Skills and sub-skills

In order to use language skills competent users of a language need a number of sub-skills for processing the language that they use and are faced with.

If we look at the receptive skills (reading and listening) we can see that there are many sub-skills that we can call upon. The way we listen for general understanding will be different from the way we listen in order to extract specific bits of information. The same is true for reading, of course. Sometimes we read in order to interpret, sometimes we read in order to transfer the information to another medium.

People who use language skills and the sub-skills that go with them are able to select those sub-skills that are most appropriate for their task. If they only want a certain piece of information from a radio programme they will select a way of listening which is different from the way they listen to a radio play. If they read a text for the purposes of literary criticism they will select different sub-skills from those they would select if they were ‘reading’ a dictionary to look for a word. It is because they have these sub-skills that they are able to process the language that they use and receive. We can summarise the difference between skills (sometimes called macro skills) and sub-skills (sometimes called micro skills) in the following way:

Reading/Listening

Reading/ listening reading/ listening

for general for interpretation

understanding

reading/ listening reading/ listening

for detailed for extracting specific

understanding information

reading/ listening

for information transfer