Four Language Skills

Abstract

To have full mastery of a language, individuals need to be competent in reading, speaking, listening, and writing. These four skills, as they are referred to, are interrelated because using a language generally requires using more than one skill at a time. However, learners can be more competent in one skill than another. Language teachers must teach students in a way that encourages mastery of all four skills. The research on the skills draws from linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, and cognitive science.

Keywords Bottom-up Processing; Communicative Competence; Four skills; Listening Comprehension; Multimodal; Reading Strategies; Schema Theory; Speech Act; Top-down Processing

Overview

In the field of English as a second language, language is frequently discussed in terms of its four component skills:

• Reading

• Speaking

• Listening

• Writing

To have complete mastery of the language, individuals must be competent in these four skills. Yet the four skills do not exist as separate entities within the language; to the contrary, all of the skills are interrelated. When students are in a conversation, they are not just speaking, but also listening. When students listen to a lecture in class, they may also take notes. At the same time, it is possible for students to be more competent in one skill than another. Students from some language backgrounds may have no trouble reading and writing in English but find the sounds of the language more difficult to produce. On the other hand, students from orally based cultures may find it easier to speak than to write. Some students can speak a lot but cannot understand much of what they hear. The task for the language teacher is to provide instruction that facilitates the development of all four skills.

While the four skills are inseparable in terms of their use, research on the teaching of the four skills typically focuses on one component skill with the aim of better understanding the processes involved in the acquisition of that specific skill. The research draws upon developments in the fields of psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. In the sections that follow, the research and theories related to each of the four skills are presented.

Listening

Of the four skills, listening would appear to be the most basic to language learning for in most instances, learners use this skill first. Typically, learners hear spoken language before they speak it; many learners exhibit a silent period in their language development when they can comprehend more language than they can produce (Brown, 2001). The importance of listening as a source of input is widely recognized, yet listening as a discrete skill with its own set of strategies has not always been emphasized in the classroom. In the 1950s and 1960s, students spent many hours in language labs and the classroom completing listening/speaking drills, but the purpose was for students to repeat sounds accurately, not necessarily to improve listening comprehension. In the 1980s, listening became more important with the advent of Krashen's (1995) concept of comprehensible input, which said that learners need to be exposed to massive amounts of comprehensible language in order to acquire it. Today, with a greater emphasis on the importance of all four skills, listening receives attention in its own right, and the focus in the classroom is on learning how to listen through the application of listening skills and strategies.

Four primary goals for listening instruction are:

• To improve learner's comprehension of spoken language;

• To increase the quality of learners' uptake (i.e., the words actually retained) from spoken input;

• To develop learners' strategies for understanding spoken discourse;

• To encourage learner participation in face-to-face communication (Rost, 2006,)

One of the reasons that listening in a second language is difficult is that spoken language often varies greatly from the grammatically correct written language presented in the classroom. People, for instance, often speak in incomplete sentences or use colloquial language and slang. They reduce language as in "You wanna go?" instead of "Do you want to go?" In speech, there may frequently be false starts such as "I went to the hospital yesterday… you know, I went to the hospital because I was feeling pain in my chest…" Along with these, listeners may have difficulty deciphering intonation, stress, and rhythm or understanding speech that has few pauses (Brown, 2001; Mendelsohn, 2006).

To foster better listening skills, teachers need to provide input that is relevant, authentic, and not too difficult. Relevancy is important because research shows that for learners to turn input into uptake, they must find the language to be personally significant. White (2006) suggests that students should be allowed to choose what they listen to and design their own listening texts and tasks. Authenticity refers to whether the language in the listening task is language the student would actually hear in a similar real-world situation. Texts should include examples of pauses, false starts, redundancy, etc. Level of difficulty refers to the overall comprehensibility given many variables such as length, rate of speech, text organization, etc. (Rost, 2006).

