Introductory points
- 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 listen- ing, 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 teacher- training. The remainder of the chapter discusses the content of syllabuses for · students, whose aim is either to develop students' communicative com- petence or to teach them about language and linguistic theory.