Language skills: questions for teaching and learning Amos Paran This paper surveys some of the changes in teaching the four language skills in the past 15 years. It focuses on two main changes for each skill: understanding spoken language and willingness to communicate for speaking; product, process, and genre approaches and a focus on feedback for writing; extensive reading and literature for reading; and decoding and metacognitive awareness for listening. This overview, however, suggests that changes in theoretical understandings and in teacher training often do not filter down to the classroom and that change is context dependent to a very high degree. Overall, some of the changes that have been at work in language teaching since the 1970s may not have reached classrooms in compulsory education around the world. Introduction Summarizing a decade and a half of change in the language classroom is difficult enough, but additional factors make this enterprise even more problematic. Some of these are discussed in the concluding sections of this paper, but one issue which needs to be laid out in the open at the very beginning is the continuing, paradoxical separation of language skills. This separation contrasts with our understanding of language use as entailing a relationship between at least two skills (and often more), with our understanding of the importance of context in all language use, and with current views of literacy and oracy. However, from a pedagogical point of view, there are arguments for focusing on skills in isolation at least some of the time. The four main sections of this paper therefore focus on each skill in turn and describe two important developments or current characteristics for each. I then attempt to draw these points together to provide an overview of the changes and the way they link to the ELT landscape at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Teaching speaking Understanding spoken language The most obvious changes in this area have been in our view of what teaching speaking entails. This involves issues as varied as the connection between teaching speaking and teaching pronunciation, teaching aspects of conversation, teaching long turns, issues of teaching spoken grammar, and the increasing pedagogical implementation of previous understandings of conversation and pragmatics. The most ELT Journal Volume 66/4 Special issue October 2012; doi:10.1093/elt/ccs045 450 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.