We have already discussed about Language across the curriculum approach and from there we know about the importance of language in learning and teaching. In this article, we will learn about four language skills, their concept, and their importance.
Concept of language skills
There are four skills of language
- listening,
- speaking,
- reading and
- writing.
Listening Skills
One of four language skills
Involves sender, message and a receiver.
It is a psychological process and it involves
- Receiving message
- Constructing meaning from it
- Responding to (spoken/non-verbal) messages.
Process of listening:-
(a) Hearing:-
- It is sound waves simulating the sensory receptors of ears.
- It is a physical response.
- Hearing is the perception of sound waves, you must hear to listen but you need not listen to hear.
- Brain screams stimuli and permits only a select few to come into focus and these selective perceptions are known as attention.
- Attention is an important requirement for effective listening.
(b) Understanding:
- Understanding is taking out the meaning from previous associations and successful interpretation of the message being received.
- For successful interpersonal communication, the listener must understand the intended meaning and context assumed by the sender.
(C) Remembering:
- Remembering or memorizing is an import part of the process of listening.
- It means the individual who is receiving the message has received the message, interpreted
- It and added it to the mind’s storage bank.
- While listening our attention might be selective so what we rambler might be quite different from what was originally Sean or heard.
(d) Evaluating:-
- Only active listeners participate at this stage of listening.
- In this step active listeners
- Weight evidence
- Sort out facts from opinion
- Determines the presence and absence of bias in the message.
- The listener should start evaluating message only after listening to the message, not at the beginning of the message.
(e) Responding:-
- In this step individual receiving the message sends verbal or non-verbal feedback to the speaker (or sender)
- This step allows the speaker to determine if a message has been received or not.
- Through feedback, the sender may determine the degree of success in transmitting the message.
Speaking Skills
- The main goat of teaching speaking skills is to achieve efficiency in communication.
- Learners should be able to make themselves understand, using their current level of proficiency.
- They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to wrong pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary.
- Teachers can help learners develop their speaking skills by wing balanced activities that combine language input, structured and communicative output.
- Language input comes from teacher talk, listening, reading passages and language heard or read outside the class.
Reading Skills
- Reading is the most challenging skill to be introduced to children.
- It is the most difficult and exciting skill to introduce.
- Reading is not a simple skill as it involves a combination of many skills and cognitive abilities.
- There is no single, foolproof method of teaching how to read, as every method has its own limitations.
- Once a child has been introduced to reading books successfully there is no end to what a child can accomplish.
- ‘Sound reading skills’ means the child is able to associate meaning with written or printed language:
- Unless a child can make sense of what he or she reads, or relate it to something else that he already knows, we cannot call its reading sound.
- In a nutshell, we can say that Reading is a process of finding written words.
Writing Skills
- We mainly write to communicate with someone when often he is not present in front of us.
- We do a lot of writing simply to preserve something i.e., a piece of information, an idea, or a memory.
- A teacher introduces young children to how to write as, by the time they start schooling for the first time, they are already capable of talking with confidence with a variety of people on various topics.
