The four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing are all interconnected. Proficiency in each skill is necessary to become a well-rounded communications, but the ability to speak skillfully provides the speaker with several distinct advantages. The capacity to put words together in a meaningful way to reflect thoughts, opinions, and feelings provides the speaker with these important advantages:
LISTENING
Listening, as we know, is the skill of understanding spoken language. Listening is an
essential skill, present in most of the activities we carry out throughout our lives, as
Lindsay and Knight shows:
11
We listen to a wide variety of things, for example; what someone says during a
conversation, face to face or on the telephone; announcements giving
information, for example, at an airport or railway station; the weather forecast
on the radio; a play on the radio; music; someone else’s conversation
(eavesdropping); a lecture; professional advice, for example, at the doctor’s, in
the bank; instructions, for example, on how to use a pho