Language Skills and Systems: A Comprehensive Breakdown

Posted on Mar 18, 2025 in Pedagogy

Skills and Systems in Language Learning

It’s important to differentiate between language systems and language skills. We need to be specific and distinguish them because, in the end, they will tell us what students are going to learn.

Language Skills: Doing Something with the Language

Receptive skills: Listening and Reading.

Productive skills: Speaking and Writing.

Language Systems: Knowing About the Language

Function: What you do with language. E.g., Sorry vs. Excuse me.

Grammar: Structures. E.g., The construction of can + pronoun or Some vs. any.

Lexis: Words and phrases. E.g., The meaning of “play” and “guitar”.

Phonology: Sounds. E.g., Woman vs. women.

Discourse: Context or situation (how sentences relate to each other). E.g., “Pass me the book.” “Mary’s gone home.” If Mary has the book and went home, the sentence would make sense. *In order to fully understand the meaning, we would need to know more about the situational context and more about the surrounding conversation.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Processing

Bottom-Up Processing (BU): Is the process when you use the input for the understanding of the message.

• Focus on form.
• Older students.
• From the language (lexis, sounds, word order, sentence structure) to meaning.
• Relies on linguistic skills.
• Emphasis on deciphering.

Top-Down Processing (TD): Is the process when you use the background for the understanding of the message.

• Focus on meaning.
• Younger students.
• From the meaning to the language.
• Using previous knowledge (context, situation, genre) to make sense of the specific chunks of language.

Bottom-Up Activities

• Recognizing individual sounds, e.g., Clap your hands when you listen to the /s/ sound: Snake, Sheep, Salmon…
• Discriminating between sounds, e.g., Clap your hand when you listen to the /s/ sound and jump one time when you listen to the /t/ sound.

Top-Down Activities

• Understanding the main points and details, e.g., Teacher reads a story and students identify the characters, the place where the story happens…
• Identifying the speaker’s mood, e.g., Teacher reads a story related to emotions, her intonations and gestures of the face change depending on the emotions. Students identify the emotion depending on these characteristics of the teacher.

Problems if Top-Down Processing is Insufficient

The main problem could be the lack of comprehension due to the lack of ability to use the background knowledge, make predictions, inferences, guesses, etc.

If we only rely on BU skills (deciphering lexis, grammar), then readers/listeners will be less autonomous – for instance, they will get stuck when they don’t understand a specific word.

White’s 5 Subskills of Listening

Main skill: Listening skills and strategies.

5 sub-skills:

Perception Skills (BU)

• Recognizing individual sounds.
• Discriminating between sounds.

Language Skills (BU)

• Identifying individual words and groups and building up possible meaning for them.
• Identifying discourse markers which organize what is being said, for example: then, as a matter of fact, to start with.

Using Knowledge of the World (TD)

• Using knowledge of a topic to guess what the speaker might be saying about.
• Using knowledge of patterns of certain oral interactions to predict what is being said, for example, ordering in a restaurant, making a phone call.

Dealing with Information (TD)

• Understanding the main points and details.
• Inferring information which is not explicitly stated.

Interacting with a Speaker (TD)

• Recognizing the speaker’s intention.
• Identifying the speaker’s mood/attitude.
• Predicting what the speaker will say next.

Listening Activities Related to Storytelling

• Listen and Do: the children act like a character in a story, for example, Red Riding Hood walking in the forest, or the Wolf, etc.
• Listen and Perform: they act out a story, such as The Fox and the Cheese.
• Listen and Identify: they point to the picture in a story.
• Listen and Respond: they listen and clap if the teacher makes a mistake in the story.
• Listen and Colour: they follow instructions to color a story poster.
• Listen and Draw: they draw three things Red Riding Hood had in her basket.
• Listen and Make: they trace and cut out a face mask of a character.

Activities for Speaking with Support

• Using classroom phrases.
• Saying rhymes and singing songs to practice pronunciation, stress, and intonation.
• Practising new vocabulary.

A1: Make a class display of animal pictures and memory aids to support the new vocabulary (understand and remember it).

Present the new items in context and encourage them to repeat with gestures, movement, and actions. Then you can show a small part of the picture and ask them to guess the animal.

*They can touch and feel the materials to support meaning and sound.

• Playing vocabulary games.

