Teaching Productive Skills to the Students: a secondary Level Scenario

2.5 
Interrelation between Receptive and Productive Skills 
 
Teachers tend to talk about the way we use language in terms of four skills- 
reading, writing, speaking and listening. They are often divided into two types. 
Receptive skills is a term used for reading and listening, skills where meaning is 
extracted from the discourse. Productive skills is the term for speaking and writing, skills 
where students actually have to produce language themselves (Harmer, 2007, p.265). 
"Listening" is receiving language through the ears. Listening involves identifying 
the sounds of speech and processing them into words and sentences. When we listen, 
we use our ears to receive individual sounds (letters, stress, rhythm and pauses) and 
we use our brain to convert these into messages that mean something to us. 
Listening in any language requires focus and attention. It is a skill that some 
people need to work at harder than others. People who have difficulty concentrating are 
typically poor listeners. Listening in a second language requires even greater focus. 

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Like babies, we learn this skill by listening to people who already know how to 
speak the language. This may or may not include native speakers. For practice, one 
can listen to live or recorded voices. The most important thing is to listen to a variety of 
voices as often as one can. 
To become a fluent speaker in English, learners need to develop strong listening 
skills. Listening not only helps to understand what people are saying, it also helps to 
speak clearly to other people. It helps in learning how to pronounce words properly, how 
to use intonation, and where to place stress in words and sentences. This makes 
speech easier for other people to understand. 
"Reading" is the process of looking at a series of written symbols and getting 
meaning from them. When we read, we use our eyes to receive written symbols (letters, 
punctuation marks and spaces) and we use our brain to convert them into words, 
sentences and paragraphs that communicate something to us. 
Reading can be silent (in our head) or aloud (so that other people can 
hear).Reading is a receptive skill - through which we receive information. But the 
complex process of reading also requires the skill of speaking, so that we can 
pronounce the words that we read. In this sense, reading is also a productive skill in that 
we are both receiving information and transmitting it (even if only to ourselves). 
Do we need to read in order to speak English? The short answer is no. Some 
native speakers cannot read or write but they speak English fluently. On the other hand, 
reading is something that one can do on his own and that greatly broadens his 
vocabulary, thus helping him in speaking (and in listening and writing). Reading is 
therefore a highly valuable skill and activity, and it is recommended that English 
learners try to read as much as possible in English.