Dear Paul,

The scholars of the field have different opinions about the interrelationship of the receptive vs. productive skills.  In a case study by Schmidt ,working on a Japanese L2 learner  called Wes, he found out that grammatical  competence is separated from pragmatic competence. However, The link between skills and components investigated under more stringent conditions is indubitably noteworthy and a prerequisite to second language acquisition.

Best regards,

R. Biria

To be proficient in SLA  L2 it is essential to acquire the basic skills of language. One has to acquire both receptive and productive skills.

Weakness in one of these skills matters in acquiring the other skills but if one has ground knowledge he/she can cope up with other.

The language teachers & learners should take efforts to compile all the skills at equal level.

Dear Biria and all,

I remember Dick Schmidt's study. It is clear to me that to some degree adult NNSs trajectories of acquisition differ for individuals and for the L1-L2 space. What I wonder about is when there are documented cases of variance between separate skills, if these learners also turn out to lack proficiency in essential areas. I guess it depends upon each individual's situation, but if we are thinking overall, then maybe Wes would have really enjoyed and benefited from tasks that combined grammatical and pragmatic competence perhaps?

To me, grammar and vocabulary acquisition seem to be prime examples of skills that are inextricably connected with all the other skills...

I have found an article on researchgate today that speaks to this issue from an SLA modeling perspective:

The Relationship Between Receptive and Expressive Subskills of Academic L2 Proficiency in Nonnative Speakers of English: A Multigroup Approach

Pae and Greenberg (2014).

It is pretty dense reading, but I take it to mean that building lots of integrated tasks for learners (listening/speaking, listening/reading, listening/writing, reading/writing, and reading/speaking ) are going to be essential for developing proficiency.

I believe the results of this study also support in theory at least, moving away from courses that are named as separate skills, and towards program designs that support  and build on these interconnections. 

Article The Relationship Between Receptive and Expressive Subskills ...

There are two issues that I would like to focus on in relation to your question: 1) the need for most students to develop all language skills and all aspects of the language system given the interrelations between them; 2) The possibility of developing some skills or parts of the language system much further than others.

1) Skills and Systems: A two-way relationship

There are numerous studies which show the interconnectedness between receptive skills and aspects of the language system

The studies that I am most familiar with relate to reading and vocabulary. The book Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition (Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series) contains a number of papers that refer to the importance of reading for vocabulary acquisition. See especially Chapters 6, 9, 11 ,12 and 14. However, the evidence from this book does not support Krashen's Input Hypothesis, which, in its strongest version, claims that vocabulary and other aspects of the language system can be acquired through receptive skills alone. While a number of studies show that reading alone has a positive effect on vocabulary acquisition, the best improvements are found in learners who combine reading with exercises that focus specifically on vocabulary learning. There is also some evidence that reading can improve the knowledge of grammar. However, I am not in a position to recommend specific studies.

Overall, the consensus is that listening can also improve vocabulary acquisition, but more repeat exposures to lexical items are necessary than with reading. As with reading, a combination of extensive listening and vocabulary exercises has been shown to be more effective than listening on its own. For a brief, up-to date survey of listening and vocabulary learning studies see the literature review in Meir, A (2015) L2 Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Extensive Listening to Podcasts

It is important to remember that the relationship between receptive skills and the language system is a two-way one. For both reading and listening, the consensus is that learners need to have a minimum knowledge of vocabulary and grammar for skills to transfer. For reading, see chapters 8 and 17 of Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Both chapters refer briefly to the influence of discourse factors as well. These are discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 11 of the same book.

With regard to productive skills, it is obvious that a minimum knowledge of language is necessary for learners to be able to speak and write correctly. There is also evidence that speaking and writing skills can improve language knowledge-see e.g. The Output Hypothesis: Theory and Research, by Swain & Hinkel 2005 and work by Peter Skehan on "stretching" interlanguage through production tasks.

There are a few cases in which learners may need to focus only on one skill and on the language needed to develop that skill: for example, a student studying in his or her own country may need to develop above all, or even exclusively, his or her  reading skills in order to read books and papers in English. Such a student would only need to study reading skills per se and the vocabulary, grammar and discourse needed to read the texts related to his or her  area of specialization. However, the majority of learners do need to develop all four skills  and all aspects of the language system to some degree.

I also believe that reading can have a positive effect on writing, and listening on speaking. There are probably papers on this area, but I am not familiar with them.

2) Can some skills or systems develop much further than others?

In my view, notwithstanding the interrelationship between skills and systems, they clearly can. There are many students who , after a basic grounding in all skills and language areas, need to develop one or two areas far more than others. Indeed, teachers should positively encourage students to concentrate more on the skills and systems that they need to develop through a mixture of focused classroom tasks and guided self-study.

Yes domestic helpers working in foreign countries normally know speaking, listening and grammar but not writing, idiomatic expressions nor literary expressions.

Certainly, people can learn grammar without being able to speak:  This condition is one of the factors that led to the rise of the communicative approach.

Champion Scrabble players   who have no working knowledge of  a language per se are vivid testimony to the fact that vocabulary can be learned very well without having competence is other aspects or the language.  Se  http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2004/word_up/you_dont_have_to_know_english_to_play_scrabble.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_VndzDM-qE

Hi,

I just want to make the point that the list of 6 skills could be considered as problematic.  While the first four are distinguishable from each other, (as they are different modalities), the other two (grammar and vocabulary) fit into a completely different category as being different structural aspects of language.  These structural areas of language can be mixed and matched into the modalities, so that you have "listening vocabulary", "speaking vocabulary", "reading vocabulary", etc.  You can think of it as a table with the modalities as headings running across one axis with the structural parts of language being the other axis.

