Skills

The other day in class we talked about the well-known listening, writing, reading and speaking skills. In this post, first of all, I would like to explain how we can classify them into two different groups and afterwards, I will express my opinion about which ability children  learn first.

To begin with, a classification we can make it is according to the direction and in this category we can find receptive skills and productive skills.
– Receptive skills: in this group we have the listening and reading, because learners do not need to produce language, they receive and understand it (input). These skills are known as passive skills.
–Productive skills:  speaking and writing, because learners doing these need to produce language (output). They are also known as active skills.

Secondly, the other category involves oral and written skills, depending on the way we communicate.
–Oral skills: here we can find listening and speaking  as oral communication is the ability to talk with others, giving and exchanging information and ideas, so we need to listen properly if we want to be able to reply.
– Written skills: these are reading and writing, which involve the ability to understand a written text and also the writing, which seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native speakers of a language, since it involves the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

As far as I’m concerned, I believe all of them are related, as we require them to communicate in different ways. Therefore, we need to think and create different motivating activities to encourage children to use it (in English) and ensure that they can practice them in context. However,  children do not acquire all at once. The first one they come to know is the listening because since they are little, as happens with the first language, they listen to their parents  and this is how they learn it. With English it is the same, due to the fact that at the beginning, it seems that children do not know how to speak English, but they listen to us and understand and one day they dare to start producing oral messages. For that reason, speaking is the second skill they assimilate.

Then, they learn to read and write almost at the same time, although it must be recognized that they find it much more difficult to write, as I explained before.  From my point of view, I hold there is a skill  related to writing and this is the speaking ability. For that reason, in English classes, if we want children to write a sentence is much better if they comment in groups or all together before, as it would be easier for them to order their thoughts and to note them down. Furthermore, I am also convinced that there is a connection between reading and writing, in view of students learn both simultaneously, despite the fact that  written activities are recommended to be the last step.

Finally, I would like to mention a concept that I have discovered and it has caught my attention positively,  the silent way. This is a period where children do not speak in one language but they are able to understand our oral messages, when we address to them, and they can answer us nodding or by miming. Suddenly, without warning, one day they feel prepared and start producing verbal words and sentences in that language. The reason why I like it is because I agree we cannot push them to speak, if they are not at the point of doing it yet. It happens the same when children start walking, we can give them a hand to help them, but if they are not ready, we cannot force them  because they can fall. So we have to respect that each child has their own learning pace.