Using language can be considered a skill because it has these features:

• Language use is goal-directed and involves prioritizing and selection
  We select language and prioritize certain aspects of language performance depending on our goal, ie what we wish to communicate, to whom and in what way. For example, we may emphasize clear articulation when speaking on the phone to a non-native speaker. In conversation with a friend, we may use thingummy or whatsit to avoid interrupting the communication to search for a specific word. Conversely, in academic discussion, we may slow up our rate of speech in order to formulate our ideas more precisely.
  
  
• Language use involves constant monitoring
  We constantly assess how we are speaking and whether our message is being communicated. If we don't get the right feedback, aspects of our performance deteriorate. Most people, for example, find it hard to continue speaking if they do not have eye-contact with their interlocutor(s) which indicates successful 'reception'. Similarly, when we read or listen, we establish initial interpretations of the words we process and then monitor the incoming text for further confirmation of these interpretations.
  
  
• Using language requires automatization of subskills
  To use language, we have to learn to integrate a whole hierarchy of subskills from the lower-order perceptual motor skill of articulating words, to the higher-order cognitive skill of clarifying in our minds the idea we wish to communicate. In between we have to retrieve lexical items required from memory (the result of what Klein in section 2.1.1.1 calls 'analysis'), integrate lexical items within appropriate syntactic structures, add appropriate morphological marking (Klein's 'synthesis'), check the meaning of what we are about to say and fit it effectively into the conversation (Klein's 'embedding'). While doing all of this, we have to monitor whether our listener has understood or not and on the basis of this information, plan our next utterance. (Klein mentions that second language learners also need to monitor what they say to see whether it matches what they hear native speakers saying - what he refers to as 'matching'). Viewed in this way, it's surprising that anybody ever achieves fluency in any language! But, of course, in order to use language fluently, we have to automatize many of the lower-order skills, such that we are generally not aware of our movements of articulation, nor of searching for a word in memory, nor of adding morphological marking.

(For further discussion, see Johnson, 1996: 38-44.)

Reflective task 12