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I learned in this unit about how to teach receptive skills to English learners. The two receptive skills in question are reading and listening. These skills are both equally important and play hand-in-hand to how a student perceives and learns the language. There are two reasons and motives that are wide-ranged. When you or a student reads for purposes there is a set goal to achieve, like when you read the instructions on how to set use your IKEA furniture. When reading for entertainment it could be a mix of both motives. For example, you can read a book because its enjoyable but it could also be apart of your homework for a class. Something interesting that was mentioned was that reading and listening doesn't just has to do with your eyes and ears, but your mind as well. Since I am a native English speaker I don't really think about that correlation all the time. It is that I don't know that we use our minds but it is not on the top of my list. When it mentioned that an English learner could know all the words in a headline separately but not get the right gist of a sentence because lack of English comprehensive skills. There are a lot of skills used in understanding the context of what is being read or listened to. Predictive skills are when a student tries to guess what the content of an article is solely based on the introduction or headline. Scanning is when look trough a text or something similar to find exactly what the reader is looking for, like scanning for the sports section in a newspaper. Skimming is when a reader will lightly look over a text or similar to get the basic idea of what they are reading or listening to. There are definitely times when we will read things to get a more detailed sense of things such as when reading instructions. We have to be more concentrated when we do this. Deduction from context is basically when you read something and try to figure out the meaning through using the context of that sentence. For instance if I don't know the meaning of a word in a passage that I have read, I will try to use the words and so on that are around it to find out the meaning of that work. There are still many problems that can arise with reading and listening. Things like sentence strength, word length, and the amount of words that are not familiar to the student can cause problems. Some ways to counteract these problems are the careful selection of texts and pre-teaching vocabulary. When you pre-teach vocabulary it should be more difficult words or words that are unknown to the student. Doing this before they start a reading or listening activity can potentially remove the issues that could be faced if they didn't know the vocabulary before. Carefully selecting texts is also important. The teacher would want to pick texts that interest all of their students and that are designed for language students. The main things that I picked up from this unit is that the teacher should pick material that interest or motivated their students, that difficult vocabulary should be taught before hand, make sure you vary the material you use, make sure your activate phase activities naturally lead from the text, the materials used should be able to practice many different skills to give the student the best chance to learn as much as possible, and that the students interest should be peaked before doing the reading or listening activity.
