Abbott, Texas TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit illustrates 4 essential skills in term of English teaching. They are receptive (reading and listening), and productive skills (speaking and writing). In fact, all of these learning skills are equally significant, in which teachers should always aim to include all of them into their English lessons so that a balanced learning approach can be achieved for the benefit of students. This chapter also clearly explains to us a couple of specialist skills required when are reading and listening to facilitate understanding on the contents. These include “predictive skills”, “scanning skills for specific information”, “skimming skills to grasp general idea”, “ability to concentrate on and discover detailed information”, as well as “ability to deduce the meaning from context”. Meantime, listening and reading may often associate with some potential problems, e.g. sentence length, unfamiliar words, and inability to deduce meaning during listening etc. For this, one thing I have learnt is that one of the possible ways to tackle these barriers is to teach students pre-teaching difficult/unknown vocabulary before starting reading and listening activities. By doing so, it can help students better understand the wording; hence they should feel more comfortable with the receptive skills. Lastly, this unit also helps me to distinguish the difference between authentic and non-authentic texts. The former is to expose students to texts that should boost up their confidence in their skills, the latter helps students to access to materials that contain language which is more suitable to the students’ learning abilities.