Skills of Language Learning (LSRW)

• Q1: We learn language by ear as small children. But is it more difficult as an adult? If
so, how do you mitigate that?
• Q2: What are the particular challenges of learning a language that isn’t written down?
• Q3: write a short paragraph discussing your own way (as a language learner) to
develop y our receptive and productive skills.

Introduction:
The skills of language are a set of capabilities that allow an individual to comprehend and
produce spoken language for proper and effective interpersonal communication; these skills
are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
In the context of first language acquisition, these skills are acquired in this order; they are
often called LSRW skills. They can be divided into two categories:
1- Receptive/Passive (listening, reading)
2- Productive/Active (speaking, writing)
According to SIL International1 the four basic skills are related to each other by two
parameters:
1- The mode communication: oral or written
2- The direction of communication: receiving or producing the message

Oral Written
Receptive Listening Reading
Productive Speaking Writing

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SIL International : Summer Institute of Linguistics

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I- Receptive Skills: are listening and reading, often called passive skills because
learners do not need to produce language, they just receive it in form of sound or
text and decipher it.
1- Listening: is the first language skill we acquire in our native language, it is
the receptive skill in the oral mode. Listening means understanding what we
hear; we usually find two situations in listening: interactive listening and non-
interactive listening.
The interactive listening is when we have chance to ask question for
clarification from our partner, it can be face-to-face conversation and
conversation by phone or call.
The non-interactive listening place us as passive listener, for example listening
to the radio, TV, film, or anything else that we have no chance to ask for
clarification.
2- Reading: is the third language skill we acquire in our native language, is
receptive skill in the written mode. Here we get information from written form.
In the reading skills, learner sees the item in the written form and understands
it.
Unlike listening, reading is one of the two artificial language skills, as not all
natural spoken languages have a written system
II- Productive Skills: are speaking and writing, often called active skills, they are
called productive because learners produce language in form spoken language or
speech or written form.
1- Speaking: is the second language skill we acquire in our native language, it
is a productive skill in the oral mode, here we produce sound from mouth
(vocal tract) and that sound must be understandable. In speaking skill there are
three speaking situation:
Interactive speaking includes face to face and telephone call conversation.
Partially interactive situations such as giving a speech in front of audience.
Non-interactive speaking such as when recording a speech.
2- Writing: is the fourth language skill we may acquire in our native language,
is a productive skill in written mode. Writing skill is a complicated skill, even
for native speakers of language. Writing skill does not only present speech or

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 idea, but develop and present that speech or idea in the written form of the item
and in a structured way.

Discussion:

Q: If you want to learn a foreign language, do you need to master all the four skills?

The answer: Both answers are correct YES and NO

YES:

You should learn all the four skills if you want to have full access to the language as native
speakers do.

Listening will help you to comprehend natives when they talk, listen to the radio, and watch
movies and online videos with no need to subtitling.

Speaking will help you to engage natives in conversation and address audiences

Reading will help you to read newspapers, books, and magazines; it will help you also to
interpret country signs, alerts and notice and read novels, books, articles in the targeted
language

Writing will help you to compose personal emails, letters and text message; as well as to write
articles, essays, books or any form of texts.

NO:

There are two possibilities in which you may not need to develop all the four skills:

1- Your target language does not allow all the four skills: due to historical circumstances,
certain languages lack the basic conditions that allow learners to effectively develop
all the language skills:
a- Learning a language without a writing system: in this case you will be unable to
learn to read or write that language eg: The Shoshone language , Nahuatl
Note: according to ethnologue, out of 7099 languages alive today, only 3866 have
an equivalent writing system

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 b- Learning an extinct or dead language like Latin or Ancient Greek, you cannot
learn to speak or listen to them as they were originally spoken as there are no
native speakers alive today.
2- Your goals do not require all the four skills: depending on what you wish to
accomplish with your target language, you may need to learn just one or two of the
skills rather than all of them. For example:
a- Those who want to understand spoken language can learn through listening to
native speakers( directly or via radios and audios)
b- Those who want to speak languages with complex writing systems can avoid the
need to read and write by relying only on Romanization.
c- Those who want to read literature of a specific language can practice through
books and vocabulary lists.
d- Those who want to write in foreign language can just practice making and
imitating the symbols.

Assignment:

Q1: We learn language by ear as small children. But is it more difficult as an adult? If so,
how do you mitigate that?

Q2: What are the particular challenges of learning a language that isn’t written down?

Q3: write a short paragraph discussing your own way (as a language learner) to develop y
our receptive and productive skills.

1-