Teaching English usually involves four basic skills, namely listening, speaking, writing, and reading. The skills should be seen to complement one another to facilitate one’s language mastery. These four elements fall into two major categories, i.e. productive and receptive. Those which belong to the productive category are speaking and writing while those which join the receptive category are
listening and reading. Based on an observation that the researcher carried out to a number of students in a private school, a majority of students seemed to be able to master the receptive skills better as their scores demonstrated. In terms of their
learning motivation, it seemed the case that they also preferred listening to a story and reading than composing one. Yet, these students seemed to encounter more difficulties when faced with the productive ones. As a result, they tended not to enjoy the lessons related particularly to writing. |