Difference Between Receptive and Productive Skills

This article is going to discuss about the difference between receptive and productive skills.

In English Language Teaching (ELT) we know two groups of skills. They are receptive skills and productive skills. Receptive skills are listening and reading, productive skills are speaking and writing.

Receptive Skills

Listening and reading are called receptive skills because we use our sense to receive the skills. In listening we use ears and in reading we use our eyes.

In receptive skills, we tend to be passive. We just listen to listening materials or someone talking and read some text.

In receptive skills, our brain just wait and see. After that we respond using our gesture or utterance.

Productive Skills

Speaking and writing is called productive skills because we use our productive sense. We use our mouth to produce utterance and our hands to produce writing.

In productive skills, our brain is active. It moves our mouth to speak up. We talk something that is processed by our brain. The brain also makes our hands moving. It appears an idea then produces a text or a passage.