SECTION 1

Macroskills: An Overview

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 Developing Listening and Speaking Skills
in a Competence Based Curriculum

When we learn a language, there are four skills that we need for complete
communication. When we learn our native language, we usually learn to listen first, then
to speak, then to read, and finally to write. These are called the four "language skills" also
known as "macro skills'. Macro skills are most commonly referred to listening, speaking,
reading, and writing in English language.

What are the four macro-skills?

Language teaching covers four macro-skills needed for communicating –

listening, speaking, reading and writing. Good language teachers plan lessons, and
sequences of lessons, which include a mixture of all the macro-skills, rather than focusing
on developing only one macro-skill at a time.

Oral skills Literacy skills

Receptive skills Listening Reading
Productive skills Speaking Writing

Listening and speaking are oral skills. Reading and writing are literacy skills.
Each week teachers should include some activities which focus on developing the
students’ oral skills (e.g. pair and group interactions and games) and some activities
which focus on literacy skills (e.g. reading and analyzing texts and then students write
their own).

The four skills can also be grouped another way. Listening and reading
are receptive skills since learners need to process and understand language being
communicated to them in spoken or written form. Speaking and writing are known
as productive skills since learners need to produce language to communicate their ideas
in either speech or text.

It is common for language learners to have stronger receptive than productive

skills, that is they can understand more than they can produce. Teachers often link
activities for developing students’ receptive and productive skills.

How to Develop the Four Macro-skills

The Four Language Skills

When we learn a language, there are four skills that we need for complete
communication. When we learn our native language, we usually learn to listen first, then
to speak, then to read, and finally to write. These are called the four "language skills":

 Listening Skill
 Speaking Skill
 Reading Skill
 Writing Skill

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 The four language skills are related to each other in two ways:

 the direction of communication (in or out)

 the method of communication (spoken or written)

Input is sometimes called "reception" and output is sometimes called "production".

Spoken is also known as "oral".

Note that these four language skills are sometimes called the "macro-skills". This is
in contrast to the "micro-skills", which are things like grammar, vocabulary,
pronunciation and spelling.

What is the connection between receptive and productive skills?

It’s important for teaching activities to be designed so that learners receive input
and modeled language (through listening and reading activities) before they are expected
to produce those modeled structures (in their own speaking and writing). Listening and
reading activities prepare students to be able to speak and write their own texts.

To take an example of a speaking activity, to enable students to talk about their

family, a teacher might ask each student to prepare a profile of their family for an oral
presentation to the class:

My family lives in Tagum City. Our house is big. Dad cuts the grass. I
have three brothers. Their names are Tigreal, Chou, and Franko. We have a dog
called Miya. Nana lives with us too. My auntie comes for dinner every night.

To prepare the learners for this speaking activity (demonstrating their productive
skills in the language) it’s important that they first have many opportunities to listen to
and/or read models of family profiles (developing their receptive skills in the language).
The models could be: an audio or video recording of people introducing their family; the
teacher speaking to the class, introducing their family using photos; family profiles
written by students in previous years. Before presenting to the class, the students could
work in pairs to practice introducing their family.

To take an example of a writing activity, to enable students to write about what

they did in the holidays or on the weekend, a teacher might set an activity in which each
student writes a recount of an event.

To prepare students for this writing activity (demonstrating their productive

skills in the language) it’s important that they first have many opportunities to listen to
and/or read model recounts (developing their receptive skills in the language). The
models could be written or told in language by the teacher and/or examples of recounts
written by other students in previous years. The students read those models and answer
questions about them. The teacher uses those models to help the students understand the
meaning of the texts and analyze the language structures.

How do you teach receptive skills?

Both listening and reading are receptive skills. For a teacher to be sure that learners
have understood a spoken or written text, they need to demonstrate their understanding
through a response. The response may be:

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  a verbal response, e.g. answering questions orally when the teacher asks students
one-by-one around the class,
 a physical response, e.g. an action in a Total Physical Response activity,
 a creative response or visual representation, e.g. listening to a talk about local
places and drawing a map of them; reading a description of a person and drawing
them,
 a written response, e.g. listening to or reading a text and writing answers to
multiple choice, true/false, short answer comprehension questions, sentence
completion activities,
 completing a cloze passage.

Receptive skills involve bottom-up and top-down processing. From the bottom up,
teachers ensure that students know the sounds and spelling system, word roots and
suffixes, and build up to phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. If students understand and
can analyze smaller components of language, they can build up to understanding longer
texts in the language.

At the same time, it is important to present students with opportunities to process

spoken and written texts from the top down. The texts will contain a mixture of
vocabulary and language structures which are already familiar to the students, together
with vocabulary and structures which are not familiar. This challenges and develops
students’ ability to work out the meaning, fill in gaps, and develop skills in finding out
about aspects of the language which are new to them.

From the top down, students hear or read a whole text. At first they may just pick up
the gist of the text, e.g. they take note of the setting, identify the characters, and
understand the general meaning of the text. They use their understanding of the gist of
the text to begin to work out more of the details, e.g. they make informed guesses about
unfamiliar words and phrases in the text.

For students to develop their top-down processing skills, they often need to hear or
read the text a few times. Each time they will process and understand more of the text. So
don’t worry if they don’t understand the whole text the first time they hear/read it. Rather
than immediately translating it into English for them, it’s better to let them listen to or
read the text again and again.

