Au Sable, Michigan TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

After reading this chapter, I learned that there are four basic skills in every language: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Reading and listening are receptive skills and writing and speaking are productive skills. Unit 11 focused on the importance of receptive skills, covered a variety of teaching techniques to aid students' learning and also listed activities that are helpful when practicing receptive skills. I learned that we can divide the reasons and motives for listening and reading into two categories: for a purpose and for entertainment. While reading and listening, people don't just use their eyes and ears, they use their minds to understand words and use pre-existent knowledge to gain true understanding. People also use a variety of skills to understand a context: predictive skills, scanning and skimming skills, paying attention to detailed information and deducting from context. I think it is important to include all of these skills equally while teaching receptive skills. Unit 11 also suggested techniques to make learning and practicing receptive skills fun and how to prevent potential learning problems. These include pre-teaching difficult vocabulary, carefully selecting texts (mainly using non-authentic texts and only some authentic texts) and lastly choosing a variety of interesting topics that you know your students will like. After reading this lesson, I was able to make my own lesson plan for teaching receptive skills which was great practice for me.