Dear All-

I have a lot of deadlines these days and I have to do some reading before I can add significantly to this thread. Here in Japan we do struggle to help adult Japanese learners of English to catch their 'listening vocabulary' up to their 'visual vocabulary.' As a teacher, more and more I see that we are really designers of the complex neural networks - the pathways from the ears to the language systems of grammar, vocabulary, meanings, pictures, and the pathways out to the mouth etc. I understood the concept of non-coordinate bilingual to be where there are separate L1 and L2 lexical spaces in the brain, but then, I was not prepared to consider that L2 lexical entries could be broken into separate spaces by modalities, but then that is the beauty of individuals. I can't seem to conceive of modalities as separate from systems, but rather, one is a path and one is a nexus of many of these paths...

Paul

One telling place to look is the aphasia literature (although I can't cite this off the top of my head) where differently placed lesions can lead to very surprising specificity of the type of linguistic information that is lost. 

For aphasia, a summary done in the 19th century (sic) is interesting as a starting point:

"Aphasia," The British Medical Journal

Vol. 2, No. 296 (Sep. 1, 1866), pp. 258-261.

For a recent study on grammar vs. spelling, see:

"A Syntactic Specialization for Broca's Area"  "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America," Vol. 97, No. 11 (May 23, 2000), pp. 6150-6154

Other studies incldue:

"Preserved Speech Abilities and Compensation Following Prefrontal Damage"

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Feb. 6, 1996), pp. 1249-1253

In "Impairments of Speech Production and Speech Perception in Aphasia"

Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 346, No. 1315, The Acquisition and Dissolution of Language (Oct. 29, 1994), pp. 29-36, Sheila E. Blumstein claims that aphaisa problems are not linguistic, being neurological instead.

"Nouns and Verbs are Retrieved with Differently Distributed Neural Systems"

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 90, No. 11 (Jun. 1, 1993), pp. 4957-4960 :  Two patients could correctly produce words belonging to one part of speech but not others.-- but does this apply to L2, especially in the early stage of learning?  How about gerunds?

* This interesting article argues from evidence for a close tie between vocabulary and grammar, pointing  our that grammar development follows vocabulary expansion: "On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon: Evidence from acquisition, aphasia and real-time processing"

EBJC Goodman - Language and cognitive Processes, 1997 - Taylor & Francis

First off, it is useful to distinguish four "skills" and at least three areas of form: grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. It is certainly possible to become highly knowledgeable in any or all of the formal areas without becoming proficient in the language itself, as is common among linguists. The opposite is also possible: quite commonly very proficient speakers still retain a strong accent ( e.g. Henry Kissenger). As to the skills, those based on orthography are relatively recent inventions in human history, and it is not difficult to find examples of people whose "letters" are not up to the level of their oral abilities. Speaking and listening are oldest, of course historically, and listening is primal in terms of human development, but can the one be learned without the other?Again you can find cases, among the deaf, for example, but for those without a disability, it is exceedingly rare. The normal case is that these two skills develop together in L1 and L2 acquisition, though not at exactly the same rate. Likewise the orthographic skills develop together, but at greatly different rates. In both cases, the receptive skills ( listening and reading) develop ahead of the productive skills ( speaking and writing) in L1 acquisition. It is not clear that this sequence holds for SLA. 

So, what does this have to do with the validity of and interpretation of the TOEFL? ETS in its design of the basic TOEFL is making the claim that the receptive skills are enough to extrapolate an overall proficiency level from. Many disagree, but the question of practicality often trumps those concerns. As difficult as it is to assess listening and reading, it is more time-consuming and tedious to assess writing and - heaven forbid - speaking on a large enough scale with any reliability. So, I believe that the answer to your question is that, no, we cannot assume that a level of proficiency at one skill determines the level of proficiency at another, but you may be stuck with that shortcut for practical reasons, anyway.

I have observed many learners of English, and as a learner of English myself, I can say that there is a threshold level where most of the skills start to go together and affect each other positively and finally improve much better than before. However, factors such as age differences and aptitude play an important role in terms of developing native-like fluency in productive skills especially. Speaking and writing always improve more slowly than other receptive skills although in practice those skills are not easily separable. Therefore, a strong accent in speech and some L1 interference might still be heard and seen even if one can be really fluent in speaking and/or writing.

Dear all,

I believe that all language skills are interconnected and rely on each other. Of course, L1 interference is also something we have to take into consideration.

When I did a research with my students (university students of class teacher education) by using their learning diary for the analysis, most of them said that speaking as a skill is the most difficult one in terms of studying English, then grammar and then writing. My students find reading and listening as skills which could be mastered more easily then others. 

Hope this helps.

Best regards from Serbia,

Ivana

In my observation, and my personal, teaching and research experience as an ESL student and researcher in language and literacy development, focusing on English language learners, I believe that different aspects and language skills are interconnected or correlated. For example significant research on first language learners in the primary grades has demonstrated that vocabulary knowledge is a pivotal predictor of reading comprehension (e.g., Bialystok, 2002; Stahl & Nagy, 2006; Snow et al., 1998). This is equally true and even more critical for English language learners (e.g., Farnia & Geva, 2013).