The Effectiveness of a Program Integrating Reading and Writing on Developing Some Study Skills of English Language Student Teachers

Abstract

Languag e learning inevitably entails developing four skills: listening, speaking , reading and writing. For years, the tradit ional approaches to teaching English as a second/foreign languag e have often promoted skills separation rather than skills integration as a means to languag e learning. This approach of skills compartmentalization hinders students' progress towards the achievement of their ultimate languag e learning goal: full communication. It also contributes to classroom teaching of skills in isolation when college students graduate to the status of teachers. Recent pedag ogical approaches, however, emphasize the importance of teaching languag e skills collectively. Through the interaction of languag e skills, learners tend to develop communicative competence increasingly. Since there is inevitable overlap in learning and practicing languag e skills, they should be viewed as an organic integrated whole where the move from one skill to another is enhanced by the needs of the students rather than the demands of the teacher. For the past two decades, second languag e researchers and educators considered both reading and writing as rather separate. This historical split obviously evolved from the, outdated notions that viewed reading as a receptive decoding skill while writing as a productive encoding one. Now reading , like writing, is recognized as an active and constructive process. Dougherty (1986) points out that as writers construct "written texts", readers construct "interpretation ofthe texts writers have produced" (p.82).