What are the four language skills?
The Occupational English Test (often referred to as OET) is an international English
language exam for the healthcare industry. It evaluates the linguistic communication abilities
of medical professionals who want to register and work in a country where English is the
primary language.
There are four types of language skills in OET and they are explained as follows:
a. Listening
● It is one of the four linguistic abilities
● It consists of a sender, a message, and a recipient
● It is a psychological process that involves:
- Receiving messages
- Putting meaning together from it
- Reacting to vocal and nonverbal cues
● In listening, there are further five (5) processes and they are:
- Hearing
➔ It is sound waves acting as the ears’ sensory receptors
➔ It is a visceral reaction
➔ Listening requires listening, whereas hearing does not need attending
➔ Hearing is the perception of sound waves
➔ The term “attention” refers to the selected impressions that result from
the brain’s processing of the many inputs that it receives
➔ Effective listening needs a lot of attention - Understanding
➔ Understanding is correctly interpreting the message that has been
received and extrapolating its meaning from prior associations
➔ The listener must get the intended meaning and context that the sender
assumes for successful interpersonal communication - Remembering
➔ The process of hearing involves listening and then remembering or
memorizing
➔ It indicates that the person receiving the message has heard it,
understood it, and stored it in their mind
➔ Our listening attention is sometimes selective, so what we ramble on
about may be very different from what Sean or the listener first heard
- Evaluating
➔ At this point in the listening process, only attentive listeners take part
➔ Active listeners in this step: evidence weight, distinguish truth from
opinion, and determines if bias is present or not in the communication
➔ Only after listening to the message, not at the beginning, should the
listener begin judging it - Responding
➔ In this phase, the person receiving the message provides verbal or
nonverbal responses to the speaker (or sender). The speaker can use
this information to ascertain whether or not the message has been
understood
➔ The sender can assess the degree of message transmission success
through feedback
b. Reading
● The most difficult skill to teach young children is reading
● The most challenging and intriguing talent to teach is this one
● Reading requires a variety of talents and cognitive abilities, thus it is not an
easy ability to master
● There isn’t a single, flawless approach to teaching reading because each
method has its own drawbacks
● There are no limits to what a youngster can do if they are effectively
introduced to reading books
● We cannot refer to a child’s reading as sound until they can comprehend what
they are reading or link it to something else they already understand
● To put it briefly, reading is the process of locating printed words
c. Writing
● The major reason we write is to communicate with someone who is frequently
not in front of us
● We write a lot only to keep anything alive, whether a memory, an idea, or a
piece of knowledge