Study On The Correlation Between Receptive Skills And Productive Skills

This paper focuses on investigating the relationship between receptive skills (reading skills and listening skills) and productive skills (writing skills and speaking skills) of EFL. Based on Krashen's Input and Swain's Output Hypothesis and also China's context of ELT, an experimental research was carried out. The statistical package SPSS was used to compute the coefficients between the different variables, and also t-test was used to check the result. The experimental result shows that receptive skills and productive skills are significantly related, but the correlation was not very strong in practice, especially between reading and writing(r=0.183), reading and speaking (r=0.297). The findings of this study demonstrate that receptive skills have an indirect influence on productive skills, with vocabulary as the medium. We also find that input-output-combined instruction is more effective and efficient in developing learner's productive skills than input-dominated instruction is. We suggest a variety of measures to improve the ELT in China, such as computer-assisted instruction, improvement of course design and textbook and so on.