Teachers should also encourage students to use both top-down and bottom-up processing strategies. Top-down processing occurs when students utilize their prior knowledge to help them understand a speaker. For example, a student may infer what a speaker intended to say given the learner's understanding of the topic. Bottom-up processing occurs when listeners focus on the sounds, words, patterns, etc. of the language. Rost (2006) identifies two important phonological processes that help listeners identify words in a stream of speech: feature detection and metrical segmentation. Feature detectors are phonological processing networks in the brain that respond to specific sounds. Although children are born with the ability to hear all sound combinations, adults only hear the sounds for their native language(s). This means that adult listeners will experience perceptual difficulties when decoding streams of L2 speech. Metrical segmentation refers to a listener's use of stress, intonation, timing rules, etc. to turn speech into words. This kind of processing can be improved through training.

With greater access to technology, more options for listening activities are available. Students are listening to podcasts, online lectures, and video clips while completing activities involving the other four skills. Research indicates that students enjoy this kind of learning and find multimodal forms of learning, which involve the use of more than one skill, beneficial for language retention (Patten & Craig, 2007; Smidt & Hegelheimer, 2004).

Speaking

Speaking and listening are closely related skills, for one rarely occurs without the other. In the classroom, speaking has frequently received more attention, for it is the primary skill learners want when learning a language.

Communicative Competence

The speaking skill is often discussed within the context of a theory of communicative competence. Communicative competence describes a language learner's ability to communicate appropriately within a given situation. Canale and Swain (1980) outlined four components of communicative competence. These are:

• Discourse competence,

• Grammatical competence,

• Sociolinguistic competence, and

• Strategic competence.

In terms of speaking, learners demonstrate communicative competence when they choose the correct words/phrases to convey their meaning while showing an understanding of the particular sociocultural or sociolinguistic context in which they speak (e.g., choosing language to be polite or formal based on the situation). Speakers also show communicative competence when they can compensate for language deficiencies such as using other words to describe a concept for which the speaker has no word (Martinez-Flor, Usó-Juan & Soler, 2006).

An important area of research that has influenced speaking instruction is the discovery that much language use is formulaic. For example, when greeting someone in English, it is likely you say, "Hi. How are you?" and the hearer responds, "Fine, thank you." Speech act research has identified multiple situations where language is formulaic such as in greetings, thanking, requesting, apologizing, and complimenting (University of Minnesota, 2007). These formulas, in their appropriate context, can be directly taught to L2 learners to quickly increase their proficiency.

Bottom-up processes related to speaking include the ability to pronounce the sounds of the language, to recognize how words are segmented and to use rhythm, stress, and intonation correctly. While pronunciation is taught as a speaking skill and pronunciation can improve through practice, it is also recognized that adult second language learners rarely achieve native-like pronunciation due to their inability to perceive all of the phonetic features of the L2 (see above).

Teaching Speaking Skills

To teach speaking, programs that use an indirect communicative language teaching approach often engage students in life-like situations such as role-plays or problem-solving tasks. In these situations, students must negotiate for meaning with their classmates, thereby creating chances for incidental speech learning and production. Programs that use a direct approach teach the microskills of speaking (e.g., speech acts, politeness strategies, turn-taking) and then provide opportunities for the students to use the skills. (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1997). Most programs try to ensure that students speak for a variety of purposes. Some of the commonly recognized purposes for speaking include:

• Interpersonal dialogues, conducted to maintain social relationships;

• Transactional conversations, meant to convey or exchange information;

• Intensive speech, designed to focus on particular forms; and

• Extensive monologues, extended speech used for oral reports, summaries, or speeches (Brown, 2001).

Reading

Unlike speaking and listening, reading and writing are not natural processes. The symbols of any written language are entirely based on conventions. There is generally little rhyme or reason to why certain combinations of lines and dots have been chosen to represent spoken sounds. Thus, learning to read does not occur in the same way that learning to speak does. Reading must be explicitly taught (Grabe, 2006).

