Integration & Separation of ELT Skills | Pinkie | December 1st, 2000

White Rabbit! (In my time-zone, at least)

ON INTEGRATION: thanks to Murray, Rita and Steve for very interesting and useful replies. I shall look into at least some of the references mentioned, including Steve's Gang-of-Four article! Is the general conclusion then that integration is something that has sort of snuck in to mainstream opinion? Of course, the idea that the different components of language competence will tend to "help each other along" is I guess pretty much beyond debate. But presumably integration is not strictly NECESSARY for learning: for example Latin used to be learnt purely as a written form, and was presumably successfully learnt as such by a significant minority (alas, myself not included).

I'm not sure whether Rita replied to me direct or to the list. Whichever, I particularly liked the following comment: "If we mean the four traditional skills (listening etc) most learners are helped by their integration; if we think of other language skill such as the ability to discriminate and imitate the sounds of the target language or to master its sructural system, integration does not always work and they develop at different stages of the learning process and are influenced by personality factors".

ON THE NATURAL ORDER HYPOTHESIS: thanks again to Murray, Rita and Rob. Interestingly, Rob mentions the interlanguage hypothesis (Selinker and Corder), which I guess is not the same as the natural order hypothesis but presumably closely related to it? Both hypotheses presumably derive from Chomskyan ideas of Universal Grammar???

In any case, I've found what appear to be very useful summaries of both the natural order hypothesis and the interlanguage hypothesis in Ellis "Instructed Second Language Acquisition"; and Ellis appears to have done a lot of research himself on order of language acquisition in naturalistic and classroom environments. Has anyone looked into this research? I shall try to read Ellis a bit more carefully this weekend.

By the way, Rob replied direct to me, not to the list. One of the interesting things he mentioned was that Willis "The Lexical Syllabus" includes consideration of interlanguage in syllabus design.

Thought I'd share that with y'all!

Best,

Pinkie