What are the skills of language learning?

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tungemål
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What are the skills of language learning?

Postby tungemål » Sun Jan 19, 2020 11:21 am

What constitute the skill of knowing a foreign language? How many skills are there and what are they?

And a personal question: Which skill is easiest for you, and what is the most difficult?

LANGUAGE SKILLS
Ususally language proficiency is divided into these 4 skills:
- reading
- listening
- speaking
- writing

However it is possible to define it in other ways. This webpage define 5 skills for oral language:
- vocabulary
- phonological skills - how to pronounce words
- understanding of syntax - how to put together words
- morphological skills
- social rules of communication

This webpage adds one skill to the basic 4:
- reading
- listening
- speaking
- writing
- and cultural awareness

I think one might add yet another one to these 5: pronunciation and accent. The reason is that to be able to speak and communicate fluently is one skill, and for that you don't need a good pronunciation and accent. It is also possible to develop a good pronunciation, without being able to speak or communicate very well.

edited: slightly rephrased.
Last edited by tungemål on Sun Jan 19, 2020 8:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: What are the essential language skills

Postby tarvos » Sun Jan 19, 2020 4:03 pm

You need pretty much all of these if you want to be really good - it's a holistic package.
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Re: What are the essential language skills

Postby tungemål » Sun Jan 19, 2020 8:09 pm

yes, but...

Maybe I should re-phrase the title. I have a slightly different angle. What I meant to discuss was:
How would you analyze and break down the holistic skill that is knowing a language, into its smaller parts?
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Re: What are the essential language skills

Postby tarvos » Sun Jan 19, 2020 8:44 pm

tungemål wrote:yes, but...

Maybe I should re-phrase the title. I have a slightly different angle. What I meant to discuss was:
How would you analyze and break down the holistic skill that is knowing a language, into its smaller parts?


I personally never do that. The only time that sort of happens is when I need to learn a new writing system (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, whatever), when my reading lags behind my speaking.

It may be useful if you really need something for a specific goal like for archival purposes or whatever, but otherwise, why would I do that?

The only other thing is that for me speech is leading and written language is a reflection of speech.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby lingua » Sun Jan 19, 2020 9:25 pm

I break it down into reading, writing, listening, speaking & grammar based on what is required for the Italian CILS test. Proper pronunciation is also an important component. Without a thorough understanding of grammar one may read and listen without complete comprehension as well as speak and write poorly. From my perspective understanding grammar is the most important skill because without it your ability to be understood is limited.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Jan 19, 2020 9:31 pm

I think listening comprehension can be divided into several skills. The first skill would be vocabulary. You can improve vocabulary through reading, especially in phonetic languages.

The second one is syntax and expressions. You can also improve this through reading. I noticed I was lacking in this skill when I noticed that I wouldn’t understand Hebrew phrases despite knowing most or all of the words. Clozemaster was a good way for me to improve this since I got a better sense of how grammar works and I could see *how* words were used.

Another skill is parsing phonemes and word boundaries. You need to do listening to improve this. A lot of people don’t really know how to improve this skill. The advice I usually hear is just to do a lot of listening and hope it gradually improves. What I do is divide audio in my target language into small audio clips and just repeat it many times in a row. I can use Audacity, Speater or subs2srs to do this. Some people may be skeptical of this because it doesn’t feel like studying. They may also just find it tedious or boring. I usually get fast results doing this. When I was more of a beginner I’d usually notice very quick improvement. Sometimes it would be instant and sometimes it would be within a day or week. At first these improvements might only show up with the clips you practice, but it quickly improves your listening comprehension in general.

Another skill is knowing what people are saying through context despite the words not being pronounced clearly. This relies on experience and grammar knowledge. You can improve this by improving your knowledge of sentence structure and just listening a lot. I did notice this skill took longer for me to develop. I think you really do need more time and experience for this skill. It may account for the audio clips I took longer to hear clearly.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby slowmoon » Sun Jan 19, 2020 10:54 pm

The skills of language learning include any skill that helps us to send and receive comprehensible messages.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jan 20, 2020 11:51 am

tungemål wrote:LANGUAGE SKILLS
Ususally language proficiency is divided into these 4 skills:
- reading
- listening
- speaking
- writing

I prefer the term "macroskills" to describe these (I didn't invent the term -- it is used academically). When people call them "the 4 skills" it presents them as though they can't be broken down further, and that's just anti-intellectual... and wrong.

This sort of breakdown of the underlying skills is far more helpful:
However it is possible to define it in other ways. This webpage define 5 skills for oral language:
- vocabulary
- phonological skills - how to pronounce words
- understanding of syntax - how to put together words
- morphological skills
- social rules of communication

...because it gives us actual specifics we can work on, and these specifics are shared across all 4 macroskills (although arguably social rules are different in spoken and written language).

This is pretty ridiculous though:
This webpage adds one skill to the basic 4:
- reading
- listening
- speaking
- writing
- and cultural awareness

It's not that cultural awareness isn't important, it's just it's in the wrong place. It's like dividing humanity into Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans and women. Each category is a valid subdivision of humanity, but they're not equivalent -- it's splitting on different dimensions.
To me, cultural awareness is on the same dimension as vocabulary, syntax etc.

The usefulness of this article is not in what it says on the surface, but that it highlights the biggest danger in the "4 skills" model (if we don't use the term "macroskills") -- that people tend towards one dimensional thinking. People who talk about the 4 skills talk about other things (if they do at all) as "subskills" -- i.e. subdivisions and specialisations of the 4 skills.

Instead, we really need to look at things as multiple dimensions.

The 4 macroskills already covers two dimensions: spoken vs written mode and productive vs receptive skills. If you can't describe a skill in terms of these dimensions, you can't add it to the 4.

Vocabulary, syntax, phonology, morphology, orthography, social convention etc don't share those dimensions specifically, and don't form an entire dimension in and of themselves, although orthography certainly only sits under the written mode.

But regardless, we have to be able to look at each dimension separately, and look at the relationships and intersections of different skills on different dimensions. It's just that if you try to formalise this idea, it gets incredibly complex and confusing, so people try to build simpler formalisms.

Unfortunately, the simpler formalisms are wrong. So maybe the solution isn't to formalise at all. If a formalism cannot be complete, accurate and useful at the same time, then it's valueless.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jan 20, 2020 11:52 am

slowmoon wrote:The skills of language learning include any skill that helps us to send and receive comprehensible messages.

That's a circular definition. "The skills of language learning include any skill that helps us learn language."
Walking in circles doesn't get us anywhere.
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Re: What are the skills of language learning?

Postby Voytek » Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:11 pm

sporedandroid wrote:The second one is syntax and expressions. You can also improve this through reading.


There's only that point I cannot agree with. I think a better way is to listen to basic grammar structures repeatedly till they're ingrained. It's like Glossika but the main drawback of Glossika is they don't use the most frequent basic structures for every language but just translated some grammar sentences into target languages.
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