These are two types of communication skills that concern teachers in the primary classes. Receptive skills, where children use language to receive inputs. The skills that fall under this category are listening and reading. The other is the expressive skills, where children learn to express themselves through their speaking and writing skills.

Language teaching thus entails facilitating the acquisition of these four skills and also include handwriting, spelling, grammar and usage, vocabulary building and even literature.

Now can these skills be taught sequentially? Certainly not! If learning is to occur in an efficient and effective manner, language experiences must have meaning in children’s active lives. For this, language cannot be pulled out into pieces and given in artificial bits to children while teaching them. When children listen, they also learn speech habits, laying a foundation for vocabulary development and for reading. As children read, they are also improving their power to listen, extending their oral vocabularies and acquiring the raw material of words within which to express themselves creatively.