TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACROSKILLS

MACROSKILLS
Macroskills, which can be broken down into a variety of microskills, refer to the major
skills such as speaking, listening, reading, writing, and viewing.
The Six Macroskills are both the productive skills (i.e., speaking, writing, and
representing) and receptive skills (i.e., listening, reading, and viewing).
 Receptive skills are listening and reading, viewing learners do not need to
produce language to do these, they receive and understand it. These skills are
sometimes known as passive skills.
 Productive skills are speaking and writing because learners doing these need
to produce language. They are also known as active skills.
Listening is an input receptive skill, which means receiving language prevails
producing it. Listening is the process of interpreting messages, interpreting what is said.
Producing messages or texts involves putting them into a form, using individual sounds,
syllables, words (which may be linked together), phrases, clauses, sentences and longer
stretches of a text. Meaning is added by intonation, and word and sentence stress, too.
The listener has to be able to decode a lot of elements to get the message. Listening
can be either active or passive. Listening is the first language skill we acquire in our
native language.
Usually tied up with speaking as a skill is listening. It is a complex process that involves
the understanding of spoken data and involves receptive, interpretative, or constructive
cognitive processes (Rost, 2005).

Speaking is the second language skill. This vocalized form of language usually
requires at least one listener. When two or more people speak or talk to each other, the
conversation is called a "dialogue". Speech can flow naturally from one person to
another in the form of dialogue.
Speaking is a complex process that involves simultaneous attention to content,
vocabulary, discourse, information structuring, morphosyntax, sound system, prosody,
and pragmalinguistic features (Hinkel, 2006).
The goals focus on pronunciation, fluency, dialect, intonation, stress rhythm,
interaction, practice and communication. The goal of teaching speaking skills is
communicative efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves understand,
using their current proficiency to the fullest. 
Reading
Traditionally, people imagine reading as a simple process that is linear and passive.
However, more recent views have established that it is a complex cognitive process of
decoding written symbols. It is a “linguistic, socio-cultural, physical and cognitive
activity” (CPDD, 2010, p. 31) which involves getting meaning from and putting meaning
to the printed text. This definition implies that reading and reading comprehension are
essentially the same meaning. Reading, in many instances, requires simultaneous
application of skills and subprocesses, such as identifying author’s mood and purpose,
identifying main ideas, context clues, analysis, evaluation, recognizing and assigning
meaning to words, constructing meanings at sentence and discourse levels, and relating
such meanings to the readers’ already existing knowledge (Graves, Juel, & Graves,
1998
Skimming:

    Reading for skimming refers to an extensive reading.  It means that you read a text
quickly and generally to get the general ideas of the text.  This is applied when you deal
with a long comprehension text.  If you have ever attended English classes, you have
probably been asked to skim a text and then complete a task connected with it. This is
one of the activities you have to do in an exam/test. Most teachers encourage students
to read very quickly, just to get the main points out of the text. Reading in such a way
not only isn't very useful but may even slow down your progress!

Scanning:

     Reading for scanning refers to an intensive reading.  It means that you read a text
slowly and intensively to get the specific meanings and information of a text.  When
you read in your native language, you read for content. Your brain focuses on key
words that convey the meaning of the text. This way you are able to read faster. But
this is wrong to do when reading in a foreign language. You want to concentrate on the
grammar, too.You should analyze the sentences closely.This is applied when you deal
with a close text.  Comprehension, Act of or capacity for grasping with the intellect. The
term is most often used in connection with tests of reading skr 8 ills and language
abilities, though other abilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) may also be examined.

Writing Writing refers to the act of putting ideas in text whether print or nonprint. It is a “non-
linear, exploratory, and generative process” as they discover ideas and reformulate them
(Zamel, 1983, p.165)

Viewing The dominance of visual media in our lives today has led to the inclusion of viewing in
the language macroskills. It refers to perceiving, examining, interpreting, and construction
meaning from visual images and is crucial to improving comprehension of print and nonprint
materials.

Viewing is the fifth macro-skill today. It refers to perceiving, examining, interpreting,

and construction meaning from visual images and is crucial to improving comprehension
of print and nonprint materials. This is the skill to be taught as the learners are exposed
on multimedia. To make it possible, they should have strong media and visual literacies.
https://www.slideshare.net/Mariumkumailraza/difference-betweem-receptive-and-
productive-skills
http://www.bchmsg.yolasite.com/skills.php
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
292843457_Key_Concepts_in_Teaching_Macroskills
https://www.national-u.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/JSTAR-6_Barrot.pdf