905. A way of practicing the four skills



One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “When we communicate with one another we do it by using the four skills of a language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. So it is sensible you make your students practice those four skills. Your students will be gaining experience by using them. Our students don’t only read and write in English. Try to balance those four skills in your classes. Sometimes one single activity will demand using several skills along it or at the same time.

Those four skills, natural skills, should be assessed and evaluated by you and by your students.

Now I’m trying to think of an activity that should combine different skills in a naturalistic way – it isn’t complex at all to think of one. Well, you can work on an article about the formation of the mountain ridge of Sierra Nevada, near Granada, south of Spain.

Those mountains are ‘young’ and ‘new’: as far as I know they are growing in altitude; they aren’t mountains that are only being eroded like any other mountain in the surface of the earth.

Briefly. It's just an example. First you all can discuss about the fact that this ridge is going up, and you present an estimation of how high the peaks were millions of years ago, by means of diagrams projected by a video projector.

After that they can listen to you reading an actual article about all this.

Then you all can shortly keep on discussing about this phenomenon. Then you teacher hand out copies of the article among the students.

They’ll have to orally present a summary of the article. So they read the article, while they’re writing notes about important facts and points. Don’t do this activity very long.

At the end one student will present a summary of the article, and you could ask for further points from the other students, so as complete the information or make predictions for the future.” / Photo from: antonioboveda blogspot com. Recursos Didácticos de Ciencias Sociales. Formación geológica de la Península Ibérica. Los grandes períodos de la historia geológica de la corteza terrestre. Sierra Nevada should be in the southern side of Sistema Bético. Península Ibérica is Portugal in a rather small part of the west and Spain is the rest of the peninsula, the larger part of it. The photo right below was taken from post # 503.


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