ABSTRACT

Speaking, writing, listening and reading are the four language skills. There are two conventional ways of dividing the four skills up. The first is into medium, with listening and speaking occurring in the spoken medium, reading and writing in the written medium. The second division is into the receptive skills of listening and reading, and the productive skills of speaking and writing. In some approaches to language teaching, the four skills are treated separately. The chapter looks at the processes involved in the comprehension and production of language. These processes will reveal what the foreign language learner needs to be able to do in order to comprehend and produce the language properly. Things have developed a lot in the teaching of comprehension in the past few decades. One of the main agents of change has been psycholinguistics. Traditional comprehension exercises focus on bottom-up processing.