1. Differentiate receptive and Expressive macroskills.

Receptive macroskills is the ability to understand words and language. Much of

this type of skill is inferring communication from our environment and experiences.
For example, when we hear a siren, we know to get out of the way for an emergency
vehicle. Similarly, when a dog sees their owner grab a leash and put on a coat, they
become excited because experience has communicated it is time to go on a walk.
Receptive skill also is responsible for understanding concepts such as size, shape,
color, time, and sentence structure.

Expressive macroskills is the use of words, sentences, gestures, and writing to

create a message or convey a meaning. It is frequently associated with identifying
objects, describing events and how to do actions, create sentences and use correct
grammar. Children of the appropriate age also will have the ability to recall or tell a
story and answer involved questions. This is critical for social communication and
communication of needs, wants, and develop writing.

There are four basic language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing. They are
most commonly known as the “Microskills”.

The four basic skills are related to each other by the direction of communication:
receiving and expressing/producing the message.

Listening comprehension is the receptive skill in the oral mode. When we speak
of listening what we really mean is listening and understanding what we hear.

Speaking is the expressive skill in the oral mode. It, like the other skills, is more
complicated than it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words.
Speaking is often connected with listening. For example, the two-way communication
makes up for the defect in communicative ability in the traditional learning.

Reading is the receptive skill in the written mode. It can develop independently
of listening and speaking skills, but often develops along with them, especially in
societies with a highly-developed literary tradition. Reading can help build
vocabulary that helps listening comprehension at the later stages, particularly.

Writing is the productive skill in the written mode. It, too, is more complicated
than it seems at first, and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native
speakers of a language, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech,
but the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

These skills are proven to be intertwined according to language theoriticians.

They believed how receptive and expressive macroskills relate each other in building
the a person’s background in knowledge.

2. Differentiate macro- and microskills.

Aydoğan, H. (2014) said that language educators have long used the concepts of
four basic language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing. These four
language skills are sometimes called the "macro-skills". This is in contrast to the
"micro-skills", which are things like grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and
spelling.

When we learn a language, there are four skills that we need for complete
communication. When we learn our native language, we usually learn to listen first,
then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. These are called the four "language
skills".
The five skills of language (also known as the four skills of language learning)
are a set of four capabilities that allow an individual to comprehend and produce
spoken language for proper and effective interpersonal communication. These skills
are Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. In the context of first-language
acquisition, the four skills are most often acquired in the order of listening first, then
speaking, then possibly reading and writing. For this reason, these capabilities are
often called LSRW skills.

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 set
relative to a particular context. It is commonly referred to in English language. The
four macro skills are reading, listening, writing, and speaking.

Micro skills concerns on understanding the speakers’ utterance. Moreover, 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.

3. Give examples of microskills under macroskills (such as reading, listening,

writing, speaking, and viewing).

 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 microskills 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 microskills for Reading, which she labeled as
“subskills”: Global Comprehension, Skimming an Scanning, Understanding
Discourse Markers

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

requires the sub-skill of skimming i.e. 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. Skimming a text means going through it quickly to get an overall
idea of the content. We are not interested in details or any specific information while
skimming. Scanning on the other hand , involves searching the text for specific piece
of information in which the reader is interested. Discourse markers are ‘signposts’
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.

 Perero (2019) claimed these microskills that is imperative for writing:

punctuating correctly, planning, forming letters, paragraphing, using the
appropriate layout, proof-reading

 Lackman, (2010) also stated some Speaking microskills 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 .
 Relate what was seen to personal experience or needs .
 Analyze and evaluate what was seen (including elements, techniques, and
overall effect) (e.g., critique a video or drama review)
 Draw conclusions about the perspective and values found in what was seen.
 Express and support personal reactions to and opinions of the presentation
 Identify the strategies used to influence an audience (e.g., exaggeration, one-
sided view of a group, jolts)
 Seek additional information from other sources as needed or desired.

