Receptive Skills as a Bridge to Deeper Language Understanding

When we talk about teaching language, we always think about speaking, listening, writing and reading; but now, let’s just focus on reading and listening, in other words, the receptive skills.

This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Mirazo L. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.

Why do we read or listen?

The answers are: we do read or listen in teaching receptive skills because we need to know some instructions as how to control a video recorder which is not an usual task for a normal people so our a motivation must be higher than other in rather understand the difference between reading with passion and read a favorites book and listen to somebody who is not familiar with us ... some advice, some map directions.

So, in general, we deal with the reasons and motives for reading and listen. So why are we using the reception skills for a purpose and entertainment? Why for a purpose because it's very useful when we want to attend some particular aim or goal. Entertainment because we are looking for maximum satisfaction in it especially a particular moment which tends to the sum mum of happiness of knowing every word with based on your expectation as several numbers of specialist skills withdraw from the reading and listen.

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And final the understanding of the context will depend on their expertise in this area. They are 5 specialist skills when it's related to reading and listening. They are predictive skills who generally make the content of predicting of an article or dialogue from the headline or introduction. Following by the specific information - scamming of usually used for specific information when a particulate story comes up and the third is general idea skimming which focuses on the understanding of the contents. The fourth is detailed information which is to get a general understanding of every detailed instruction and manner to gain full benefit and the last specialist skills are a deduction from the context which is very important to deduce the meaning of individual words or phrases from the context.

The way we use specialist skills only depends on our interest in the information that we receive at the moment. When we teach the reading and listening, we might face some problems like the way students read with the length of the text and the structure, the accent of the teacher, the speed of the speech and the information that the teacher may give. Sometimes, the students may feel that the course does not fit their interests.

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How to bypass such problems?

If the teacher wants to get more attention and motivation from students, he/she must know first how are his/her students, their age, their interests then choose carefully the topic that he/she wants to teach them, next teacher can instruct in advance some vocabularies and grammar to help students understand the meaning of the texts and make sure that students can take part of the discussion in the class about the topics that they learned.

When we teach reading and listening, we often use the PATCHWORK ESA lesson. To engage the students, the first teacher must introduce the subject but he/she does not give many details about it. We can take the singer Adele as an example. The teacher must let students talk in English as much as possible; ask students some information about her and what they want to know about her, who is she? What is she doing? … This can help the teacher to create interest for students, and students can practice skinning or scanning skills. Then comes the first study phase, where the teacher teaches some helpful vocabularies and keyword about Adele and the fact that she is a singer, and to help students to have a foundation about her and understand what it is the topic about.

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After that, the second engage phase takes its place and the teacher must read a full version of the text concerning the subject to help students for their grasp and then let them answer the comprehension question, get feedback and receive correction from the teacher.

Students must take part as much as possible in the English class so maybe they can give short information about the subject, how is their knowledge about it, and at the end of this first activate phase, teacher can correct errors made from students and let the students express in their turn who is their favorites famous personalities and give biography about them without mentioning their names.

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There are some basic keys if we want to succeed in our teaching receptive skills lesson. We must choose very attentively the materials that we want to use because the interest and motivation of the students depend on that. We need to take our time to set up audience participation before reading and listening courses. Sometimes, it is necessary to teach complex vocabulary but it is not a must and nowadays a lot of games are very efficient by using them in the classroom which is an attractive activity and encourage the student to talk in English as long as they can. We should use simple and realistic reading comprehension to help easily the students with their understanding.

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