Top-down listening activities often involve a pre-listening exercise before the

students hear the text for the first time. In the pre-listening stage of the activity, the
teacher tells the students that they are about to hear a recording of a boy called Harry
who will introduce his family. As a class or in small groups, the students are asked to
predict the kinds of things Harry will say in the recording. The students brainstorm and
guess some of the vocabulary and structures they will hear in the target language.

In the second stage of the activity, the teacher plays the recording to the students. As
they listen, they draw Harry’s family tree. Their diagrams should show as many of the
details as possible which they have heard in the recording, e.g. relationships between
people, their names, what they look like. The students listen to the recording a few times
in order to be able to add more detail to their diagrams. The teacher might have a
worksheet for the students to complete – it might contain multiple choice, short answer,
true/false questions about the recording, e.g. Where does Harry’s family live? How many

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 people in Harry’s family? How many sisters does Harry have? What’s Harry’s Dad’s
name? Does Harry’s family have a pet?

After the listening activity, the students to share the details they heard in the
recording. The teacher reviews the content of the text the students have heard and may
focus the discussion on any details that the students had trouble understanding.

To develop learners’ listening and reading skills, teachers can be a model. That is,
teachers can speak to their students and write example sentences on the board. But
individual words, phrases and sentences are not enough. Teachers can provide their
students with much more input, if they provide them with opportunities to hear and read
whole texts (such as the one about Harry’s family). Sometimes those spoken and written
texts already exist in the resources available to the teacher but sometimes they need to be
created, developed and recorded.

How do you teach productive skills?

Both speaking and writing are productive skills. To enable learners to produce
language, teachers select the vocabulary and structures, and the spoken or written text
types which will be the focus of a lesson or unit of work.

As summarized in the diagram and example activity below, firstly the selected
language is presented to the learners through listening and/or reading activities. That is,
the teacher provides input and models the vocabulary and structures that the students are
expected to produce. Secondly, students are given opportunities for controlled practice of
that language. Ultimately this supports them to use that language to produce new spoken
and written texts.

The modeled language may be provided by:

• the teacher speaking to the class,

• an audio or audio-visual recording which the teacher has made earlier,

• the teacher presenting text on the (interactive) white board,

• a text for the students to listen to and/or read and analyse,

• in a textbook, workbook or on a teacher-made worksheet.

When students have listened to and/or read various models, teachers provide
controlled practice activities so that the students can begin to rehearse the set vocabulary

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and structures in their own speaking or writing. Controlled practice may be in the form
sentence substitution activities – the students take the model and substitute similar word
types into each part of a sentence frame. For example:

Example/model: Kangaroos lie in the shade.

Sentence frame: animal name + animal action + place

Controlled practice: The sentence frame allows for many possibilities (e.g. Fish
swim in the river. The dog eats outside the house. Birds fly in the sky. Brolgas stand in
the water. Pipis burrow in the sand). The list of animal names can be long. The actions
can be past, present or future tense. The place can be a number of different locations. The
action and place parts of the sentence frame are an opportunity to teach and rehearse
various verb and noun suffixes.

A series of additional sentence frames could model for the students how to
describe what the animal looks like, how it moves, what it eats, its habitat and so on. In
this way students build up a lot of relevant vocabulary and grammar for this topic.
Controlled practice may also involve the whole class or small groups of students working
together to jointly construct a text. After that, each student chooses an animal and
independently writes a factual text, for example:

Emus are large birds. Their necks and legs are long. They have feathers and small
wings. They don’t fly. They walk and run fast. They live in flat country and near trees.
They eat plants, insects and stones. They see and hear well. They live in pairs and groups.

Controlled practice supports the students to manipulate the learned vocabulary

and structures in new ways. They create series of linked sentences in their own original
spoken or written text. They use the newly introduced language but also incorporate
language they have learned in previous lessons, units of work, school terms and years.
They draw on recently learned language as well as the language skills and knowledge
they have developed over a number of months or years. They can also use resources such
as dictionaries.

Here is an example of a speaking activity in Gumbaynggirr, adapted from a unit

of work about country featured in the Board of Studies NSW (2003) Aboriginal
languages K-10 assessment for learning in a standard-referenced framework CD ROM.
At this point in the unit, students have learned vocabulary related to coastal animals,
places and activities. They have been introduced to nouns with ergative (doer to), locative
(in, at, on) and purposive (for) suffixes. They have copied example sentences containing
those suffixes, listened to sentences containing the suffixes and drawn pictures to indicate
their understanding, and used the suffixes in controlled practice written exercises.

In the speaking activity, students are given a picture of a beach scene. They draw
their own additional figures into the picture, e.g. people spending time on the shore.

Students then use the modeled and rehearsed vocabulary and structures, to take
turns in talking with each other (in pairs or small groups) about what is happening in each
of their scenes.

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 The family is down at the beach.

They are sitting on the

sand. The children become

hot.

They are running to the sea to

swim. Uncle collects pipis for the

family.

The children cook the pipis.

Grandma and grandpa eat the pipis.

The boys are swimming to the island.

The girls catch flathead for the

family.

There are birds in the sky.

They are flying to the west.

TASK 1

Instructions: Compare and contrast Receptive skills and Productive skills using a Venn
diagram.

Receptive Skills Productive Skills

Similarities

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TASK 2

Instructions: Discuss some ideas by answering the following questions. Explain

and/or give examples.

1. There are four main language skills: reading; writing; speaking; listening. In
general, which one do you think is the most important for you?

2. Among the four skills, what will happen if one skill is removed?

3. Why is it important for teaching activities to be designed or planned?

4. What things does a teacher need to consider upon teaching the different macroskills?