Teaching Reading and Speaking as Integrated Skills in a Junior High School EFL Classroom

Abstract

　　This paper focuses on the teaching of reading and spoken interaction as integrated skills for junior high school students. A 11-lesson unit was designed. The points for the instruction were as follows: (a) to improve their knowledge and skills, in every lesson they had brief opportunities to share their ideas in groups after reading a short passage, and they created their own lists of useful expressions as “My Useful Phrases,” (b) to improve the students' ability to think, make decisions, and express their thoughts, eight strategies were presented to the students as “Thinking Points,” and (c) to improve their attitudes towards learning, they were put into groups of three and assigned integrated tasks in which they could share their ideas and have opportunities to learn dialectically;in addition, ICT (tablets) was utilized to record their conversations for reviewing their interaction. The results suggest that the unit led students to evaluate their integrated skills more positively, though their performance did not improve significantly, and that, based on student written reflections, the use of “Thinking Points,” “My Useful Phrases,” and small groups provided effective support for learners. The implications of these findings are discussed.