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  **The Four Strands** //**Paul Nation (2007)**// Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

 Nation (2007) mentions the four strands that are important in any language acquisition course. The four stands are: the meaning- focused input, meaning- focused output, language focused learning and fluency. Nation (2007) explains the importance of devoting equal time for each of the four strands in a lesson. It is very important to have balance and integration between the four strands to ensure that the language skills are actually acquired.

 Nation examines each of the four strands separately, and in doing so he referred to previous studies that were conducted in the field. Then, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of providing a balance between the four strands for effective acquisition of the taught language. Nation presents his belief that the teachers have to spend equal time for any of the four strands to ensure that learners have acquired the different skills.  Nation involves Swains (1995) [|output hypothesis] which suggests three various functions of the output. The first is the noticing function, when the learner pays attention that there is a gap between what he wants to say and what he could say. His noticing causes the second function where he tests what he already knows and others' output as well to achieve appropriate output and fill the gaps he has in his knowledge. The third function of output is concerned with dealing with the language as an item. Here the teacher should provide an activity for the learners to interact while speaking and writing about the language itself. According to Swains (1995) output hypothesis we can conclude that it is important to integrate and combine the four strands in a language acquisition course which is based on the four skills of reading, listening, speaking and writing.  **The Four Strands:** **Meaning-focused input** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">, includes learning through listening and reading. To this strand to be effective, learners need to know most of the material, to be interest in learning and understanding the material. Only a small percentage of the language items will be acquired per activity. Since learning is based on the learners' background knowledge, therefore a large amount of input should be provided to this strand to work effectively. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> **Meaning-focused output,** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> includes learning through speaking and writing. Learners need to talk and write about familiar topics to convey a message. They need to build on their background knowledge of familiar items, communication strategies and previous input while getting a plenty of opportunities to talk and write to make this strand function well. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> **The strand of Language focused learning** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> includes learning language items such as <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and grammar. The basic target of this strand is to learn language items but for the long term learning it is be very beneficial for learners in dealing with messages. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">Activities in this strand should not take over the entire lesson, but teachers should plan their lessons while this activity takes a quarter of the lesson time. Language focused learning is based on systematic aspects and serves as a way to develop strategies. Therefore, learners can gain knowledge, raise their awareness to help for future learning through this strand. Moreover, for this strand to be effective, learners need to pay attention to the language features and process it deeply and thoughtfully, so the teacher has to provide opportunities where he focuses on an individual language feature. These language features should be simple and are not related to information the learners do not have. In addition they should be mixed and integrated with the other three strands in a language acquisition activity. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> **Fluency** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> in the four strand, it includes the four skills of reading, listening, speaking and writing. The purpose of this strand is to allow students to receive and deliver messages using their previous knowledge in the best way. This strand includes no new language or features of unknown content, students need to function faster than normal and to be exposed to large amounts of input and output. Practice and repetition increases fluency and grammatical accuracy improves it. This strand is very important in the early stages of language learning and acquisition of useful phrases and sentences.

<span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">**Balancing the four strands** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> Each strand should have a similar importance and taking into account what happens outside and inside the classroom. To achieve this the teacher must pay attention to tasks that he does in the classroom, observe them out for two weeks to a month to check that all the strand take an equal time of the lesson. For effective learning Nation believes that each strand should take over 25% of the lesson time. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> Ellis (2005) argues that the three strands of meaning focused input, meaning focused output and fluency that take over 75% of the lesson focus on meaning, and only 25% of the lesson is dedicated for learning the form. Therefore, he claims that although the three strands of the input, output, and fluency are important and success oriented but are less effective than a language-focused learning which is most important and enables actual learning to occur. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> These four strands provide a good opportunity to certain types of learning to take place and therefore there are many ways to balance the time between them. The choice between the four of them depends on factors related to the skills of teachers, student expectations, school expectations, and system constraints of time and updated methods for teaching and learning language, but it must maintain the equal division of time between the four strands. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> Teachers can plan their lessons to include each of the four strands if they follow the ten principles that Nation (2007) suggests. These principles serve as a guideline for the teacher in order to balance his lesson between the four strands which will result in more effective language acquisition. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">**Reflection** <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> While I was working on this article summary I thought about my teaching methodology compared to the four strands that Nation presented and the importance he attributed to time management and giving equal time to each of these strands. I was surprised to find out that I focus more on meaning focused input and output than fluency. I think it is because my heterogeneous classes, and the individual differences among my students. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> I spend a lot of time providing input when I stand and lecture or the short videos I present and even the listening activities -which take over a long time of the lesson-, are meaning focused input and turn to be meaning focused output when my students are asked to produce any kind of <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;">language <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> wether in speaking or reading. After I expose my students to a large amount of input, I go through the strand of learning focused output where I focus on students' production. While listening to students' production I emphasize the language focused learning strand when I focus on their pronunciation, spelling, grammar, proper use of vocabulary and sentence structure. Then I drive their attention to any mistakes and we try to correct them, here I find myself pushing my students to produce more accurate and authentic output. I believe that correcting students' mistakes by teachers and /or students is a great opportunity for students to learn and it also enables them to use their metalinguistic knowledge. <span style="font-family: Times New Roman,serif;"> Developing fluency gets less importance and less time of the class activities. In fact I demand a certain level of fluency of my advanced students and less demand it from the low achievers.