We have already explored many aspects of languages here in our blog from language learning methods and tools, to language travel destinations, to tips in learning languages and almost everything which concerns languages. However, we better brush up on the basics and refresh our minds with the essentials of language learning.

Language learning can be defined as the acquisition or skills of knowledge of languages by studying, instruction, or experience. In order to learn or acquire a language and in order to become fluent in it, a language learner must develop the four language learning skills which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The four basic skills are related to each other by two parameters; the mode of communication (oral or written), and the direction of communication (receiving or producing the message).

Listening. Listening is the receptive skill in the oral mode; it simply means listening and understanding what we hear. There are two kinds of listening situations which we may find ourselves in: interactive listening and non-interactive listening.

• Interactive listening situations include phone calls and face-to-face conversation in which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have the opportunity to as for repetition, clarification, or slower speech from our conversation partner.
• Non-interactive listening situations however, include listening to the radio, lectures, television, films, or sermons.

Speaking. Speaking is the productive oral mode skill. Like the other skills, speaking is more complicated than it seems at first and it involves more than just pronouncing words. The three kinds of speaking situations in which we may find ourselves in are interactive situations, partially interactive, and non-interactive.

• Interactive speaking situations include face to face conversations and phone calls in which we are alternately speaking and listening.
• Partially interactive situations include giving a speech to a live audience where the convention is that the audience does not interrupt the speech. However, the speaker can see that audience and observe from the expressions on their faces and body language whether or not he or she is being understood.
• Non-interactive speaking situations include recording speech for a radio broadcast.
• Speaking involves micro skills in which the speaker has to:
  pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough in order for people to distinguish them;
  • use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said;
  • use the correct forms of words;
  • use vocabulary appropriately;
  • put words together in correct word order;
  • make the main ideas stand our from the supporting information;
  • and a whole lot more.

Reading. Reading is the receptive skill in the written mode of language learning. It can develop independently of speaking and listening skills but it often develops together with them. Reading can help build one’s vocabulary that helps listening comprehension at the later stages of learning a language. Reading also involves micro-skills in which the reader has to

• decipher the script or establish a relationship between sounds and symbols;
• recognize vocabulary;
• figure out the meaning of the words;
• pick out key words which identify main ideas and topics;
• recognize grammatical word classes;
• recognize basic syntactic patterns;
• detect sentence constituents;
• and many more.

Writing. Writing is the productive language skill in the written mode. In a way writing is more complicated than it seems at first and it often seems to be the most difficult of the skills even for native speakers of a language because it involves not just a graphic representation of speech but the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

The writer needs to develop these micro skills in order to be effective:

• use the orthography correctly including the spelling, script, and punctuation conventions
• use the correct forms of words
• put words together in the correct word order
• use vocabulary correctly
• make text coherent so that other people can follow the development of the ideasmake the main sentence constituents clear to the reader
  and a lot more.

Discovering, developing, and mastering these four basic skills in the language you are learning will be very important in order to achieve fluency. As you progress in learning foreign languages, you will little by little gain more knowledge of these skills and hopefully they will equip you with what you need in order to effectively communicate in a new language.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Learn Languages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.