Micro skill

Richards proposes that the following are the micro-skills involved in
understanding what someone says to us.The listener has to:

• Retain chunks of language in short-term memory.
• Discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language.
• Recognize stress and rhythm patterns,tone pallerns,intonational contours.
• Recognize reduced forms of words.
• Distinguish word boundaries.
• Recognize typical word-order patterns.
• Recognize vocabulary.
• Detect key words,such as those identifying topics and ideas.
• Guess meaning from context.
• Recognize grammatical word classes.
• Recognize basic syntactic patterns.
• Recognize cohesive devices.
• Detect sentence constituents,such as
• subject,verb,object,prepositions,and the like.