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The Language Four Skills

By Beth Sheppard

You are surely familiar with the four language skills:

Skill types: Receptive Productive

Oral/Aural Listening Speaking
Literate Reading Writing

Language instruction should include a balance of these four skills according to student
needs. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean equal time for each skill. Let’s look at
some details of how students use and learn each skill.

The Receptive Skills: Listening and Reading

It might seem at first that receptive skills are easier than productive skills. After all, the
learner doesn’t have to produce any language. The challenge of these skills comes from
how the learner is not in control. The speaker or writer chooses which words or forms to
use, and the learner has only a limited ability to ask for clarification.

These skills can be challenging to teach because we can’t actually see our students’
performance. Listening/reading comprehension occurs inside the learner’s mind, and
teachers have to depend on some other aspect of students’ behavior to make
inferences about what they understood.

Listeners and readers both use two types of mental processes to understand the
language they hear or read. Bottom-up processes (also called stimulus-based
processes) involve perceiving the sounds or letters of the input and translating them to
meaning. To do this, listeners or readers have to decode sounds/letters, words, and
grammar. Top-down processes (also called knowledge-based processes) involve
applying knowledge about the world and the speech context to predict or interpret the
intended message of the speaker or writer. Everyone uses both kinds of processes
whenever they perceive language, but language learners use them differently than
native speakers do. For expert listeners and readers, bottom-up processes are
automatic – effortless, fast, and accurate. Top-down processes can then be used to
amplify the message by interpreting references and making inferences to fill in any
blanks left by the speaker. For language learners, bottom-up processes are not
automatic. They often result in incomplete and/or inaccurate information about the
message, so top-down processes are used to compensate for missing information.

Students need plenty of motivating practice to help them make their reading/listening
more automatic. Provide texts that expose students to a variety of genres, registers, and
styles of English, and for listening be sure that they hear many different speakers. When
designing activities, think about how you want students to interact with the text, keeping
these activity types in mind (adapted from Rost, 2011):

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● Intensive reading/listening: Use a short text and let students interact with it
several times. Help them notice details about both language and
listening/reading processes. Activities for intensive listening can include
dictations and other transcription exercises, prediction activities, elicited imitation,
minimal pairs, and error spotting. Activities for intensive reading can include
examination of the words, grammar, and cohesive devices in the text, and
teaching strategies for reading.
● Selective reading/listening: The focus is on meaning as students seek particular
information in a medium-length text. Activities for listening and reading can
include note-taking, comprehension questions, and information transfer.
● Extensive reading/listening: Have students spend a lot of time working with long,
interesting, easy texts. They can practice strategies to understand main ideas
and maintain attention. Activities include reading/listening logs, watching tv and
movies, podcasts, graded readers, and other level-appropriate reading. Ideally,
students should select texts that interest them.
● Interactive reading/listening: When students participate in communicative
activities with a partner or group, the focus is usually on the productive skills
(speaking or writing), but you can draw students’ attention to the receptive skills
as they interact with peers. Activities include practice with clarification and follow-
up questions, making notes to prepare to respond, or students tracking their own
comprehension.

When reading about these four practice types, you will have noticed that
comprehending the content of the text is not the only focus. Depending on the
objectives of your course, the content may be essential, but students also need direct
instruction in the skills and strategies of listening/reading. Pay attention to how activities
can help students build skills to succeed with ANY text.

Finally, vocabulary size is an important consideration for reading and listening. Studies
show that students need to know nearly all of the words to understand - 98% for reading
and 95% for listening. Consider this when you select texts, and be sure to teach
vocabulary explicitly. Listening and reading can reinforce known vocabulary, but it’s not
the best way to learn brand new words. When you teach words, be sure that students
become familiar with both the written and aural forms of the words. When students
study vocabulary only in written form, they may not recognize “known” words when they
hear them.

The Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing

When we think of language proficiency, we often tend to focus on the productive skills.
These skills are easier to observe, and so teachers can more easily analyze student
performance in these areas. Students are also more likely to be judged by others based
on their performance in productive skills.

