Focal Skills (or The Focal Skills Approach) refers to a specific non-traditional program design and assessment regime that purposely structures intensive foreign or second language instruction to align with student-centered, communicative language teaching that is skills-focused and content-based. When the principles and processes of the Focal Skills approach are used, the rate of student language acquisition is accelerated. This finding is particularly evident in the intermediate to advanced stages of acquisition—the stages of greatest concern when instructing a language for use in academic, business or other professional settings.
Focal Skills restructures program design by sequentially focusing attention on the development of one language skill area at a time until its mastery to a chosen threshold level is reached. Assessments in Listening, Reading, and Writing are used to determine whether the threshold level has been attained.
Teaching practices in Focal Skills programs are heavily influenced by the work of Stephen Krashen. There is an emphasis on comprehensible input using authentic materials. Activities that would raise a student's affective filter are generally avoided. The Focal Skills Movie Technique is an example of the kind of teaching used in this approach.
Read more about Focal Skills: Background, Outline, Movie Technique
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