Lakhasly

Speaking, writing, listening and reading are the four language skills. Most of the example activities we looked at in the last chapter were in the context of the first
of these. Now we shall focus on the other three.
There are two conventional ways of dividing the four skills up. The first si into
medium, with listening and speaking occurring in the spoken medium, reading and writing in the written medium. The second division is into the receptive
skills of listening and reading, and the productive skills of speaking and writing. This use of the termsreceptive' and 'productive' is probably self-evident. But beware of the once-used terminology which called the productive skills 'active' and the receptive skills 'passive? As we shall see in this chapter, listening and reading are in fact highly 'active' processes. You are invited to write the words speaking, listening, reading and writing inside the box below, to indicate how they stand in relation to these divisions:
In some approaches to language teaching, the four skills are treated separately. There is a listening comprehension lesson, a speaking lesson, a reading lesson and a writing lesson. There are obvious advantages to doing this. For one thing, our needs analysis is likely to reveal different learner needs for each skill area. Also, each skill poses its own problems, which will sometimes benefit from separate treatment.
But it is important to realize that there are similarities and interconnections
between the skills. In this chapter we shall treat listening and reading together,
because both involve common processes of comprehension. Also, when we look at teaching techniques, we shall often find that listening exercises can be
used, with small changes, for the teaching of reading as well, and vice versa. In 240
Skills addition there are processes common to the productive skills, so that techniques
for the teaching of speaking can, with modifications, often be used for writing. But there is another set of interconnections to think about. In a later section we shall touch briefly on the idea that to be a good writer, ti helps to be a good reader. Understanding your reader, knowing what they are expecting next and anticipating how they will interpret what you write are essential skills for
good writing. One might even go so far as to asy that teaching good writing involves teaching someone to be agood reader. Al this adds up to the fact that although ti is sometimes useful to look at the four skills separately, we must not
forget ways in which they are similar, and how they interconnect.
This chapter looks at the processes involved in the comprehension and pro- duction of language. Understanding these processes will reveal what the foreign
language learner needs to be able to do in order to comprehend and produce the
language properly. We will also think about how teaching can help the learner master these processes.