Those with any classroom experience will recognize the impossibility of maintaining the pace of an oral class for one hour with no stimulus (written, audio, video). To a certain extent speaking always has to be a skill integrated with listening, just as reading goes hand-in-hand with writing, and there are always further crossovers between skills. Assessing reading, for example, usually requires some form of written or spoken production in order to measure comprehension, as does assessing listening. This is why Brumfit (1984: 70) reclassified the four skills as:

1. conversation / discussion;
2. comprehension;
3. extended writing;
4. extended speaking.

This imitates more precisely what people actually do with language, which is, to a large extent, what we are trying to replicate in a student of modern languages.