Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four integral skills of a language.  Negligence of any one of them would lead to failure in learning a language. Listening  and reading are receptive skills whereas writing and speaking are productive skills.  Mastery over these four skills by the learner injects into him confidence and enhances  psychological and linguistic aspect bringing him closer to what he aspires for.

Languages are generally taught and assessed in terms of four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The proper order involved in learning a language is Listening (L), Speaking (S), Reading (R), and Writing (W). Thus, LSRW is the process of language acquisition. Listening and reading are known as receptive skills, while speaking and writing are known as productive skills. All language learners need to develop their skills in each of these areas, and language classes should incorporate activities related to all these skills.

According to NCF 2005, speech and listening, reading, and writing are all generalized skills, and children’s mastery over them becomes the key factor affecting success at school.

Listening Skill

Listening comprehension is the receptive skill in the oral mode. It is the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or non-verbal messages. Listening is an active process of getting information, ideas, etc.

Listening Situations

Listening situations can be classified into two kinds:

1. Interactive Listening: Includes face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, where there is an opportunity to ask for clarification, repetition, or slowing down.
2. Non-Interactive Listening: Includes listening to radio, TV, films, lectures, or sermons, where there is no opportunity to ask for clarification, slowing down, or repetition.

Speaking Skills

Speaking is a productive or expressive skill in the oral mode and a crucial part of learning. It involves conversing or expressing one’s thoughts and feelings in spoken language.

Speaking Situations

There are three kinds of speaking situations:

1. Interactive: Includes face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, where there is an opportunity to ask for clarification, repetition, or slowing down.
2. Partially Interactive: Includes situations such as giving a speech to a live audience, where the audience does not interrupt but the speaker can see their reactions.
3. Non-Interactive: Includes situations such as recording a speech for radio broadcast, where there is no interaction with the audience.

Reading Skills

Reading is a receptive skill in written form. It is a decoding process that enables learners to extract thoughts, facts, and information from printed symbols.

Reading is considered a fundamental area of language education. According to NCF 2005, our school syllabi are burdened with information-absorbing and memorizing tasks, and opportunities for pleasure reading are missed out.

Types of Reading

Reading can be classified into the following types:

1. Silent Reading: Reading in actual life is mostly silent reading, enabling learners to comprehend meaning.
2. Loud Reading: Involves creating sounds of a language that are significant for meaning, enhancing pronunciation and confidence.
3. Intensive Reading: Reading in depth or in detail, studying text minutely.
4. Extensive Reading: Non-detailed study of text such as reading newspapers, articles, etc., reinforcing command over language.

Methods of Understanding by Reading

There are three methods of understanding by reading:

• See and Tell Method or Look and Say Method: Children learn to recognize whole words or sentences rather than individual sounds, associating words easily with pictures or short sentences.
• The Language Experience Method: Supports children’s vocabulary growth through meaningful reading and writing activities based on personal experiences and oral language.
• The Context Support Method: Involves choosing books that interest learners, supporting learning through visual aids and simple language.

Writing Skills

Writing skills are a crucial part of communication. They enable us to express our thoughts and ideas clearly on paper, organize knowledge, and construct convincing arguments. In its advanced form, written expression can be as vivid as a work of art. As children progress in their writing abilities, they move from forming simple sentences to crafting elaborate stories and essays.

Writing is the productive skill in the written mode. It is more complex than it initially seems, even for native speakers, involving not just the graphic representation of speech, but also the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured manner. Writing skills are an important aspect of language teaching as they reinforce oral and reading comprehension.

According to NCF 2005, writing ability should be considered akin to artistic expression and not merely as a skill for office work. During the primary years, writing abilities should be developed holistically in conjunction with listening, speaking, and reading. At the secondary level, routine tasks like letter writing or essay writing should be less emphasized to allow imagination and originality to play a more prominent role in education.

Types of Writing Skills

There are four types of writing skills:

1. Expository: Focuses on explaining a topic without voicing personal opinions. It often includes facts and figures.
2. Descriptive: Focuses on describing a character, event, or place in detail.
3. Persuasive: Aims to convince the reader, presenting opinions, biases, justifications, and reasoning.
4. Narrative: Tells a story, encompassing genres like novels, short stories, novellas, poetry, and biographies.

