Teaching language skills is often the key focus or main element in language teaching practice.

In
the world of globalization, English has increasingly become the medium in every domain of
communication, both in local and global contexts. As a result, the demand for using English
effectively is necessary in every country. Teaching and learning English, except for the native
language, is thus crucial for communicative purposes to cope with the growing local, national
and international demands for English skills. In Vietnam, English is considered as a foreign
language, and is used for the purposes of academic advancement, career advancement, and
traveling abroad. To cope with the growing local and international demand, a number of efforts
from all parties involved have been made to the Vietnamese educational system to help boost the
learners‟ English performance.

Since English is today used predominantly by linguistically and culturally complex users of
English who are naturally active agents in the process of creation of world English, these Native
English speakers have the least authority to judge the appropriateness of the use of English
language or to decide the most effective teaching methodology. The process of learning English
is slow and progressive and it could be interpreted as a series of challenges to face. This process
consists of the development of certain skills. According to the common framework, these are
divided into productive and receptive. Receptive skills comprise reading and listening. They are
important because they allow learners to understand contents, textbooks, works or documents.
Productive skills consist of speaking and writing and they are significant because they permit
learners to perform in communicative aspects such as oral presentations, written studies and
reports among others. Therefore, these skills need to be developed and learnt properly.

In a communicative approach there are four basic skills of learning foreign language like English
i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing. When it comes to talking about using English at any
level of education whether it is primary, secondary, intermediate or at the tertiary level, it
requires teaching the four skills of the language giving equal importance to each of these skills.
Each of these is important. In communication and especially in communicative English each skill
demands equal importance. Ever growing needs for using English around the world is the
consequence of the role of English as the world’s international language has given priority to
finding more effective ways to teach these crucial language skills.

Speaking and writing skills are called productive skills. They are crucial as they give students the
opportunity to practice real life activities in the classroom. These two skills can be used as a
'barometer' to check how much the learners have learned.

 Teaching speaking is vital unless someone is learning English purely for academic reasons and
does not intend to communicate in English, which is quite rare. Good command on speaking
skills develop a real sense of progress among learners and boosts their confidence. The teaching
of speaking skills was not perceived as important until the introduction of the direct method and
audio lingual method. From this time onwards, one very common focus of the teaching of
speaking skills has often been on establishing optimal classroom conditions for learners to speak.
This view is often grounded in cognitive and social psychology, second language acquisition, or
educational psycholinguistics. Informed by these disciplines or areas of inquiry, various
theoretical concepts such as comprehensible input, communicative competence, negotiated
interaction, and communication strategies. In practice, some secondary and tertiary English
language teachers often organize the course with a list of discussion topics, and use reading
materials such as newspapers, magazines, and other sources hoping that they will somehow
generate interest and prompt students to “talk.” Though this is still a practice in many English
language classrooms today, it may not be effective in developing and enhancing oral skills, and
suggests that the teaching of speaking skills should be based on the following characteristics of a
real speech or the nature of oral discourse.

Teaching listening is similar to speaking, listening was not recognized as a skill in its own right
until the era of communication language teaching. The perspective of listening as comprehension
is grounded in an assumption that the purpose of listening is to extract meaning from messages.
If the listener has understood and identified the intended meaning, attending to the form of
messages is unnecessary unless they encounter severe problems in understanding the message.
Since this perspective advocates the need to guide students to become effective listeners, there
exist two approaches to the teaching of listening: bottom up and top down approaches, which
have been widely discussed in the area of inquiry. English language teachers who adopt a bottom
up approach tend to adopt a view that comprehension happens when the incoming linguistic
input—sounds (phonemes, syllables), words, sentences, clauses are decoded, recognized, and
understood. Therefore, a bottom up pedagogical approach focuses on improving students’
knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. For example, students are asked to complete tasks such
as close listening or multiple choice listening comprehension questions, in which the ability to
recognize keywords, clauses divisions, transitional markers in a discourse, and key prosodic
features (stress, or intonation) is developed and tested.

A top down process emphasizes the importance of (activating) one’s background knowledge as
well as schemas or scripts (pragmatic/discourse conventions, discourse clues, topic familiarity)
in order to comprehend the meaning of a message. Specifically, learners need to learn to develop
both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in order to “listen well.” In
developing metacognitive knowledge, students are encouraged to use their knowledge of people
(themselves and interlocutors), task (purpose of a listening task or text organization/structure),
and strategies (various strategies for enhancing comprehension) in order to help them
comprehend what they listen to, and at the same time reflect on the effectiveness of using this
knowledge. A diary on listening events and students’ evaluation of their performance in those
events, for example, can be used as a way to develop this knowledge and better listening skills.

Teaching or learning how to communicate is often associated with teaching or learning how to
speak. The important role of reading skills in developing one’s communicative competence has
often been underestimated. What has been overlooked is the fact that many learners of English in
some educational settings do learn the language predominantly by reading prior to speaking.
supported by several empirical works in the area of inquiry. The internationalization of the status
of the English language has led to a further development in the way reading and reading
pedagogy are conceptualized and practiced. Specifically, it has moved from a skill based
perspective to a sociocultural perspective of reading.
A skill based perspective of reading conceptualizes reading as having the ability to recognize
codes and to comprehend as well as interpret meanings of those codes. Pedagogically, English
language teachers guide their students who are at the early stage of learning English develop the
skills to recognize the forms of words or sentence structures and their meanings. Advanced
learners of English can be taught a wide range of reading strategies such as skimming, scanning,
making inferences, and guessing meanings and topics of a passage. Informed by a skill based
perspective, four major approaches to the teaching of reading skills such the grammar
translation, comprehension questions and language work, skills and strategies, and extensive
reading have been developed and practiced by many (English) language teachers in different
educational contexts. Though skills and strategies and grammar translation approaches are the
most popularly adopted ones, it is important to note that all four of these approaches are often
mixed in an actual classroom, depending on the proficiency level, cultural contexts, preferred
learning styles, and age groups.

Teaching writing is important because written communication is a basic life skill. Students may
need to take notes, fill in forms, and write letters, reports, stories etc. Many need to fill in
detailed questionnaires relating to health, education and employment. Sufficient ability of
writing skill gives one the confidence and marks his expertise on a particular language

Another reason learners need to write is for assimilation. Writing is an effective way of
reinforcing what they have already been studying, and they benefit greatly from seeing new or
unfamiliar language in written form. Writing is a good way to practice grammar structures; it
helps learners to recycle and look up new vocabulary and to learn English punctuation rules. It
encourages learners‟ autonomy when they are asked to keep journals or turn in regular writing
assignments that they carry out at home.

Although a recent review on research in teaching writing has shown that the teaching of writing
has changed from transmission to transformation; from static forms of academic literacy to
plurality; from deficit to possibility; and from “one-size-fits-all” to contexts based, often the
rhetoric does not match the actual classroom practices. Therefore, more research that explores
and unpacks this mismatch is needed.

Second, as mentioned before, one of the main implications of the internationalization of the
status of English is that English belongs to all users of English. Writing pedagogy needs to focus
on human agency, honoring the power of students in shaping and reshaping language to suit their
communicative needs and to negotiate meanings.

Each of the different methods has contributed new elements and has attempted to deal with some issues of
language learning. However, they are derived in different historical contexts, stress different social and
educational needs and have different theoretical considerations. Therefore, in teaching practice, in order
to apply these methods effectively and efficiently, practitioners should take these questions in mind: who
the learners are, what their current level of language proficiency is, what sort of communicative needs
they have, and the circumstances in which they will be using English in the future, and so on. In a word,
no single method could guarantee successful results.