Teaching the four skills

 

The Importance of the 4 Skills to learn a language

To learn a language correctly, we have to develop the ability to speak, listen, write and read in that language, that is, we have to master the four language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. No matter which language we study, all these skills will be always present, otherwise, we will not learn to produce a correct language.

Sometimes, depending on the context in which we are learning the language, we develop one or two of the skills, and we forget about the others ones. For example, if we study a language in a self-taught way, it is very likely that we will develop written expression and reading comprehension much better than the other two skills. If we are going to live in a country and have never studied the language before, when we are interacting with natives, we will most certainly develop Listening and Speaking much more than the other two skills. Therefore, to avoid learning just the half of the whole, we have to try to be connected with all the skills as much as we can. If some of them is not present, we should find the way in which we can put it into practice, and remember that if we want it, we can achieve it, so we have to calm ourselves and enjoy the process of learning a second or new language. By the way, when we learnt our native language, we did it following a process carried out by our parents, since they were the ones into teaching us the most basic components as sounds and pronunciation of the language, and then in the school, where teacher taught to read and write correctly.

Concluding it, the process of learning another language takes time to synthesize all the information in our brains to use all the things learnt in a real context. Thus, we have to be patient on learning each skill carefully, and practice with different activities to develop each one. Even, we can try to practice with people to make the language more related with us, instead of repeating grammar, vocabulary or dialogs already learnt.