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This unit went in depth into the receptive language skills which are reading and listening. While I agree that each of the four basic language skills are very important to learn, I believe that in a classroom setting, listening and production are probably the most difficult for 2nd language learners. I say this because students probably have a lot more experience reading and writing, as they are very easy to do individually. Listening and reading are also two different processes when it comes to language processing, and different skills are at work when performing each one. It is true that when a student is reading, they have the benefit of being able to take in the language over and over again, but they also have the benefit of the sentences being pre-parsed. Each word is completed and separated by spaces. The student only needs to be able to take in the characters of the word, understand how they come together, and then find the meaning of the word in their mental lexical library. With listening, the student has to parse what seems to be a string of sounds. And since most speakers tend to cut corners with language production (ex. saying 'wanna' instead of 'want to'), the level of difficulty in listening rises even more. Because of this, each skill must be treated and taught differently.