A2: Guessing the picture – SS have to guess the pictures because we want to see if the students can remember the words without seeing the pictures. The teacher takes one of the pictures but she doesn’t let the class see it. She asks the children to guess what the word is, and the child who guesses it comes up and takes the next picture without showing it to the others. He whispers the word to the teacher (if he forgets the word in English he can say it in his mother tongue, and the teacher will remember him the word and the sound), and the others have to guess it. This game continues until all the cards have been guessed.

A3: Remembering a list – The children are adding words to a list and so making phrases. Each child can add a new word but must also repeat the phrase that went before. Each group of four makes a list (objects, fruits, actions…).

T: Shows 4 cards and says “we’ll start with these 4, are you ready?”

S1: I’d like an apple.

S2: I’d like an apple and a pear.

S3: I’d like an apple, a pear, and an orange.

S4: I’d like an apple, a pear, an orange, and a banana.

• Practising pronunciation of new sounds.

A7: I spy with my little eye – Let’s play a game… I spy with my little eye something beginning with “pl”? One child points to a picture of a planet and guesses it. Very good…pl…pl…planet. Now this child whispers a new word. Then the teacher can say the first sound of the word to the child. The child says…I spy with my little eye something beginning with “s”? and waits while the others guess.

*Try out and play with the sounds. Help and praise the efforts.

Activities for Speaking More Freely

A1: Guess the mime: Pictures on the board. Students, in pairs, choose a picture and perform the mime together. The class watches and tries to guess the miming activity. Teacher can ask questions like “Who can guess what are they doing? Hands up if you can guess what they are going to do next? Can you remember the activity that Amanda and Josh were doing?”

A2: Find the differences: Students have to find differences between two pictures and talk about them.

A3: Guessing the animal: In pairs, students will play a guessing game pretending to be a particular animal, and their partner has to guess the animal.

In these activities (A4,5,6) we can have some control over this practice to encourage our students to use specific language (make templates of phrases, put a list of words they can use, etc.).

A4: Make our students draw their favorite animal, sport, color, etc. (depending on the topic) and talk about it in class.

A5: Organize pairs and make them talk about any topic (where do you go on holidays, what do you like to bring to the beach, etc.).

A6: Organize groups and make a role-play centered on a topic (going to groceries, in a cafe, making dinner).

Types of Listening Activities and Examples

• Listen and draw: a story, with instructions, adjectives.

A1: Listen and draw a story – Teacher reads or makes up a story, and as the students listen, they draw the different scenes.

A2: Listen and draw with instructions – Teacher gives them instructions on what to draw, for example:

• Draw a big circle.
• Draw two other small circles on the sides.
• Inside the big circle draw two other smaller circles on top.
• Draw a thick vertical line below the circles.
• Below the line draw another horizontal line.

A3: Listen and draw (adjectives) – Teacher gives them instructions on what to draw using adjectives, for example:

• Draw a very big fly.
• Draw the tallest animal of the Sabana.
• Draw a beautiful butterfly.
• Draw the smallest elephant.

• Listen and identify: with flashcards, put them in orden, Picture/Number/Word Bingo.
• Listen and do: blindfold walk, spelling messenger.
• Listen and say: secret message, guess what it is, listening stories.
• Listen and perform: mute story, act out the story, dice, Simon says, TPR.

Read vs. Tell

One of the most important differences is on the intonation pattern.

Read a Story

• Repeat and rephrase in a natural way.
• Stop and talk to the children about what is happening. – You ask questions and make prompts.
• Stop and show pictures and talk about them.
• Sometimes talk to individuals about an aspect of the story.

Tell a Story

• Speak spontaneously.
• Use natural intonation to help make the story seem real.
• Are looking at the children, and you can see if they understand.
• Can use your face and body to make gestures.
• Practice first and have some support.

Cuisenaire Rods

Cuisenaire rods are small wooden rods of different lengths and colors. They are used as a classroom resource to visually represent various areas of language. Cuisenaire rods are used in the Silent Way, a teaching methodology associated with humanism.

Ways to Retell a Story

• Act out the story as you tell it, and later get some children to take parts, come out to the front, and act with you.
• Let the children sit in groups. Give a set of pictures from the story to each group. As you tell the story ask the groups to put the pictures into the right sequence.
• Ask the children to listen carefully, then make some deliberate mistakes/changes, e.g., One day a fox saw a bird eating a hamburger.
• Use Cuisenaire rods for the characters and places in the story and ask the children to say what is happening.