TOPIC 8: LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA ESCRITA.

2.WRITTEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

2.1 FOUR SKILLS INTEGRATION.
2.2 CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE.
2.3 LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.
3.READING TECHNIQUES FOR GLOBAL AND SPECIFIC
UNDERSTANDING
3.1 READING: DELIMITATION.
3.2 IMPORTANCE OF THE LANGUAGE INPUT.
3.3 FACTORS THAT FACILITATE READING COMPREHENSION.
3.4 READING SUB SKILLS.
3.5 READING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.
4. WRITTEN EXPRESSION.
4.1 WRITING SUB-SKILLS.
4.2 WRITING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.

1. INTRODUCTION.
Nowadays, learning English as a Foreign Language is essential in order to have better
chances in our society.

Due to the influence of the Communicative Approach, our current educational

system has incorporated this functional and communicative potential of
language in its objectives and methodology, the ultimate goal being the
development of the students´ communicative competence, which is one of the
general objectives for Primary Education established in the RD 126/2014 28th
February, of the Ministry of Education, that establishes the teaching
requirements for Primary Education nationwide.

Based on this view, I have chosen the topic ... because it is a good example of
how to work the Communicative Approach under different authors’
perspectives and showing, as examples, communicative activities.

2. WRITTEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

2.1 FOUR SKILLS INTEGRATION.
Let me start developing the first part of this topic by establishing a distinction
between the four basic skills of language
As David Crystal says in his book ‘’ The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language’’ written in
1987 and published by CUP we can classify these skills according to the activity of the
participants, speaking and writing are said to be productive skills since they demand some
kind of production on the part of the language user, whereas listening and reading are
receptive skills, since the language user is receiving oral or written language.
 Communication in the classroom has to be understood as a process in which the
communicative competence in the four linguistic skills is equally important: there must be
planned activities in which all four are practised in an integrated way, although sometimes
a skill is emphasized. This is called ‘’the four skills integration’’

According to the Organic Law 8/2013 of 9th December, for the improvement of the
educational quality (LOMCE) Communication is the basis of understanding among human
beings, and in this topic we are going to focus on the written linguistic skills.

2.2 CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

Writing’s support is graphic and written language is space-bound (in opposition to oral
language, that can be characterised as time-bound) , as the writer has all the time to think
about what is going to say and how to do it, and the reader can go back in the text as many
times as wished to re-read a passage or to check some information previously seen.
1. It favours careful organisation and complexity in sentence structure.
2. Its unique features include pages, lines, capitalisation, spatial organisation and several
aspects of punctuation, which make it more difficult to learn than oral language.
3. Written language tends to be more formal than oral language.

2.3 LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

When students begin to learn to read and write the second language, they have already
achieved some competence at these skills in their mother language. Thus, as teachers, we
can make the most of this circumstance fostering the linguistic transference of the
abilities students have already acquired.

One possible problem we can find is that some students have difficulties to grasp the
global meaning of the text.
In order to avoid that:
The texts chosen for beginners should have short sentences, avoiding being repetitive,
and the language presented must be at a level students can understand. The topic should
be according to the students’ age and interest, the letter size should be not too small and
there should be illustrations, etc.

One specific problem that Spanish students learning English are going to face is the
difference between both languages regarding the relationship between sound and
spelling. Due to this, students have to face learning to read English using a different
system, such as the Word Method (which is analytic) where the learners read words and
sentences as a whole, giving meaning to the major importance. Also the Phonics method
(which is synthetic) can be used too: is based on the principle of identifying the
 relationship between a letter and its sound in a written system and teaching the students
to use these to construct or decode words.
On most occasions unknown words can be skipped because the global meaning of the
sentence or text can be guessed.

On other occasions, readers must guess the meaning of a word or expression, and foreign
language learners must be trained in it. This strategy is known as sensitising.

3.READING TECHNIQUES FOR GLOBAL AND SPECIFIC UNDERSTANDING

3.1 READING: DELIMITATION.
As Christine Nuttall says in her book ‘’ Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language’’
published in 1996 by Heinemann, ‘’The objectives of the reading class are to enable
students to read without help, unfamiliar authentic texts at appropriate speed,
silently, and with adequate understanding’’

Moreover, we must take into account that, when we read something, we do not see every
single letter, not even every single word, but we identify the general shape of the word
and some of their letters and skip over the short ones.
How can we help our students to understand a reading activity?
Let’s go now to see the necessary characteristics for the language input that the
students receive through reading.

