Four Skills for Language Development and How They Help You to Speak English Better

If you are looking to improve your English-speaking skills, there are four key skills that you need to focus on. Receptive language skills such as reading and listening help you understand the language, while productive skills such as writing and speaking help you express yourself. With the right amount of practice and dedication, you can become a better English speaker in no time. In this blog post, we will discuss the four skills you need to become a better English speaker.

Receptive Language Skills

Before children can speak or write, they can understand almost everything that is spoken around them. First language acquisition starts with making sense of the world and developing a lingual representation of this world in our minds. Having learned a language once, our brains are familiar with the process of learning a second language. It takes a child over 6-7 years to master a language (bar geniuses), however, an adult can do it in 1-2 years. 

Before one can use language to communicate, one needs to be familiar with and able to understand it. The ability to comprehend and decipher a language is known as receptive skills.

Let us explore two of these skills - listening and reading. Listening is an auditory input and is the primary medium for beginners to acquire language especially when it is combined with visuals. It helps develop vocabulary, which is nothing but words to represent stuff in our world. It is simpler to learn words for things that we can perceive with our five senses and therefore, we usually start with them. Labelling also happens for things that we cannot perceive with our five senses e.g., ideas, concepts or emotions. Graphical representation of the language, where English is written helps develop language proficiency even further. The ability to read fires our imagination. This helps codify the graphical and auditory representation of imagery. Our internal semantics and syntax libraries are further influenced by emotional experiences.

Productive Language Skills

Children learn their first language through imitation and then try to form sentences to represent whatever it is that they mean to say. A new language is always acquired in a context. Using that language for a need either in the present or having a need to use it in the future for a purpose serves as a motivator. However, you may be a person who loves learning a new language for its own sake, and that works too. 

Writing and speaking are fine motor skills that require training. It is like learning how to drive a car or learning to play a new sport. Practising makes one more and more competent at doing the deed because it builds muscle memory and neurological connections. In other words, the more you practice writing and talking the better you get at it. 

Productive skills require the ability to comprehend communication to us, develop a response, organize our thoughts and then express it using words. Unless one is in an exam, one can take one’s time to organize one's ideas and thoughts while writing. One can also go through several iterations before submitting the final piece. However, one does not have the luxury of time while talking. Compared to impromptu speaking, planned presentations are less cognitively demanding. One is forgiven mistakes in casual situations, but they may prove fatal in sensitive ones. Writing helps one organize one's thoughts better and that can help in speaking better in time, as it helps one get better at planning, organizing thoughts and giving words to them.

Practice Makes Perfect

Once you have your comprehension and planning in place, please know that nothing can substitute practice. It is quite like knowing everything about car driving, but since you have not driven a car, you do not have the skills. Talking requires one to use their muscles to produce sounds in a meaningful way, that others can understand. That requires practice. The more one does it the better one gets. In children, major mistakes are cute, but when adults make them, we frown because we expect adults to have had more practice and therefore be more proficient. 

Hence, the best thing to do while learning to talk is to allow yourself to make mistakes. Allow yourself to be a child again, and most importantly enjoy the process. There is no such thing as a flawless speaker. The more proficient one is the lesser flaws their language will have. More importantly, they do not dwell on their mistakes. They move on, appearing confident. 

Training can help you get better at speaking. To train your oral muscles you could practice reading aloud. This literally helps form muscle memory and create neuro connections for those words and the meaning they hold. Ideally, you should read text that you can relate to, imagine and feel. Reading creative content, and stories work best. This not only helps build your vocabulary and pronunciation, but it also helps codify that language into your memory system. When the situation asks for it, you are better trained to perform.

In Conclusion

When courses claim that you will become better in a few days, they are selling half-truths. The pace of proficiency development depends on the stage of language development you are at. If you do not have exposure and practice, you may struggle and even feel discouraged. However, if your receptive language is two levels higher than your productive language, you may pick up the productive language rapidly. If your writing is good, but you cannot talk, when you develop the skill to talk, you may produce better quality than someone who is not used to writing. If your language acquisition skill is at a tipping point (kind of like evolution) then you may notice rapid improvement. All in all, having the right perspective, expectations from self, a method to train yourself, motivation and consistency in joyful practice will unwaveringly make you better at speaking English.