Relationship among Speaking and other Skills

Language educators have long used the concepts of four basic language skills:

Listening Reading Speaking Writing

The four basic skills are related to each other by two parameters:

the mode of communication: oral or written the direction of communication: receiving or producing the message

We may represent the relationships among the skills in the following chart:1 Oral Receptive Listening Productive Speaking Written Reading Writing

All senses must be involved in the process of teaching a language. There are for instance some people who are visual types and other people are more audio types. Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a language and the most important skill they can acquire. These learners define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write or comprehend oral language.2 Speaking involves three areas of knowledge:

SIL International , "SIL International ". http://www.sil.org/. 2010-05-10 <http://www.silinternational.org/lingualinks/LANGUAGELEARNING/OtherResources/GudlnsFrALnggAndClt rLrnngPrgrm/FourBasicLanguageSkills.htm>. 2 National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC), "The essentials of language teaching". http://nclrc.org. 2010-05-10 <http://nclrc.org/essentials/speaking/goalsspeak.htm>.

1. Mechanics pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary- using the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation 2. Functions transaction and interaction - knowing when clarity of message is essential and when precise understanding is not required 3. Social and cultural rules and norms - turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants, understanding how to take into account who is speaking to whom, in what circumstances, about what, and for what reason. In the communicative model of language teaching, teachers help their students develop this body of knowledge by providing authentic practice that prepares students for real-life communication situations. They help their students develop the ability to produce grammatically correct, logically connected sentences that are appropriate to specific contexts, and to do so using acceptable pronunciation.3 Inseparable part of development speaking is listening. It helps to evolve a phonetic side of language and therefore listening is very closely connected with speaking. Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their inschool information through listening to instructors and to one another.4

By listening, a learner of a foreign language obtains and works with spoken information which comes from one or more speakers, so for a listener is very important to identify the message, understand the message and be able to interpret the message. However, in order to develop

National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC), "The essentials of language teaching". http://nclrc.org. 2010-05-10 <http://nclrc.org/essentials/speaking/goalsspeak.htm>.
4

National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC). (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2007 from http://nclrc.org/essentials.

The essentials of language teaching.

communicative efficiency in pronunciation the students need to understand how sounds are made.

Reading is a process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension that means to encode meaning. A good reader should read for purpose, integrate information in the text with existing knowledge and relies on different skills. Students learn to read a language by studying its vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure, not by actually reading it.

The last skill that is connected with speaking is writing. A logical structure is very important for a good writing. Writing is the productive skill in the written mode. It, too, is more complicated than it seems at first, and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native speakers of a language, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech, but the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

Finally we can state that speaking, reading, listening and writing cannot be developed separately. The more senses we use with learning, the more permanent is our knowledge. Speaking, reading, writing and listening are very closely connected and supplement each other. And therefore everybody who wants to speak a foreign language must be able to use all four skills.