Ulan Hot, China TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit covered the two receptive skills - reading and listening. There are two different reasons for reading and listening - for a purpose and for entertainments. An example of reading for a purpose would be reading the instructions for a new game you bought; reading a novel would be an example of reading for pleasure. There are many different things going on when we read or listen - its is more than eyes and ears. In order to understand what is being read/heard, one must be able to grasp understanding from context and a knowledge of the vocabulary and phrases. There are many different ways to do this - through predictive skills, scanning, skimming, reading for detailed information and so on. When teaching receptive skills in a new language, students often have trouble with vocabulary. The best way to approach this while still allowing students to discover the language on their own is to pre-teach essential vocabulary and phrases before presenting students with reading or listening material. By having knowledge of essential vocabulary, they should be able to guess the full meaning from context. In order to engage students when teaching receptive skills, its is important to choose topics that they are interested in, create fun comprehension tasks to check their understanding, and use a variety of materials and topics. By engaging students effectively, strong reading and listening skills can be taught which are an essential part of language comprehension.