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“Why productive skills (speaking and writing) is (to me) the most important” It seems that in the modern world, where millions of people are trying to produce their own material, videos, reports (and so on) to be uploaded in media such as youtube or to be given at professional presentations, productive skills are normally the most forgotten skill exercised in English language courses. I do not know the reason for this. It could be perhaps because receptive skills are the first skills developed in a person? I ask myself this question very often. It is very common to see people who can understand English very well but have an awful time producing texts or speeches. This issue has always called my attention and it is something I have seen constantly throughout my professional career as Lieutenant in the Argentine Navy. The reason for this it seems to me (and I am assaying an answer here) it is because people are mostly exposed to English only in a passive/receptive manner...such as listening to music, watching movies, reading from the TV and so on, but they are very rarely (if ever) in their lives exposed with the real need to produce anything in English. Then suddenly appears the need to produce a conference or a video or a text in English and panic and disaster strike. Facing this situation, most of us then try to improve our language skills by taking courses, but again they don't seem to focus on these type of skills, but the same scheme of receptive/passive learning is repeated. It could be just my ignorance, but I have never seen such courses and I would love there to be out there courses purely dedicated to productive skills rather than just general skills. It might seem like I am just speaking for myself, but I can assure I am not. Also, it does not help this situation the fact that most of the sources of English we are exposed to such as DVD players, tv shows, radio, music, movies (and so on) don't allow any opportunity for productive skills. Only now Google has developed a voice recognition application in which the person must talk and if their pronunciation is good enough, the computer will reflect that by writing the word on the screen, but let's face it, nobody I know has ever used it nor even knows it exists. An application like this I think It could be a great tool to create new types of courses, or, at least new techniques to apply in regular English courses, which I have never seen being employed. I don't intend to be an expert in the design of language courses at all, but it's my humble essay about the main difficulty most non-native English speakers face, which leads them to embarrassing situations or hinders their careers when they are unable for example to travel abroad and make international presentations or going to job interviews abroad. The reason I picked up this topic is that I feel like it is an issue most language courses neglect to address. And I am just reflecting on one possible solution. If I have the fortune of ever becoming an English teacher, It is something I would love to put in practice and learn more from my experience. Especially because I know well what is the most common issues in learners around me. I´d like to thank you for taking the time to read my essay. Kind regards, Pedro Parica
