The importance of soft skills for students

In language teaching we often focus on language hard skills. Grammar, grammatical accuracy, having a wide vocabulary, getting the spelling right, being able to pronounce ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ differently, and so on.
But then we have soft skills - the ability to relate to and interact successfully with other people. Aren’t they also necessary for successful communication?
In this session we will talk more about what these soft skills are, why they are necessary for language learning, how a lack of them can impact successful language acquisition, and how we can help students get better at them.