Speaking Skills
The learner can hardly understand anything at all, unless the speaker is talking about
things the learner is observing, or unless the language being learned is closely related to some
other language the learner knows. Through comprehension activities the learner can internalize
some vocabulary and some grammatical structures, which will help the learner to understand
more in stage two, when she or she knows enough to actually converse in a simple way. The
result of getting through stage one is that the learner has acquired enough of the basic building
blocks of the language to begin to function in real communication situations in a halting way. In
stage one there is very little real speaking ability, apart from some words and sentences that can
be built on the comprehension exercises. In real communication situations the learner has to
depend on memorized survival phrases to meet the most immediate needs.