At one time, reading was viewed as a passive process where learners merely absorbed the input off the written page. Today, this view has changed, and it is now believed that reading is an active process. The reader purposefully engages with the text in order to create meaning. Within reading studies, there are two generally broad ways to view how readers get meaning from text. The first is a product-oriented view, in which the meaning is contained in the text and the reader's goal is to decipher the symbols and structures to understand the writer's ideas. The second is a process-oriented perspective. In this view, the reader brings to the text thoughts and experiences that shape how the reader interprets the text (Ajideh, 2003). While these two general perspectives influence the direction of reading research, most professionals do not believe that reading involves processes related to only one of these views. Rather, most people believe that reading is a complex process that involves the use of multiple processes, skills, and strategies employed in different combinations depending on the reader's purpose and the nature of the text being read.

Reading Strategies

In order to understand how readers employ skills and strategies, one body of research has focused on the good reader and what he or she does while reading. The most important finding is that good readers read differently depending on the text and their purpose in reading it. For example, when reading a newspaper, good readers may quickly skim the headlines to decide if there is anything worth reading. If reading a book for pleasure, the reader may read rapidly to get the main ideas. But if doing research for a project, the reader may slow down to focus on details and statistics or may take notes and reread portions of the text to ensure accurate understanding. Each of these ways of reading involve strategic decision-making by the reader who adjusts reading strategies to achieve a reading purpose (Ediger, 2006; Grabe, 2006).

Good readers are in command of multiple reading skills and strategies. Some of these strategies include

• Previewing text,

• Activating prior knowledge about the topic or the nature of the text,

• Creating mental images,

• Asking and answering questions related to the reading,

• Producing graphic organizers, and

• Summarizing portions of the text (Ediger, 2006; Grabe, 2006).

For ELL instructors, good reading instruction must give attention to teaching reading strategies along with how and when to use them (Carrell, Gajdusek, & Wise, 1998).

Vocabulary Acquisition

An important area of instruction relates to vocabulary acquisition and reading fluency. As might be expected, the more words one knows, the easier it is to comprehend written text. The connection between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension has been proven in multiple studies (Grabe, 2006). Studies have shown that readers should know 95 percent of the words in a text for adequate comprehension and in order to accurately guess the meaning of unknown words. The rate is even higher, 97 to 98 percent, for pleasure reading because anything below this makes the reader struggle and the reading becomes unpleasurable. Translated into numbers of words or more accurately word families (a base word plus all of its derivatives: active, activation, actively, etc.) students may need to know between 2,000 to 5,000 word families to comprehend certain kinds of unsimplified texts (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hsueh-Chao & Nation, 2000).

To gain the word knowledge needed to read fluently, teachers must focus on vocabulary acquisition. Controversy exists over whether teachers should pre-teach vocabulary or allow students to learn new vocabulary in context. Many researchers and programs promote extensive reading where students select texts of high interest out of various graded readers and simply read for enjoyment, as a way to provide incidental vocabulary acquisition (Waring & Nation, 2004). The theory behind extensive reading is based on Krashen's (1995) view that language acquisition occurs when learners are exposed to large volumes of comprehensible input. By reading many books at or below their reading level, students, theoretically, will be exposed to much comprehensible input and be able to guess and learn the meanings of any unknown words. While some studies support this view, others have shown that intentional learning is more efficient and effective (Waring & Nation, 2004; Williams, 2006).

Schema Theory

While vocabulary knowledge is important to reading comprehension, some students say that even though they know the words and structures of a text, they have difficulty interpreting the text. For this kind of reading problem, researchers point to schema theory and the importance of activating background knowledge in order to create an understanding of the text (Ajideh, 2003). Schema theory presents a hypothetical model of how information is stored in memory. In the model, schemata represent packets of information that are stored in the mind and become activated in one of two ways. Either new information from the outside world gets into the brain and becomes connected to related schema, thereby allowing an individual to assimilate new knowledge with existing knowledge, or new schemata are created to represent ideas not already present.

In terms of learning and reading, teachers can help students to integrate new knowledge by helping them connect knowledge with old. For example, asking students to share their experiences related to the reading topic before they read will activate appropriate schemata. Similarly, using graphic organizers such as concept webs can helps students recognize their semantic associations. Instructors can also encourage students to read widely in one content area to build up a foundation of knowledge of the subject (Ajideh, 2003; Kasper, 1995).

