I am the original writer of the question. Here is more info: I am working on a 3-year syllabus which now must be certified by a university board in France. My company is a private sector company with a large contract in higher education for specific professional training at the post-secondary level. I originally designed my curriculum around the four skills (passive: reading/listening, active: speaking, writing --with the 3 sub areas of grammar, vocab and pronunciation) as I did for years in Tokyo in the 80s/90s as my team in a post-secondary institution followed the fashions in ESL such as the natural approach, functions-based syllabus, task-based curriculum, etc. The four skills always remained no matter what happened in ESL academia. Here in France my university auditors balked when I didn't know about the recently added and 'well known' skill of "Interaction". I can't find it anywhere on internet in English. Are my concepts so outdated or is this a French thing? In French I can find it mentioned briefly on the French ministry of education's website: "take part in a converstion." My auditors mentioned spontaneous speech. But like pronunciation, don't these interaction skills, according to what I can find so far in French, fall under the skill of speaking? I can't conceptualize it as a separate and therefore sovereign fifth skill. So anyone with access to recent ESL journals or ESL conferences-- please respond if you have any knowledge about this supposedly new fifth skill.
By the way to continue with the thread that my original question wove, fifth skill candidates could be 'critical thinking skills', 'learning strategies' and 'cross-cultural awareness'. None of these qualify because they are not specifically related to learning a language.