Students need to coordinate many different skills when they speak or write. Speakers
have to produce comprehensible sounds, rhythm, and intonation. They must select

Advanced Certification in English Language Teaching (ACE) Course 1

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Week 4 required reading by Beth Sheppard
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and use appropriate words, phrases, and grammatical structures. They should consider
the knowledge and characteristics of the person they are speaking to and use effective
strategies to convey their message. Finally, they need to do all this while maintaining
sufficient fluency and coherence to keep their listener’s attention. Writers have less
time pressure, and they can correct and revise their own work before sharing it. On the
other hand, they face higher expectations for the complexity and coherence of the
language they produce when writing.

There are significant differences between spoken and written language. Spoken
language tends to use simpler clauses and vocabulary. It has more redundancy, and it
also sometimes leaves statements incomplete, depending on shared context to make
ideas clear. These features don’t make spoken language inferior or incorrect - they are
adaptations to the demands of producing speech in real time. When you teach speaking
and writing, be sure your examples and expectations conform to the type of language
you are teaching.

Analyzing appropriate examples of speaking and writing can be very helpful for
students, but it can’t replace lots of opportunities to actually practice speaking or writing
in a variety of registers and situations (formal and informal, planned and unplanned),
about a variety of topics, with a variety of communicative goals. For writing, focus on the
final product should be balanced with focus on the writing process, in which students
consider the reader, gather and organize ideas, write a draft, review their draft(s), and
make revisions.

Teacher feedback can also help students improve their speaking and writing. This
feedback can provide motivation and encouragement, as well as making suggestions
for improvement. It can involve a score, or scores on a variety of language features, but
it can also consist purely of comments, suggestions, and corrections. When giving
feedback and instruction on pronunciation, target intelligibility rather than focusing
unrealistically on a “native-like” accent. Two useful guidelines are to avoid
overwhelming learners (and teachers!) with too much feedback, and to focus feedback
on areas that will have an important effect on writing/speaking skills in general, rather
than items that are specific to a particular task. For example, you might focus
grammatical feedback on a specific form that you know the student is on the verge of
learning, or you might choose to comment on word choices especially when the words
seem generally applicable.

It is also useful to distinguish between mistakes, and errors. With a mistake (also
sometimes called a “slip”), the learner knows the correct form, but produces something
incorrectly due to a lapse of attention. With an error, on the other hand, the learner
produces an incorrect forms consistently due to a lack of knowledge. Students can find
many of their own mistakes in the process of reviewing their written drafts or the
process of recording, transcribing, and analyzing their own speech, but teacher
feedback is needed for errors.

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Copyright 2016 University of Oregon. All rights reserved.
Week 4 required reading by Beth Sheppard
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Students need to develop both accuracy and fluency in their productive skills, within the
context of communicating meaning. Try to balance the following activity types in your
instruction (adapted from Nation, 2009).

● Meaning focused tasks: The focus is on communicating meaning, although

language-focused tips may be shared as needed, especially as learners stretch
to express their ideas using more complex forms. Most communicative tasks are
designed to focus on the exchange of meaning.
● Focus on Form: Learners need to focus on form and develop their accuracy and
intelligibility even while they practice meaning-oriented communication. This can
be achieved through targeted exercises which raise awareness of grammar or
pronunciation features before, during, or after communicative tasks. Teachers
can pause a meaning-oriented activity for brief grammar/pronunciation instruction
when certain form-focused errors are occurring commonly in speaking/writing
task.
● Fluency Building: It is helpful to assign “easy” communicative activities and push
learners to increase their speaking/writing speed in these tasks. The grammar
and vocabulary items should be very familiar to learners, to keep the focus on
fast writing or speaking.
● Task repetition: Learners can benefit from doing the same task again after
reflecting on their performance the first time. Task repetition has been shown to
result in language use that is both more accurate and more fluent.

Integrated Skills

Finally, we should mention that many if not most activities and tasks in a communicative
language classroom will integrate two or more of the language skills. A better
understanding of the four skills will serve you well when you are intensively teaching a
single skill, or when you are focused on the interrelation of skills in a classroom task or
project. Your detailed knowledge of the challenges involved in each skill can help you
understand your students’ experience as they develop their language ability.

References

● Rost, M. (2011). Teaching and Researching Listening. New York, NY: Routledge.
● Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching EFL/ESL Reading and Writing. New York, NY:
Routledge.

Advanced Certification in English Language Teaching (ACE) Course 1

Copyright 2016 University of Oregon. All rights reserved.
Week 4 required reading by Beth Sheppard