Strategies In Learning English 4 Skills

Listening

According to Bulletin (1952), listening is one of the fundamental language skills. It's a medium through which children, young people and adults gain a large portion of their education--their information, their understanding of the world and of human affairs, their ideals, sense of values, and their appreciation. In this day of mass communication (much of it oral), it is of vital importance that our pupils be taught to listen effectively and critically, he says.

Listening to and understanding speech involves a number of basic processes, some depending upon linguistic competence, some depending upon previous knowledge that is not necessarily of a purely linguistic nature, and some depending upon psychological variables that affect the mobilization of these competence and knowledge in the particular task situation. The listener must have a continuous set to listen and understand, and as he hears the utterance, he may be helped by some kind of set to process and remember the information transmitted. His linguistic competence enables him, presumably, to recognize the formatives of the heard utterance, i. e. , to dissect out of the wave form of the morphemes, words, and other meaning-bearing elements of the utterance.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Reading

According to Burhan (2012: 9), reading is a physic and mental activity to reveal the meaning of the written texts, while in that activity there is a process of knowing letters. It says a physic activity because the parts of the body, our eyes particularly, do it. And it says mental activity because perception and memory as parts of though are involved in it. He then concludes that the main goal of reading is a process of comprehending written texts.

Dealing of it, Cline et.al (2006: 2), states that reading is decoding and understanding written texts. Decoding requires translating the symbols of writing system (including Braille) into the spoken words which they represent. Understanding is determined by the purposes for reading, the context, the nature of the text, and the readers’ strategies and knowledge. Further, Cline et.al (2006: 2) in their second definition states that reading is the process of deriving meaning from the text. For the majority of readers, this process involves decoding written text. Some individuals require adaptation such as Braille or auditorization to support the decoding process. Understanding is determined by the purposes for reading, the context, the nature of the text, and the reader’s strategies and knowledge.

And based on the experts quotation above, I then define reading as the process of decoding and understanding of a writing system into the spoken words they represent and at the same time analyze the meaning or the messages of the text by paying attention to the intonation, stressing and pronunciation.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Writing

According to Tarigan (1985:5) writing is productive skills for writing an indirect communication and the nature of the character is very different from that expressed by speaking directly, therefore writing is included an ability, according to Harmer (2001:79) writing is a form of comunication to deliver throught or to express feeling through written form. Suparno, Jonah (2006:14) argues that writing is a series of activities going on and involve several phases, the preparatory phase, the content development and review, as well as revisions or improvements posts,Jonah (2006:29) argues that writing can be used as an indirect means of communication to others to convey information. Activities is not easy to write because writing should be able to produce something new and can give you an idea or ideas to the reader through writing. another definition of writing is proposed by Nation (2009:112) who states that writing is an activity that can usefully be prefared for by work in other skills of listening, speaking, and reading. This preparation can make it possible for words that have been used receptively to come into productive use.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Speaking

According to  Thornbury (2005: 1) speaking is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted. The average person produces tens of thousands of words a day, although some people – like auctioneers and politicians – may produce even more than that. So natural and integral is speaking that we forget how we once struggled to achieve this ability – until, that is, we have to learn how to do it all over again in a foreign language.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Conclusion:

I think the four skills learned in English is actually not so difficult to understand. But depending on the desire and willingness to master the four skills. So many books or learning materials on the Internet that allows us to understand and be able to practice it.