Can you imagine how did you acquire your first language? Did you go to school, an institution, or a language center? Did a teacher teach you vocabulary and sentence structure?
Not at all! –Â then how come you acquired it and spoke your L1 very fluently?
Here is how you aced it. The very first and essential thought for acquiring a second language it to differentiate between Receptive and Productive skills. As a language has 4 skills, so one has to categorize them in to two and comprehend properly which ones to acquire first and the others later.
The categorization of the said skills make us acquire a target langauge conceptually as it tunes our language acquisition device to observe and store the data. If we keep practicing language learning techniques, it will consume our energy as well the expected outcome will not be attained. For instance, students try their best to learn English, however, after their tiring efforts, they still struggle and give up believing that they are not made for it. The major problem lies with the strategy they adopt. Most of the time, they initiate their journey by randomly learning all the skills but they are unaware of the plan for how strategically to acquire English. If we compare a child’s acquisition with a second language learner, it will be way easy to do it. A kid first listens to his surroundings and based on that, he develops speaking. Similarly, reading is an input to enhance writing skills.
Receptive & Productive Skills
Receptive are the skills that are acquired effortlessly through our senses, e listening and seeing, and based on these receptive skills, productive skills are developed. So, listening and reading are the receptive skills that help us to develop our speaking and writing skills. They are the input we give to our mind, if there is no input, how come we can get the outcome? In the same way, if we desire to acquire English, the first important step is to listen to English and tune our mind to the native speakers which store the data in our mind. It has so many benefits such as we come to know about the standard pronunciation, collocation, correct structure, and use of a word in context rather than learning an individual word’s meaning. When we listen to them, right after that, we can speak English fluently without translating words and then put them in an appropriate structure. Similarly, when we start reading, our active mind stores data I,e vocabulary, sentence structure, and a lot more to enable us to write based on reading skills.
To sum it up, English learners are required to differentiate receptive from production skills and commence acquiring them at that pace. It helps them learn English effectively and consumes less energy and time. If they learn it randomly, the result will be not as expected and they will have to face many language barriers.  Â
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