To deconstruct a skill, you must first identify what is actually happening.
- What are the physical movements performed?
- What steps are there, and how do they affect the outcome?
While you're deconstructing the skill it would be a very good idea to imagine various projects you could do with each to improve them.
To get a general feel for the skill you should gather up some Resources and skim them. That will help you determine some overall patterns of action. What do you actually do, and how can you improve that? 60-80% of the skill is likely to be a tiny fraction of skill elements.
example: learning to touch type.
You see people pressing typing without looking at the keyboard
Looking harder you see that their fingers jump from each key to the next efficiently working as a team.
- Knowledge of the language being used
- Ability to think of sentences on the fly
- recall of where each key is and what it does (possibly reflexive or conscious remembering)
- proper placement of hands
- sense of which fingers to use for what keys
- Pressing the space bar after each word (this is such a reflexive skill I'd entirely forgotten I was even doing it. Creepy!)
Of these, the single most important is is recall of where each key is. Knowing the language is less important if you're just trying to be able to produce an arbitrary symbol without looking.
An exercise to improve key recall would be to open a text editor, take a big chunk of text, and then type each work while looking, and then repeat the word without looking. After you've gone through the text, try to do the whole thing without looking.
knowledge skills
Knowledge based skills are a little bit more difficult. I consider each category of knowledge to be separate sub-skill, but you might just group that all together.
Rough skill deconstruction of language:
- Alphabet letter writing
- Alphabet letter identification
- Alphabet pronunciation
- Verbal word identification
- Verbal transcription to alphabet
- Common phrases
- conjugation of “to be” as well as “to have”, et al
- Grammar rules
- Conjugation of regular verbs
- Tenses: past, present, future
- names
- verbs
- nouns
- counting/numbers
- directions
- dates
- articles
- pronouns
- conjugations
- prepositions