Role of ‘Thinking’ and ‘Understanding’ as Two Other Major Skills in Learning a Language: A Pedagogical Interpretation

Abstract

It is a long established notion that learning a language means becoming skilled in the four major skills- Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing. Without being expert in the aforementioned skills, language learning is quite impossible. But thereare other two skills like ‘Thinking’ and ‘Understanding’ which appear to be essentially important and also play a vital role in the arena of learning a language. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to focus on these two new skills as the major ones along with the basic four skills and their integrated role in the process of an in-depth learning of a language. Not only this, this paper will also show how these two skills can be taught and assessed by applying some techniques in the classrooms to make language learning a success.

Keywords: Language, skills, thinking, understanding, classroom techniques