Proper Teaching and Assessment of all the four skills in the English language could help save their extinction.
For decades, the English language has been taught based on developing and enhancing four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
These skills are predominant at preprimary. However, as the children advance in grades, some get overshadowed. Speech and listening skills begin to fade and we are left with copying notes, not the creative writing and silent reading, not the oral one which grows and stimulates the speech skill.
The impact of this trend has led to the birth of poor listeners not only to the spoken English language but spoken local languages. Some of you will bear witness that in Uganda, because of the dying listening skill, many people prefer to listen to and watch English films that are translated into local languages. To make matters worse, nowadays even the films acted in local languages are also retranslated into the very local languages again!
Similar to that is speech skill. In schools, this skill is murdered by teachers through poor classroom cultures of: “keep quiet”, “don’t talk while in class” and as soon as the children can copy notes on the writing board. It is therefore not surprising to find adult people who have poor listening and oral skills. One of the causes of this trouble is the examining body. It doesn’t assess them at the national examination. We can’t groom orators when platforms such as debates are not even heard of in majority schools? How can we raise listeners when there are no audio lessons conducted in schools and a conducive environment? Listening needs concentration and because teachers don’t know how to teach it, they end up producing poor and inaccurate listeners.
Is it, therefore, surprising, if you found learners who could access the TV and radio lessons failing to tune in and listen to them during the lockdown?
The problem lies partly in poor teaching methods and embedding many skills in the English language which suffocates other skills.
The other challenge is that many of the teachers of the English language are not well trained to teach English as a language using the basic structural processes like phonology and grapheme representations. The poor training inhibits the teacher to develop the decoding abilities of the learners through active listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Furthermore, the time allocated to the lesson is not enough. You can’t sustainably and realistically teach well all the language skills in a class in a 40 minutes lesson to more than 50 students. You may complain of the poor reading culture of many Ugandans and perhaps Africa but have you ever bothered to know how they were taught to read and why to read and what to read and what makes reading fun, enriching, educative, and magical?
Have you ever bothered to know why some confident speakers are flat in their speech and boring or use a lot of fillers? It’s because they have limited phonological consciousness in intonation and elocution which is rooted in accurate decoding of the phonemes with long or short sounds and failure to differentiate the sight words and content words while stressing them.
Here are some solutions to growing all the four skills that ought to be taught in English and any other languages
Create enough time for teaching listening and speaking through debates, quizzes, poems, storytelling, songs, etc.
Teach creative writing as an independent skill and reading as more independent as possible. Reading is not only about the graphical interpretation and processing but goes deeper into comprehension, connecting and analyzing the meaning in the graphemes its significant to develop many learning situations aligned to stimulating comprehension. These situations must appeal to all the human senses.
Focus on one or at most two skills in every English language lesson. I am aware that other skills will resurface but ensure that your priority skills are dominant all through.
