This document discusses reasons and strategies for teaching and developing the four main language skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. For each skill, it outlines key reasons for developing that skill such as listening requiring real-time comprehension and being the basis for speaking development. It also provides example strategies for teaching each skill, such as using pre-listening activities to help students understand what they will hear and implementing role-plays to provide speaking practice in a safe environment. The overall document serves to explain the importance of integrating work on all four language skills into language education.

1. Reasons and Strategies to teach and develop listening, reading, speaking
and writing
By Rosa González Concha
Listening
It is well-known to language learners, listening is far more challenging, they need to know
how to listen and what it is more important what they are listening for. Listening is a
receptive skill; however, it is very active because as people listen they have to process a lot
of information in order to get meaning.
Reasons to teach and develop Listening:
 Listening is one of the most complex skills for ESL students and it is crucial that
students learn “how to listen” and “what they are listening for.”
 Listening happens in real time, so people listen and have to comprehend what they
hear immediately.
 Listening requires a person to receive and understanding incoming information
(input)
 Listening is the basis to develop speaking; it requires productive, spoken responses.
 Listening is considered way better in comparison to reading because students must
pay attention and follow what a person, recording or whatever is saying.
Strategies to teach and develop Listening:
 Teach a variety of tasks, so students can experience different types of listening such
as predicting, guessing information, missing information or just listening to
understand a conversation.
 Expose students to different ways of processing information: Bottom-up and top-
down.
 Consider text, difficulty and authenticity will helps students understanding of
listening to a conversation with natural sounding language.
 Check on how well students have understood by asking open and close questions.
 Student’s background knowledge along with pre-listening activities will help
students to know what they will hear in order to comprehend the general meaning.
Reading
It is a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their own
background knowledge to build meaning.

2. Reasons to teach and develop Reading:
 Students’ background knowledge integrates with the text to create the meaning.
 Reading not only helps to comprehend a text but also to acquire a wide range of
new vocabulary.
 Reading helps students to develop a critical and analytical thinking about different
topics in order to get the meaning of a text.
 Reading is useful because it helps learners to transform strategies into skills that
prevailed in the future.
 Reading is an activity that develops fluent reading; it means to read at an
appropriate rate with adequate comprehension.
Strategies to teach and develop Reading:
 Activate prior knowledge means to engage readers in activities that makes them
thinking about what they already know about the text.
 Increase reading rate by making students to read aloud several times a text, in order
to improve comprehension and rate.
 Keep a vocabulary notebook with difficult words or key concepts, so students can
learn a word every day.
 Skimming and scanning are good strategies that allow students to gist the general
idea of a text or to look for specifics details and information of a text.
 Evaluating progress by making students to write a journal in which they have to
answers a question about a text they have already read, it will help to develop
comprehension skills.
Speaking
First, unlike reading or writing, speaking happens in real time. You cannot edit and revise
what you wish to say. Speaking is a productive skill which consists of producing systematic
verbal utterances to convey meaning.
Reasons to teach and develop Speaking:
 Speaking another language is harder than reading or writing because of the
pronunciation of words and the language structure, among others.
 Speaking helps to communicate in an appropriate way in different context of real
life.
 Through speaking teachers can help students to feel more confident in different
situations.
 By speaking, students are constantly practicing to express their ideas and thoughts
in a well organized way.

3.  Speaking is a good way of showing off what a student has learnt, in terms of
vocabulary and language structures.
Strategies to teach and develop Speaking:
 Provide opportunities for students to talk by using group work, for instance to
discuss a controversial topic.
 Implement role-play activities for speaking in a safe environment in order to
practice this productive skill.
 Oral reports can help students to speak about something they are comfortable with
it.
 Teaching useful vocabulary for Interactional speech which is communicating with
someone for social purposes, and Transactional speech that involves communicating
to get something done.
 Implement activities such as information gap is a useful activity in which one
person has information that the other lacks.
Writing
Writing is a series of contrasts that involve a physical act of committing words or ideas to
some medium, and a mental work of inventing ideas, thinking about how to express them,
among others.
Reasons to teach and develop Writing:
 Writing helps to organize ideas in a well-structured way that will be clear to a
reader.
 Through writing students acquire different levels of complexity, depending on the
purpose of writing.
 By writing students learn to edit and correct their work when they have mistakes.
 Writing develops students’ creativity and capacity of writing original compositions
or essays.
 To teach the appropriate structure of reading will helps students to pass international
exams.
Strategies to teach and develop Writing:
 Make quick writings in order to improve students’ writing skill.
 Write about an interesting topic that students may like so they can feel motivated
about it and write without complaining.
 Make sure that students know how their writings will be assessing this will help
students to do a better work.

4.  Give a clear feedback, so students can understand and correct their mistakes by their
own.
 Use a dictionary with the purpose of checking spelling mistakes.