_____ is the first step for learning a language. I. Speaking II. Listening

Concept — A language is made up of four skills that develop in a fixed order: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing (the L-S-R-W sequence proposed by J. A. Bright). Listening and reading are receptive skills, used to take language in; speaking and writing are productive skills, used to send language out. Acquisition is input-driven, so a receptive skill must always be established before the matching productive skill can appear.

Application — The stem offers two of those four skills: Speaking, the productive oral skill, and Listening, the receptive aural skill. In the L-S-R-W sequence Listening occupies position 1 and Speaking position 2. A child passes through a long silent period, absorbing the sound system, rhythm and vocabulary of the language from the environment for many months before the first word is produced, and the same input-before-output pattern is built into second-language teaching, where an initial comprehension-only stage precedes any demand for oral production. Listening is therefore the entry point of language learning.

Cross-check — Testing each of the offered choices against that sequence:

• “Only I” places speaking at the start, which would require a learner to produce sound patterns never received; no acquisition model supports output without prior input.

• “Both I and II” merges reception and production into one opening stage, whereas L-S-R-W keeps them as two separate, ordered stages — 1 and 2.

• “Neither I nor II” leaves reading or writing to open the sequence, but those are stages 3 and 4 and both rest on the oral-aural base built earlier.

Result — Listening (II) is the first step for learning a language, so the correct choice is “Only II”.