The “skills” in English language teaching are: reading, writing, listening and speaking. These are sometimes broken down into sub-skills.
Each one requires a different approach, different exercises and activities, and different assessment. Some students will have a bias towards one or more skills and in a very general way, some nationalities will also. This depends on how they have been previously taught as well as how their mother-tongue compares to English.
The articles here look at the different skills in TEFL and how you can deal with them as a TEFL teacher.
Skimming and Scanning are two skills which are often talked about in TEFL when it comes to reading. In fact, some teachers swear by them; every reading lesson (they maintain) should include practice with these skills because they feel their students will benefit enormously from knowing how to skim and […]
Writing is not just a matter of putting pen to paper. It requires some thought and a certain level of language skills. We talk about good writing when the written work – be it an essay or an email, a poem or a business letter – expresses a clear point, […]
Listening is one of the four main language skills along with reading, writing and speaking. Whilst in reading and writing we talk about sentences, the spoken (or heard) equivalent is an utterance. The Components of Listening Listening is often confusing for an English learner. There are a number of reasons […]
Vowels and Consonants are the sounds which go to make up the English language. If air passes straight through the mouth without being stopped or constricted anywhere, this forms a vowel sound. If the air is stopped at any point or the mouth is constricted somehow, then this creates […]
Voiced and Voiceless (sometimes Unvoiced) describe the two different ways we can make sounds in our mouths. The basic difference is this: voiced sounds occur when the vocal chords vibrate voiceless sounds occur when the vocal chords are still An Example of Voiced & Unvoiced The best way to explain […]