Writing

Writing shares some features with speaking in that both skills involve the learner in the production of language. Both writing and speaking are social processes which involve consideration of purpose, audience, and context before language is produced (Martínez-Flor et.al., 2006; Johns, 2006). But writing is distinct from speaking in that writers have more opportunities for revising their final product before declaring it complete.

Writing as a Process

The concept of writing as a process is the predominant theory of writing in today's ELL classrooms. In the past, emphasis on the product led teachers to teach grammatical forms and discourse structures without regard to how students got from blank page to final composition. Today, investigations into the processes of good writers have shown that writing is a recursive activity involving multiple steps. In the classroom, teachers apply this theory by encouraging students to develop their ideas through brainstorming and free writing before producing a rough draft. Peer editing and teacher feedback show students ways to revise their ideas, and students may write several drafts before choosing a final one to edit for publication (Brown, 2001).

While most classes have shifted to a process approach to writing, focus on the form of the final product has not been forgotten. Cumming (2006) states that students have three important areas to improve upon as they learn to write:

• Features of the texts they write;

• Their processes of composing;

• Their interactions appropriate to literate social contexts (p. 474).

While the second has already been discussed, Cumming (2006) elaborates on the first by saying that improving the features of the text can include such items as increasing fluency in text production, gaining experience using a range of rhetorical structures or genres, choosing specific vocabulary, developing syntactical complexity and grammatical accuracy. Improving interactions appropriate to literate contexts refers to the personal and social power students gain as they learn how to correctly negotiate and interact within various discourse communities through their writing.

In teaching writing, teachers often serve as facilitators, helping students to become aware of and control their writing processes. Teachers encourage students to understand why they are writing and for whom. In genre approaches to writing, teachers may expose students to different styles of writing (e.g., compare/contrast, persuasive, informal vs. formal). In read-to-write approaches, students may read one or more texts and summarize, respond to, or synthesize the information from the text. Some teachers ask students to write more personally about a topic, a type of writing Kroll (2006) calls student-to-world.

In conclusion, listening, speaking, reading, and writing are the four core skills that one should master in order to be fully competent in a language. Research on the four skills provides insight into the subskills and strategy uses that make a learner competent in each skill. While teachers should use the research to guide their teaching, in real life, the four skills are always interrelated, and instruction should integrate the four skills as much as possible.

Terms & Concepts

Bottom-up Processing: Bottom-up processing refers to a learner's use of the words/wordforms, grammatical structures, phonological cues, etc. to understand spoken or written texts.

Communicative Competence: Communicative Competence refers to an individual's ability to appropriately use language to convey meaning within a given context.

Comprehensible Input: Comprehensible input is a term developed by Krashen to describe the kind of language that learners must be exposed to in order to acquire a language.

Extensive Reading: Extensive Reading refers to programs that encourage students to read from a wide variety of graded readers in order to increase exposure to comprehensible input and thereby increase incidental vocabulary acquisition.

Multimodal: Multimodal is a term that describes environments that utilize or activate more than one form or mode of learning.

Silent Period: A silent period refers to a time in many language learners' development when language can be more easily comprehended than it can be produced.

Schema Theory: Schema Theory is a theory that presents a model of how information is stored in our brain. The theory suggests that information is stored together in packets. These packets are activated when new knowledge is taken in, allowing new information to be assimilated with old.

Speech Act: A speech act is a minimal unit of discourse.

Top-down Processing: Top-down processing refers to a learner's use of prior knowledge, experience in order to comprehend spoken or written texts.

Bibliography

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Suggested Reading

Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language teaching. Malaysia: Pearson Education Limited.

Jacobs, H. (2006). Active literacy across the curriculum: Strategies for reading, writing, speaking and listening. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

Pinter, A. (2006). Teaching young language learners. China: Oxford University Press.

Taghizadeh, M., Alavi, S. M., & Rezaee, A. A. (2014). Diagnosing L2 learners' language skills based on the use of a web-based assessment tool called DIALANG. International Journal of E-Learning and Distance Education, 1–28. Retrieved from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=100042722&site=ehost-live&scope=site