EL 74-TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACRO SKILLS

UNIT 1: An Overview on the Teaching of the Macro Skills

Lesson 4: Connection of Vocabulary, Grammar and Literature to the Macro Skills

Learning Objectives:
At the end of the lesson, the students will be able to:
1. Determine the connection of Vocabulary, Grammar and Literature to the Macro Skills
2. Differentiate macro skills and micro skills

Presentation of Content

English Language has 5 main skills and each skill has other sub-skills and skill
activities. The main skills are all basic and very important. They are called the Macro
skills. Macro skills refer to the primary, key, main, and largest skill relative to a
particular context. It is commonly referred to in English language as the four macro skills
are reading, listening, writing, and speaking.

On the other hand, Micro skills concerns on understanding the speakers’

utterance. Brown (2007) offers a simplified list of micro-skills and macro-skills.
The macro-skills isolate the skills that relate to the discourse level of organization, while
those that remain at sentence level continue to be called micro-skills.

Richard (1983) and Brown (2007) exemplified the micro skills of listening;
discrimination among sounds, recognition of vocabularies, detecting keywords, and
recognition of grammatical structure. Haroun Abdo (2020) also added some micro skills
for listening which includes: eliciting the meaning through understanding word formation
and contextual clues in utterances and spoken text, recognizing phonological
features of speech, understanding relationships between the syntactic and
morphological characteristic of spoken language.

Mishra (2013) also gave some micro skills for Reading, which she labeled as “sub
skills”: global comprehension, Skimming and Scanning, and understanding Discourse
Markers.

Global Comprehension, or the ability to get ‘over-all’ meaning from a text,

requires the sub-skill of skimming for example, reading through the text at high speed in
order to identify and pick up the main idea or ideas in the text while ‘filtering out’ the
unnecessary details. Discourse markers are ‘sign posts’ provided by the writer. These are
used in a text to indicate sequence of ideas and signal the writer’s point of view.
Understanding the writer’s use of discourse markers is an important sub-skill of reading.
These signposts are helpful because they indicate to the reader the relationship between
two parts of the text.
 EL 74-TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT OF THE MACRO SKILLS

Perero (2019) claimed these micro skills that are imperative in writing
include: punctuating correctly, planning, forming letters, paragraphing, using the
appropriate layout, proof-reading.

Lackman (2010) also stated some speaking micro skills on his book entitled,
“Teaching Speaking Sub-Skills”: Fluency, speaking with a logical flow without planning or
rehearsing, accuracy with words & pronunciation, using words, structures and
pronunciation accurately, appropriacy, using language appropriate for a situation and
making decisions about formality and choice of grammar or vocabulary, responding and
initiating, managing a conversation by making responses, asking for a response or
introducing a new topic or idea, repair and repetition, repeating or rephrasing parts of a
conversation when they suspect that what was said was not understood.

Donaghy, K. (2019) cited skills necessary for viewing: analysis and evaluation of
visual texts and multimodal texts that use visuals, Acquiring information and
appreciating ideas & experiences visually communicated by others. Determine the
difference between fact and underlying message portrayed in visuals and between real or
imaginary images, use pragmatic, textual, syntactic, semantic, graph phonic and
other cues(e.g., the visual elements and techniques used) to construct and confirm
meaning, recall and summarize main points, important details, and techniques
employed .

What is the connection of the macro-skills with vocabulary, grammar, and literature?

Macro-skills are the primary ability that involves the process of developing our
knowledge and competency. Each of our macro-skills works on improving certain ability
to comprehend components of language that includes the vocabulary, grammar and
literature. The fluency and accuracy within these components boils down on how we
improve and develop our macro-skills. Greatly developing one’s macro skills
promotes communicative competence, which involves the competency on the
appropriate use of vocabulary, grammar and literature. Our macro-skills namely,
listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and representing, play a key role in
fostering learners’ competence. Since these skills are vital in the manifestations of
interpreting and producing a spoken or written piece of discourse (literature) as well as a
way of manifesting the rest of the components of a language (vocabulary and grammar).