Page 239 - Beyond Methods

Integrating language skills 227
order was suggested partly because that is the order in which chil- dren learn their first language. Clearly, such a suggestion ignores the apparent dissimilarities between children learning their first lan- guage and adults learning their second or third.
Yet another point to remember is that audiolingualists divided the four language skills into two categories: active and passive. Speaking and writing were considered active skills, and reading and listening were considered passive skills. Today, such a suggestion “makes us smile” (Sandra Savignon, 1990, p. 207) because we now know that there is nothing passive about reading and listening. Readers and listeners have to actively engage their minds and actively process the information in order to make meaning. Eventually, the terms active and passive were replaced by productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading). Although these new terms repre- sent a sort of improvement over the earlier ones, they, too, are prob- lematic because “it is now generally agreed that effective listening and reading require as much attention and mental activity as speak- ing and writing” (Paul Davies and Eric Pearse, 2000, p. 74). Thus, neither set of terms effectively captures the true nature of commu- nication and “lost in this encode/decode, message-sending represen- tation is the collaborative nature of meaning-making” (Savignon, 1990, p. 207).
Reflective task 10.2
There are textbooks that combine reading and writing as one unit, and lis- tening and speaking as another. Recall any L2 class you recently taught or observed. What do learners actually do in class: don’t they listen to the teacher attentively and take notes furiously, thereby combining listening and writing? If yes, how does this reality fit in with what popular textbooks profess?
Taking an empirical look at the separation of skills, and finding no substantial evidence to support any pedagogic decisions based on such a separation, Larry Selinker and Russ Tomlin (1986) call such decisions a “pedagogical artifact” (p. 230). In another study, Swaffar, Arens, and Morgan (1982) found the separation of skills to