4. 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, plays 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).

5. What is viewing as a new macro-skill in teaching English? Why is there a

need to include this skill?

Viewing refers to perceiving, examining, interpreting, and construction meaning

from visual images and is crucial to improving comprehension of print and nonprint
materials. It is a process that supports oracy and literacy, and is a part of an integrated
language arts program. It involves interpreting the images for which words stand and
connecting visual images in videos, computer programs, and websites.
The dominance of visual media in our lives today has led to the inclusion of
viewing in the language macro-skills.

We are living in a visual world. The advent of the internet and the digital
revolution, the ubiquity of mobile devices which allow us to capture still and moving
images easily, the appearance of video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and
Vimeo, and the emergence of social media networks such as Instagram and Facebook
whose users upload largely visual content, have all contributed to an extraordinary
rise in visual communication and to the image, and increasingly the moving image,
becoming the primary mode of communication around the world.

With the inclusion of viewing in the macro-skills and proliferation of multimedia

technology, it is imperative that both speakers and listeners critically assess
audiovisual inputs and make meaning from them (Curriculum Planning &
Development Division, 2010).

6. What is representing as a language macroskill? Why is it important to include

such?
‘Representing’ as the sixth macroskill can de defined as the the ability to
recognize and create elements in different modes (Jewitt, 2006; Unsworth, 2008);
The ability to apply the affordances of modes in meaning making (Jewitt, 2006;
Kress, 2003; Martinec & Leeuwen, 2009); The ability to link elements of information
in different modes contextually in spatial or temporal layouts (Kress, 2010; Leeuwen,
2005); and The ability to navigate on screens (Leeuwen, 2005; Martinec & Leeuwen,
2009).
The meaning of literacy in the 21st century has changed markedly with emerging
and now dominant technologies: that is, the move away from writing to the new
digital text mode, and from the medium of the book to that of the monitor screen
(Kress, 2010). It is therefore important to extend the notion of literacy beyond the
traditional modes of listening, speaking, reading and writing to include digital text and
communication(Viewing & Representing). Contemporary language curricula in
schools need to incorporate emerging literacies (Jewitt, 2006; Kress, 2003; Martinec
& Leeuwen, 2009).

The escalation children’s engagement on different sites has resulted in their

quickly adapting to the different navigation potential of screens (Gee, 2003; Prensky,
2001b). They are also obtaining screen-based information with different layouts of
different mode composition (Walsh et al., 2007).

Based on this, there are skills to be derived from children's intuitive

understandings arising from their natural interactions with digital text. The skills
utilize but are additional to listening, speaking, reading and writing, and involve
frequent use of visuals, dynamic information, and interaction through digital text.
Such skills are categorized in the literature as viewing and representing (Kress,
2010; MOE Singapore, 2010).

TERMINOLOGY ACCOUNT:

 Cadence- a regular beat or rhythm. : the way a person's voice changes by gently
rising and falling while he or she is speaking.

 Dictogloss task- is a classroom dictation activity where learners are required to

reconstruct a short text by listening and noting down key words, which are then
used as a base for reconstruction.

 Morphosyntax - the study of grammatical categories or linguistic units that have

both morphological and syntactic properties. The set of rules that govern
linguistic units whose properties are definable by both morphological and
syntactic criteria.

 Pragmalinguistics - refers to the knowledge of the strategies for realizing speech

intentions and the linguistic items used to express these intentions.

 Prosody -refers to intonation, stress pattern, loudness variations, pausing, and

rhythm. We express prosody mainly by varying pitch, loudness, and duration. We
also may use greater articulatory force to emphasize a word or phrase when
speaking.

 Schema-based approach is grounded in capturing and using expert-generated

schemas as frameworks for teaching and learning. This approach is a
generalization and abstraction method designed to extract and condense as much
information as possible from a single example that is spoken or written.

 Sociopragmatics- refers to the knowledge of the social conditions governing

language use.
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