Skills and sub-skills

In order to use language skills competent users of a language need a number of sub-skills for processing the language that they use and are faced with.

If we look at the receptive skills (reading and listening) we can see that there are many sub-skills that we can call upon. The way we listen for general understanding will be different from the way we listen in order to extract specific bits of information. The same is true for reading, of course. Sometimes we read in order to interpret, sometimes we read in order to transfer the information to another medium.

People who use language skills and the sub-skills that go with them are able to select those sub-skills that are most appropriate for their task. If they only want a certain piece of information from a radio programme they will select a way of listening which is different from the way they listen to a radio play. If they read a text for the purposes of literary criticism they will select different sub-skills from those they would select if they were ‘reading’ a dictionary to look for a word. It is because they have these sub-skills that they are able to process the language that they use and receive. We can summarise the difference between skills (sometimes called macro skills) and sub-skills (sometimes called micro skills) in the following way:

Reading/Listening

Reading/ listening reading/ listening

for general for interpretation

understanding

reading/ listening reading/ listening

for detailed for extracting specific

understanding information

reading/ listening

for information transfer

Conclusions

We have looked at what native speakers of the language actually know about the language. We have said that competent users of a language know how to recognise and produce a range of sounds, know where to place the stress in words and phrases and know what different intonation tunes mean and how to use them.

Competent language users also know the grammar of the language in the sense that this (largely) subconscious knowledge of the rules allows them to produce an infinite number of sentences. And of course they have lexical knowledge too. They know words in the language and how they operate and change.

Knowing a language is not just a matter of having grammatical competence. We have seen that we also need to add communicative competence – that is the understanding of what language is appropriate in certain situations. We also discussed the ability to structure discourse – our knowledge of organisational sequence, which enables us to order what we say and write. We considered one other competence that native speakers have – strategic competence. This is our ability to access and process our language/communicative competence; knowing how to use language rather than just knowing about language. We have discussed global communicative competence and the characteristics its components possess.

We discussed the four major language skills and looked at different genres within each skill – e.g., different kinds of writing or listening. And finally, we said that in order to use a language skill the native speaker needs a set of sub-skills (such as the skill of listening for specific information or the skill of reading for general gist).

Discussion

1. Can you think of any situations in L2 where it would be inappropriate to say certain things? Do you address different people in different ways in L2? How? Why?

2. Take any vocabulary item and see how much you can change it by adding to it and taking something away. How does this process change the meaning of the word?

3. Make a list of as many English words/ word combinations that have changed their meaning as you can. Explain what happened to them and what caused words cross their grammatical borders.

4. Take any sentence in English and see if you can change its meaning by changing stress and intonation. Explain what is implied by different tunes you use.

5. Take any simple English sentence and see how many more sentences you can make which have a different meaning but the same grammar. Explain what governs you ability to produce and to understand sentences in L2.

6. Select one of the four skills and see how many more strategic sub-skills you can think of. List the suggested sub-skills and explain what kind of students can be taught each of them and why.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23