The Four Essential Language Skills
Speaking and listening, reading and writing - highlighting these four skills provides a useful framework from which to think about language learning. I pinched this diagram from Approaches to learning and teaching Modern Foreign Languages, a book that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who teaches languages.
As teachers, we should always be sharing ideas and aiming to improve the experience we offer our students and this book is jam-packed with great tips and thoughtful observations. For instance, the authors, Paul Ellis and Lauren Harris, suggest that a teacher could play an audio recording of a cafe or street scene in the background as students enter class. Even if the learners don’t completely understand what they’re listening to, a recording of native speakers acclimatises the class, reminding everyone exactly what it is they’re studying.
Of course, speaking and listening are closely related. The best language learners are magpies - stealing a phrase they’ve just heard and re-using it themselves. As communicated in the diagram, listening is essentially a passive skill - we aren’t producing anything when we listen. That said, when we begin to think in this way, we may distinguish between passive listening and active listening - active listening taking place when we are fully concentrating on and ready to respond to what is being said.
I have found that, in most cases, beginners struggle most with their writing. Writing is an individual activity and Arabic learners are often still getting to grips with the new alphabet. Moreover, its easy to take note of minor mistakes when they’re recorded on the page. Nevertheless, as students progress, their reading and writing skills almost invariably overtake those of speaking and listening.
Some argue that a students who solely aim to understand a classical text (ie. the Qur’an) needn’t preoccupy themselves with the active skills (speaking and writing) because they won’t need them in the long run. Now I’ve thought about this a lot and, after a period of seesawing, I’ve come to the conclusion that this argument is ultimately flawed.
Take a simple example - that of learning new vocabulary. The learning process is going to be very dry indeed if we’re not even trying to produce the word with our own tongues. A great way to reinforce our knowledge of new vocabulary is to use it ourselves, preferably in a creative way by composing sentences and, well… speaking Arabic. So, even if you’re not interested in ordering a coffee in Cairo, it definitely makes sense to integrate all four language skills.
On the flip-side, I would argue that the same applies if your sole aim is conversational skills. Simply learning basic phrases may be perfectly adequate at first, but as we progress in our language journey, culture and context becomes more and more important. One really useful way to acquire cultural knowledge is to read as much as you can…read poetry, books, newspapers, tweets, memes, everything really!
Returning to our jobs as language teachers, Ellis and Harris put it best:
“A good teacher needs to balance the four skills while also situating them in the context of the foreign language.”