Oral Communication Skills

1. The nature, purpose and characteristics of good conversation

2. Phonological forms to use in speech
3. Developing conversation skills with a sense of stress, intonation and meaning
4. Use of question tags
5. Starting, maintaining and finishing conversations
6. Standard conversational exchange
7. Spoken language idioms
8. Effective listening and attention to others
9. Gestures and body language
10. Do’s and Don’ts in conversation
11. Telephonic conversation
12. Functions of English in conversation: introductions, greetings, clarifications,
explanations, interruptions, opinions,
13. Agreement and disagreement, complaints, apologies
14. Participating in informal discussions and situations
15. Using information to make some decision, i.e., making social arrangements
with friends
16. Reproducing information in some form (question/answer, summarizing, oral
reporting, etc.)

Reading skills
The reader employs a number of specialist skills when reading and his success in
understanding the content of what he reads depends to a large extent on his expertise in these
specialist skills. The following are some of the main reading skills required by a learner of
English listed by Matthews, Spratt and Dangerfield (1991:65):
1. recognizing the letters of the alphabet:
2. reading groups of letters as words:
3. understanding the meaning of punctuation:
4. understanding the meaning of vocabulary items:
5. understanding the grammar of a sentence:
6. understanding the relationship between sentences and clauses in a text:
7. recognizing the effects of style:
8. recognizing the organization of a text:
9. making inferences;
10. reading longer texts;
11. skimming for gist;
12. scanning for specific information; and
13. reading for detail
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This list concerns students of different levels of reading ability. For students of linguistics,
the skills numbered (4), (5), (8), (9), (11), (12) and (13) should be paid far more attention to
than the rest since they are essential skills for them not only in their major but also in real
life.
Reading skills are also identified as follows:
1. recognizing words and phrases in English script;
2. using one‟s own knowledge of the outside world to make predictions about and
interpret a text;
3. retrieving information stated in the passage;
4. distinguishing the main ideas from subsidiary information;
5. deducing the meaning and use of unknown words; ignoring unknown words/phrases
that are redundant;
6. understanding the meaning and implications of grammatical structures;
7. recognizing discourse markers;
8. recognizing the function of sentences – even when not introduced by discourse
markers;
9. understanding relations within the sentence and the text;
10. extracting specific information and summary of note taking;
11. skimming to obtain the gist, and recognize the organization of ideas within the text;
12. understanding implied information and attitudes; and
13. knowing how to use an index, a table of contents, etc. Understanding layout, use of
headings, etc.
(Willis – 1998:142)
Basically, Willis took the same view on reading sub-skills as Mathews, Sprat and
Dangerfield. These methodologists all emphasized that the student of foreign languages
should his reading ability by acquiring the ways to make prediction; how to skim and scan;
understanding the text by getting the main idea, the specific information, recognizing the
organization as well as the discourse patterns.
Also being concerned about reading skills, Harmer (1992:183) gave another list of six
specialist skills which, to some extent, summarize all the above-mentioned skills including:
1. Predictive skills;
2. Extracting specific information;
3. Getting the general picture;
4. Extracting detailed information; and
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5. Recognizing function and discourse patterns;

6. Deducing meaning from context.