The nature of speaking skill

Speaking is a productive skill. As such, its development is undertaken in terms of activity after the receptive skill of listening and reading comprehension. Thus, speaking and writing are always behind of the receptive skills. However, speaking and listening in terms of medium relate to the language expressed through the aural medium and reading and writing expressed through the visual medium (Muhayyang, 2003: 13). The description can be expressed as following table:

Table 1: Description of language skills

According to Jabu (1995) describes that aural/visual and productive/receptive refer to the way language is manifested rather than to the way it is realized in communication. It might be convenient to represent the language skills as shown, however, when considering usage, it is not especially helpful, and indeed it might be positively misleading to represent it in this way considering use. 

Furthermore, he pointed out that the distinction between usage and use relates to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance. The notion of competence has to do with language user’s knowledge of abstract linguistics rules. 

by : Devi