Post 10

 The first thing I read in Chapter 10 that struck me as odd was that the skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing were not only separate, but ordered. It is different to look at this depending on whether the learner is learning L1 or L2. The next thing I found odd but it Kuma had rectified was the differentiation of these skills as active and passive, and then as productive and receptive. I have always thought of the skills as conscious efforts to produce or comprehend language. The idea of language skills being separated in order to learn makes no sense to me. These would not lead to very realistic scenarios in the communication aspect. However, I do believe that classes specific to reading, writing, and speaking are useful further in depth practice of an already comprehensible student. By this, I mean that a foreign language course devoted to speaking would help students improve their speech after already having the ability to communicate in this language. This is evident in our L1s as well. Many English speakers take a speech class in college. Many courses are focused on reading as well. These courses do not separate the skills completely though. For instance, a reading course may have an assessment in which the students must write a summary of what they read. Or perhaps a speaking course will require students to listen to a prompt and then respond. The point is that we should not be teaching our students to focus on these separate skills but learn to integrate them and get the most out of one task by using more than one of these skills. It is natural for students to engage in activities that involve meaningful and simultaneous engagement with language.