Article+reflection+by+birgül+doğan

I am going to write my article reflection on the article named “Current Perspectives on Teaching the Four Skills” which is written by Eli Hinkel. In her article, she states the developments and pedagogical factors in acquiring L2. Hinkel indicates four themes in current L2 pedagogy which are the decline of methods, a growing emphasis on both bottom-up and top-down skills, new knowledge about English and integrated and multiple skills taught in context successively. Hinkel also says that investigating into the social, cultural, economic and political context of L2 learning have provided much insight into populations of learners and their specific learning goals. I am also in the same opinion because I believe that the more you investigate the context of every individual the more knowledgeable you will be about the learners’ goal about learning an L2. In her article, Hinkel explains those four reasons in detail. She remarks that currently in the teaching of four skills, curricula and instruction strive to achieve a balance between the linguistic and the schematic aspects of learner language development. When it comes to the integrated and multiple skills part, the writer points out that integrated skills usually follows the principle of the communicative approach, with various pedagogical emphases, goals, instructional materials, activities and procedures playing a central role in promoting communicative language use. After the writer gives some examples to integrated skills, she continues her article with the issue of teaching speaking skills. Moreover, she states that speaking a language is the most complex part of learning a language and I absolutely agree with her. You can learn a language by means of grammar and reading comprehension, but it is really difficult to speak it in a nonnative context. She then says that speaking should be taught with the help of communicative and task-based approaches. Additionally, she indicates that there are some criteria in speaking such as fluency, accuracy and linguistic complexity. One will be perfect if all these three sub-skills are acquired. After that, Hinkel examines the relation between speaking and pragmatic skills. She states that as an additional outcome of increased global mobility and the internalization of English, instruction in L2 speaking skills has been placing a greater emphasis on the sociocultural features of communication and oral production. Also, she asserts that there has been a change in the aim of speaking L2 in terms of pronunciation. She says that the goal of pronunciation has shifted from targeting a nativelike accent to targeting intelligibility, that is, the degree to which the listener understands the speaker’s utterance. Actually, I believe that pronunciation has a major role in speaking a language; on the other hand if the person who listens to you understands you, there is no problem. But, of course everybody should try to be better in terms of pronunciation. After the teaching speaking part, she goes on to write about teaching listening. I definitely agree with her ideas about teaching listening. While learning a second foreign language we encounter some problems in listening and comprehension. So, there should be some strategies to cope with those problems. I believe that both sociocultural and communication should have equal importance in teaching listening. Then, the writer states her ideas about teaching reading and writing. I definitely believe that making the students write is a beneficial way to teach the rules. Students write their own sentences and they get more professional in using that language. To sum up, that article helped me to learn new perspectives and strategies in teaching English as an L2. We should use different patterns of teaching in every sub branch of it and we should be careful about the age of our student because young learners need more care and attention. Lastly, we should examine the research papers and novel techniques to keep up with the developing teaching field.
 * ARTICLE REFLECTION by BIRGUL DOGAN **