It is traditional to consider language under separate headings of reading,
writing, listening and speaking. There is obviously much to recommend
these distinctions, although they are often artificial. For example, there are
processes of linguistic comprehension common to both reading and listening,
despite the often used divisions of reading comprehension and listening
comprehension, and foreign language or mother tongue courses designed to
teach one or the other. In addition, the division into two productive and two
receptive aspects of competence must clearly not be taken to imply that
speaking and writing are active, whereas listening and reading are passive.
Listening and reading comprehension clearly involve active processes of
prediction, for example. Given these caveats, I will use the traditional
distinctions to structure the following sections, although the categories will
sometimes overlap. So far, I have discussed discourse analysis in teachertraining.
The remainder of the chapter discusses the content of syllabuses for
· students, whose aim is either to develop students' communicative competence
or to teach them about language and linguistic theory.