3.2 IMPORTANCE OF THE LANGUAGE INPUT.

As Krashen says in his book ‘’Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning’’
written in 1981 and published Longman, ‘’the input should be at a slightly higher level than
the students are capable of using, but a level that they can understand’’.
Krashen distinguished between two types of language input. Rough tuning is that language
which is naturally adapted to a comprehensible level, as in the case of a parent speaking to
children, whereas finely-tuned language is that which has been systematically selected to
include only those items which a language student has studied. The communicative
approach uses finely-tunes language during controlled practice and rough-tuning language
for free practice.
Moreover, it is important the use of authentic materials. as David Nunan says in his book
‘’Designing Tasks for the Communicative English’’ written in 1989 and published by Prentice
Hall, we can consider authentic materials as those that are produced for purposes other
than language teaching, keeping all characteristics of real language. For instance: menus,
timetables, simple instructions, some advertisements, etc.
There are some written materials that beginner students may understand to some degree,
so teacher may make use of them in the English classroom
3.3 FACTORS THAT FACILITATE READING COMPREHENSION.
 To know the purpose of reading contributes to comprehension. It has to do with
motivation-. If someone knows why to read, and what for, motivation will keep them
reading, even if they do not understand everything seen on the page.

A second factor that contributes to written comprehension is expectations. It is much

related to the fact of making predictions about what comes next in the text: it includes
foreseeing the topic of the speech, words that are thought to be going to appear, etc.. If
we want our students to read, we must help them to ‘’expect’’ what they are going to read.

3.4 READING SUB-SKILLS.

Following Nuttall’s definition of the objectives for reading, we can see the first sub-
skills: reading aloud and reading silently. Reading aloud involves other abilities apart
from comprehension: pronunciation is an extra difficulty put on the task of reading. But
reading a text aloud should only be done when the language has been previously used
orally and.

We can make another distinction between extensive and intensive reading.

 On the one hand, in Extensive reading, the aim is to get a global understanding of the
information. For example: when reading a novel for pleasure, or an opinion article at the
newspaper.
 On the other hand, in Intensive reading, students are asked to pay attention to
specific points of the text in detail with the aim of collecting and organising the
information it contains. Thus, passages should be short and practiced several times in
order to facilitate understanding
For instance: the directions to get to a place, a theory that must be known because it is
part of the syllabus of a course.

In my year planning, I organize the session around the 45 minutes taking into account
the RC 7/2014 of 15th of July in which the instructions of organization of the academic
year 2014/2015 are established, and work with different activities and the contents
are repeated many times, I do it through different games and in this way the students
learn playing

Some authors speak about two other reading sub-skills: skimming and scanning. We can
talk about scanning when the aim of reading is to extract a specific piece of
information (the date of an exam, or the name of the city in which an accident has
occurred). And skimming is the skill applied in order to get a general idea of what a text
is about. The aim is not to gather all the details.

3.5 READING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.

 Now I will describe the main stages in reading activities, which are:

- Pre-reading stage: It is a preparatory phase. The aim of the activities carried

out at this stage is to prepare students for what they are going to read and create
expectation and motivation. First I present activities in order to contextualize the
class, such as predicting content from a title, commenting on pictures or photographs,
pre-teaching key words through flash cards, etc.
- In the while-reading stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage
is to develop reading strategies and keep the students active. These activities are
done during or immediately after the time they are reading. These activities may
include: identifying a thief according to the descriptions given by the witnesses,
making a figure with paper following the instructions; cooking a recipe... all examples
have in common that students will not have the sensation of doing a linguistic activity.
And, also there are more traditional activities such as: suggesting a title, underlining
the required information, answering questions and chart.
In this stage I work the listening to obtain a general meaning, to look for
information and to look for some details, and I do it several times depending on the
students needs. Also I adapt the activities following the order of 16th July of 2001
by which the education to students with special needs is regulated in Infant and
Primary Education
- In the post-reading stage: The aim of the activities carried out at this stage is to
check comprehension and to evaluate. Some examples of post-reading are:report to
another group, write a response, talk about the story in groups, and write their own
version of the story changing elements...
Games are also important, because students can work in groups developing the moral
and civic education based on the cross-curricular contents established by the Order of
20th of December 1994 of Conselleria of education of the Valencian Government.

Moreover, the Communicative Approach emphasizes the active role of the learner.
Therefore, lessons must be planned in a way that ensures students’ involvement in
classroom activities.

