[ELTWeekly Volume 7, Issue 16 | August 31, 2015 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Key characteristics
- While learners’ receptive competence continues to develop, their productive competence remains relatively static.
- Language items that learners recognize and understand in the input they hear do not pass into their productive competence.
All language users have greater receptive competence (language they can understand) than productive competence (language they can produce). I can read great novels for example, but I could never write one. Traditionally, in language teaching we recognize this fact in the distinction between active and passive language knowledge, particularly in relation to vocabulary learning, where it is normally assumed that learners should be able to understand far more words than they can use. And it has generally been accepted that in second-language learning, new items first become part of learners’ receptive competence before becoming part of their productive competence.
Krashen (1982) proposed that in language teaching, more effort should be devoted to developing learners’ receptive competence than their productive competence. He claimed that learners’ productive ability will arise naturally from receptive knowledge. In particular, Krashen stressed that mean- ingful comprehension rather than focused production is all that is needed to facilitate language learning.