Integrated Skills Approach in ELT Classrooms: Principles, Implication and Practice

Vietnam’s national curriculum has positioned English as a prerequisite subject in education for every student nationwide from primary level onward (MOET, 2008), and the integrated-skills approach which incorporates two or more language skills (Honeyfield, 1988) within a single activity has been required to implement in order to develop learners’ accuracy, fluency and communicative competence. However, due to the predominance of the traditional grammar-translation and segregated approaches in which the four language skills have been taught in isolation for instructional purposes and the formulaic practice of one single skill have turned students into those with poor communicative competence. As contrasted with this approach, skills taught in integration enable language learners to ‘arrive at ease in communication’ (Hersan, 1998: 22) for learners are exposed to real content, authentic language (Oxford, 2001) and real interactions (Lightbown & Spada, 1993; Long & Porter, 1985). In the integrative approach, the ultimate goal of language classroom is communication, and the learners are treated as the centre of classroom activities via cooperative work, brainstorming, hands-on experience and problem-solving tasks. In this workshop, participants will be involved in some activities to experience how the integrated approach in language teaching is implemented and adapted for suitability in terms of interest, level of difficulty and appropriateness to the learners.