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Unit 11 covered teaching receptive (reading and listening) skills This unit helped me to consider the needs of these two receptive skills in a detailed way that I'd never done before. The unit gave clear ways to most effectively teach students in a way that they not only learn, but they are able to maintain an interest in the learning material. There are four basic skills in any language and are equally important- > Receptive skills: reading and listening > Productive skills: speaking and writing The reason we read or listen to someone or something has two main possible motivations: > For a purpose > For entertainment > Often our reading and listening is a mix of these two motives How we read and listen: Our minds must not only be able to recognize and understand the words but also be able to grasp their overall meaning from a pre-existing knowledge of the world. This "pre-existent knowledge" is built based on our past and present living situations. Often this is greatly affected by the country we live in as well as the environment in which we grew up. Readers and listeners employ a number of specialist skills when reading or listening, and their understanding of the context will depend on their expertise in these areas. > Predictive skills: i.e., being able to predict the content of an article from its headline > Scanning for specific information: We can quickly assess if the article has information relevant to what we are interested in knowing, or not. We also learn to quickly assess what we hear to determine if the topic at hand is of interest to us. When we find/hear what we are interested in, we quickly "tune in" to concentrate on what is written/being spoken. > Skimming for a general idea: Sometimes we just want/need the gist or a general understanding of an article, and so we skim through it very quickly. Often this is used to determine if the article is relevant to us and we should read more carefully or not. > Concentrate for detailed information: We listen or read carefully so that we not only gain detailed information from what is written/being spoken, but we often also seek to maintain an understanding of the order of information that was provided. The order is especially pertinent in directions. > Deduction from context: We can learn to understand words that we don't know the meaning of through the context of the sentence. We can also deduce the meaning and intent of a statement beyond its literal content. The teaching and learning of receptive skills presents a number of challenges and potential problems that will need to be addressed. However, a teacher can minimize the difficulty in learning these skills by being mindful of the different things that could be an obstacle for different learners. Following are the main areas that will present difficulty, and ways the teacher can address these obstacles: > Language - Sentence length, word length and the number of unfamiliar words can present a challenge to learners of English. This is especially true of listening as compared to reading, because listeners have no time to deduce the meaning of what is being said, and can usually only hear it once. A couple of ways to help these challenges are: 1. Pre-teaching vocabulary. This can help give the student not feel so overwhelmed when reading or listening to an excerpt. However, a sensible solution is to only pre-teach the words that are essential to understanding and leaving other vocabulary work until later. 2. Careful selection of texts. The teacher can choose non-authentic texts built for the current level of the students, and authentic texts (selected to help cement the things the students already know) to give the students confidence in their receptive skills. > Topics - The topic of the text or dialogue can help to motivate the students. A student will be more motivated to read or listen to material beyond their current learning if it is a topic that interests them. This can inspire learning. The teacher will be most successful if he/she gets to know the students and their interests. Of course different students will have different interests, so really, a variety of topics, over time, will make sure that each student finds something interesting in a receptive skills lesson. > Create interest - Beyond an interesting topic and ensuring the text is well suited to the learners, a teacher can create interest in the tasks by using engage activities that create an enthusiastic response to the topic that will be used. Showing pictures and predicting what the text will be about are other ways a teacher can engage the students on the topic at hand. > Comprehension Tasks - The teacher needs to provide comprehension tasks that promote understanding, as opposed to just checking understanding. A good task should present a challenge that is realistically achievable. In conclusion: The basic keys to successful receptive skill lessons are - > Choose material that interests/motivates the students > Build interest before reading/listening > Pre-teach complex vocabulary or structures if necessary, but don't overdo it! > Vary the type of material > Use the material to practice different skills > Use realistic comprehension tasks that aid understanding > Incorporate activate phases that naturally lead on from the text