Approaches or Methods to Teach Writing

1. Controlled to Free: Learners start with sentence exercises, then progress to manipulating paragraphs, changing questions to statements, or altering tense.
2. Free Writing: Learners write freely on any given topic without worrying about spelling or grammatical structures, allowing flexibility in expressing ideas, thoughts, or feelings.
3. Paragraph Pattern: Learners have the freedom to write paragraphs, choosing their own sentences.
4. Grammatically Correct Writing: Learners focus on writing grammatically correct sentences or paragraphs.
5. Process Approach: Involves writing and rewriting in stages, starting with idea generation, drafting, organizing, revising, and redrafting.

Micro-Skills

Listening comprehension is the receptive skills in the oral mode. When we speak of listening what we really mean is listening and understanding what we hear.

Listening Situations
There are two kinds of listening situations in which we find ourselves

• interactive, and
• non – interactive

Interactive listening situations include face – to face conversations and telephone calls, in which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner. Some non – interactive listening situations are listening to the radio, TV, films, lectures, or sermons. In such situations we usually don’t have the opportunity to ask for clarification, slower or repetition.

Micro – skills
Richards (1983, cited in Omaggio, 1986) proposes that the following are the micro – skills involved in understanding what someone says to us. the listener has to

• retain chunks of language in short – term memory
• discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language
• recognize stress and rhythm patterns, tone patterns, intonational contours.
• recognize reduced forms of words
• distinguish word boundaries
• recognize typical word – order patterns
• recognize vocabulary
• detect key words, such as those identifying topics and ideas
• guess meaning from context
• recognize grammatical word classes
• recognize basic syntactic patterns
• recognize cohesive devices
• detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb object, prepositions, and the like

Speaking

Speaking is the productive skills in the oral mode. It, like the other skills, is more complicated than it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words.

Speaking Situations
There are three kinds of speaking situations in which we find ourselves

• Interactive,
• partially interactive, and
• non – interactive.

Interactive speaking situation include face – to face conversation and telephone calls, in which are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner. Some speaking situations are partially interactive, such as when giving a speech to a live audience, where the convention is that the audience does not interrupt the speech. The speaker nevertheless can see the audience and judge from the expressions on their faces and body language whether or not he or she is being understood.
Some few speaking situation may be totally non – interactive, such as when recording a speech for a radio broadcast.

Micro – Skills
Here are some of the micro – skills involved in speaking. The speaker has to

• Pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them. This includes making tonal distinctions.
• 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. This may mean, for example, changes in the tense case, or gender.
• Put words together in correct word order.
• Use vocabulary appropriately.
• Use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversations partner.
• Make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.
• Make the main ideas stand out from supporting ideas or information.
• Make the discourse hang together so that people can follow what you are saying.

Reading

Reading is the receptive skill in the written mode. It can develop independently of listening and speaking skills, but often develops along with them, especially in societies with a highly – developed literary tradition. Reading can help build vocabulary that helps listening comprehension at the stages, particularly.

Micro – skills
Here are some of the micro – skills involved in reading. The reader has to

• Decipher the script. In an alphabetic system or a syllabary, this means establishing a relationship between sounds and symbols. In a pictograph system, it means associating the meaning of the words with written symbols.
• Recognize vocabulary.
• Pick out key words, such as those identifying topics and main ideas.
• Figure out the meaning of the words, including unfamiliar vocabulary, from the (written) context.
• Recognize grammatical word classes: noun, adjective, etc.
• Detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb object, preposition, etc.
• Recognize basic syntactic patterns.
• Reconstruct and infer situation, goals and participants.
• Use both knowledge of the word and lexical and grammatical cohesive devices to make the foregoing inferences, predict outcomes, and infer links and connections among the parts of the text.
• Get the main point or the most important information.
• Distinguish the main idea from supporting details.
• adjust reading strategies to different reading purposes, such as skimming for main ideas or studying in – depth.

Writing

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

Micro – Skills
Here is some of the micro – skills involved in writing. The writer needs to

• Use the orthography correctly, including the script, the spelling and punctuation conventions.
• Use the correct forms of words. This may mean using forms that express the right tense, or case or gender.
• Put words together in correct words order.
• Use vocabulary correctly.
• Use the style appropriate to the genre and audience.
• Make the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb and object, clear to the reader.
• Make the main distinct from supporting ideas or information.
• Make the text coherent, so that other people can follow the development of the ideas.
• Judge how much background knowledge the audience has not the subject and make clear what it is assumed they don’t know.