The Correlation on English Learners Receptive 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 Hypothesis, Swain's Output Hypothesis and China's context of ELT, an experimental research was carried out. The statistical package SPSS 10.0 was used to compute the coefficients between the different variables. The 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 suggest a variety of measures to improve the ELT in China, such as improvement of course design, increasing input, valuing the teaching of vocabulary and son.