This book contains a separate chapter dealing with each of the four major language skills. The present chapter treats the ability to understand the spoken language. However, the fact that listening comprehension is placed first in the
‘An exception is Paul Pimsleur's Le Pont Sonore: Une Methode Pour Comprendre le Frangais Parle (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1974), designed to teach students to understand spoken French.
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series implies no priorities. Audio-lingual proponents have advocated the natural sequence in learning a second language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They say that this is the order in which the first language is learned. However, the hypothesized transfer from oral to written skills has not occurred in actual practice. Learning the oral skills first has not automatically improved the students' reading or writing ability.
There are two reasons why the failure of initial stress on oral skills to improve reading comprehension accordingly should not be surprising or disappointing. First, the extrapolation of theory from the first-language acquisition process to second-language teaching techniques is somewhat tenuous. (See chapter 3, page 45.) Second, present knowledge indicates that the amount of transfer across sense modalities varies depending upon the language, the learner, and the learner's level of language study. (See chapter 4, page 87.)
Relevant research and accumulated teacher experience seem to point in the direction of appealing to as many of the senses as possible rather than insisting upon a single approach for all students regardless of their predisposition toward oral or visual means of learning. Teachers need to broaden their scope of activities to include all the language skills and all student abilities. In this case, oral and written presentations can complement each other even though the transfer from one to the other may not be so great as was originally supposed. In other words, the students who do not pick up the structures and vocabulary presented orally may do so visually and vice versa. If the initial introduction is comprehended, additional study in the other mode serves to reinforce the concepts being studied.
The decision to include a prereading period at the beginning of the language-learning sequence no longer seems to merit the relative importance that it used to have. On the other hand, it is logical to assume that the receptive skills, listening and reading, precede the productive skills, speaking and writing, in the language-learning process. Thus, the problem seems to be one of determining the most efficacious procedures for developing the receptive skills and of delineating the types of knowledge and abilities within the receptive skills that are most beneficial to the students as they proceed to the productive skills.
In Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics, language learners first acquire a language "competence," which by some means, unknown at the present time, they activate to perform in the language. "Competence" is what native speakers know about their language, intuitively, not analytically. "Performance" encompasses the activation of what they know about the language to communicate. "Competence," which underlies all four language skills, is an internally stored set of language rules and must be acquired prior to "performance." Communication in any of the four language skills is an active, not a passive, process in which the native speaker's language system is
280 Part Two: Practice
activated either to decode an incoming message or to encode an outgoing one.