SHARE CONVENTION: "Development of Communicative Skills"

Development of Communicative Skills

By Alejandra Ottolina

This workshop was to talk about what really matters in the development of communicative skills. It is a difficult task at the time of asking students for their own production. Productive skills are essential because they help students to integrate everything they have learnt. The results motivate students and there is room for developing creativity. It also requires life skills such as thinking, relating with others, caring or working.  Most teachers find it difficult to develop these skills because of the unsuitable materials, lack of time or some traumatic experience with language that they may have had.

  According to the speaker, our main aim should be get students to use language to its full effect in the context of the XXI century. In practice, this means promoting active listening and reading, turn-taking among students is also important. We should give students the possibility of learning about their own abilities and difficulties. Finally developing learners’ creativity is another key feature of communicative learning.

  Finally, he gave us some examples of reading comprehension exercises taken from Macmillan books. The book limited the teacher to just playing the cd to listen to the story. However, it is our tasks to propose creative and meaningful tasks out of those texts.

  I really liked this seminar because we could express our opinions and I totally agree with the idea that effective teaching only takes place when the teacher helps students see relevance to their learning, when they are able to draw conclusions about how their learning relates to the world around them. The main purpose of teaching English is to give learners the chance of using it as a tool in their own reality.