Integration of language domains

Integration of the four domains of language is imperative to proper learning. However, linguists and language teachers did not always view this to be true. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking used to be (and still are in many places) taught completely separately, sometimes having specific courses for different domains. “Such an artificial separation of language skills, however, is quite normal in most language schools”(Kumar 225). Research has shown that integrating these four domains is much for beneficial for learning outcomes. Obviously it is much easier to compartmentalize when teaching a language, but there are effective ways to carry out integrative teaching. Brown and Kumar both discuss these methods in their texts. Brown focuses on Content-Based Instruction, Task-based learning, theme-based instruction, and experimental learning, all of these being different ways to integrate language learning. Kumar, on the other hand, discusses more specific activities for promoting this idea. Interactive scenarios, problem-solving tasks, and content-based activities are a few that he mentions (Kumar 229). These tasks all involve students using integrated language skills while completing them. Kumar also discusses linguistic input in chapter 9, which is the idea that context is extremely important. There are four realities of the linguistic input; linguistic, extralinguistic, situational, and extrasituational.

                One of the approaches that stood out to me when I was reading Brown was experiential learning. Experiential learning is similar to content-based and task-based, but it has an added dimension (Brown 291). It focuses on real life, concrete experiences. Most of this learning is inductive; the teacher is not explicitly teaching their students the information. They give students situations to work with and then guide them from there. I love this approach because I think the student learns so much more when they are given control of their learning process. He talks about some of the techniques used in this approach, such as research projects, cross-cultural experiences, role plays, and field trips. All of these things are activities that give the student control. Ownership of the learning process is essential if students are ever going to learn. I personally experienced this type of learning growing up, although not necessarily through language learning specifically. I was homeschooled and my mom took this approach when teaching us. She guided our learning experiences but also provided a lot of free exploration time and activities that were out of the box. We went on a lot of field trips, did creative research projects, and learned about other cultures. This type of approach really encourages students to take ownership of their learning.