Speaking Skills
In stage three the learner can understand new information, but it still helps if that
information is still specially geared to a new speaker's needs. This means that meanings must
often be negotiated. In order to keep increasing in comprehension fluency during this stage, the
key ingredient is coming to understand the background information that everyone in the culture
knows about, and in particular, learning this information in connection with the language that is
associated with them. Because the learner can by now understand a lot of the linguistic content, it
is possible to develop more ability for top-down processing of "new" information of the nonlinguistic
content. If there is adequate input, the learner should be developing a sense of the
different discourse genres and registers of speech. The result of getting through stage three is that
the learner is able to comprehend language related to a vast range of topics, situations and
contexts, as well as easily process many social nuances. In stage three, the learner has increasing
facility to produce connected narrative discourse