4. WRITTEN EXPRESSION.
4.1 WRITING SUB-SKILLS.
When planning lessons, and moreover when defining the curriculum the Decree 108/2014,
4th July, of the Consell, by which establishes the curriculum and develops the general
ordination of the primary education in the Valencian Government, establishes that
teachers must take into account what different sub-skills must be treated.

And the criteria to select them must be that of the students’ most feasible needs, those
situations that they may experience outside school. For instance: to give an accurate
description of something relevant, to make request, to explain their opinions or to write
short texts explaining situations.

I must insist again on the importance of integrating the four skills in the lesson planning.
But let us focus in written production activities, whose main aim must be the students’
acquisition of fluency and communicative competence.
4.2 WRITING STAGES AND ACTIVITIES.
As in receptive skills, production activities must follow three stages. The first one is:

Presentation: it has the objective of introducing the issue and providing some model to
be imitated, whilst at the same time students have the opportunity to appreciate how
the language item is used. I usually provide a clear context where the new language is
introduced, for instance, using flashcards, doing games with them and later, using word-
cards later. Some examples of activities may include listing, classifying words, etc.

Controlled practice: At this stage students are asked to use new items of language in
different contexts and I control the students’ utterances. Practice can take place in
many different ways: Drills can be mechanical and meaningful. And a very simple
substitution drill can consist, for instance, in finishing a sentence substituting the place
complement: For example:
Every afternoon I go to..... the park.
......the city centre.
Other similar drills are the opposition ones, in which a word, expression or clause must
be replaced by another one meaning the opposite.
As Carol Read says in her book ‘500 activities for Primary Classroom’’ written in 2007
and published by McMillan Education, Dictations are written activities that reinforce
listening skills. They are appropriate activities when the correspondence between written
and oral language is being worked. There are many other possibilities like suggesting a
title, underlining the required information, answering questions and chart filling,
questions and answers, word order exercises, games (puzzles, crosswords, riddles, etc...)
in which different linguistic aspects can be practised.
They also can use the ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the Council of Europe in
an effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism, including their games in the
Dossier, which is a collection of samples of their work where they record their learning
achievements.
This is a tool that allows students to create strategies to learn developing the learning to
learn competence following the Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament
and the Council of 18th December on key competences for lifelong learning
 Production: at this stage students practise the previously presented language items in a
freer way, using them as a vehicle for communication. In this way, learners will integrate
the new language into the previously known. Teacher’s supervision will not be so close
during the communicative stage and this stage constitutes a tool in order to achieve the
objective of getting the desired communicative effect.
As Harmer says in his book ‘’ The practice of English Language Teaching’’ written in 1991
and published by Longman, we can classify communicative activities: reporting to another
group, writing a response, writing their own version of the story changing elements, etc.
All these activities have in common that they focus on the content, not on the form of
language. And language is used in a way fairly similar to real-life situations, with a
communicative purpose and in a varied way.

5. CONCLUSION
To conclude, I would like to remark that, as I have proven in this topic, the written
language is a vehicle of communication, which in addition, complements oral language.
As far as the FL learning-teaching process is concerned, the comprehension and the
production stages are closely linked. Therefore, teachers should gradually train
students from global to specific comprehension when reading texts and from guided
production to free production when writing in the FL.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:
 Nuttall, Christine (1996): Teaching Reading Skills in a FL. Heinemannn
 Nunan, David (1989) ‘’Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom’’ CUP
 Harmer, Jeremy (1991): The Practise of English Language Teaching. Longman
 Krashen, Stephen (1981): Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning’’ Longman
 Crystal, David (1987). The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. CUP
 Read, Carol (2007). ‘’500 Activities for the Primary Classroom.’’ MacMillan Education

7. LEGAL FRAMEWORK.
1. Organic law 8/2013, 9th December, for the improvement of educational
quality (LOMCE)
2. RD 126/2014 of 28th February.
3. D 108/2014 of 4th July
4. Order of 20th of December of 1994 about Cross Curricular Contents.
5. Order 16th July of 2001,
6. Recommendation 2006/962 of the European Parliament and the Council
of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning.
7. RC 7/2014 of 15th of July
 8. ELP which is a project launched in 2001 by the Council of Europe in an
effort to support learner autonomy and plurilingualism

8. MAIN CONCEPTS
Written foreign language.
Reading comprehension
Reading sub-skills
Reading stages and activities: pre, while and post reading.
Written expression
Writing sub-skills
Writing stages and activities. Presentation, controlled practice and production.

Other main concepts:

Linguistic transference
Sensitising.
Word method and phonics method