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This unit is all about the teaching of receptive skills. That means the teaching of reading and listening. Reasons for reading and listening. The reasons and motives for reading and listening can be divided into two fairly wide-ranging categories which include; 1- For a purpose: This is to achieve a particular aim or goal. 2- For entertainment: Here, we read or listen because we find it pleasurable or enjoyable. How we read and listen. - Most people would say with our eyes and ears - Some school of thought says with our minds. Our minds should not only be able to recognize and understand the word but also be able to grap their overall meaning from a pre-existing knowledge of the world. 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 the following areas; - Predictive skills - Specific information-scanning - General idea-skimming - Detailed information - Deduction from text Problems with reading and listening. The teaching and learning of receptive skills presents a number of potential problems which need to be addressed which include; - Language: Here, sentence length, word length and a number of unfamiliar words presents a problem to the learners of English. - Pre-teaching vocabulary: One way of helping students is to teach them difficult or unknown language structures before beginning to teach reading or listening activities. - Careful selection of texts: Here, if a teacher is careful as to the reading and listening materials presented to the students, he or she can expose the students to a variety of authentic and non-authentic texts. - Topics: The topic of a text or dialogue if not motivated or interesting is less likely to that the students will really engage with the material. - Create interest: if the teacher here et the students motivated and engaged in the task, there is much greater possibility that they will read and listen with real enthusiasm whether or not they were originally interested in the topic. - Task: Here, we need to provide comprehension tasks that promote understanding, as oppose to just checking understanding. Outline of a typical receptive skills lesson (patchwork) - Engage - Study - Engage - Study - Activate - Study - Activate The basic keys to successful receptive skill lessons are; - Choose materials that interest the students - Build interest before reading and listening - Pre-teach complex vocabulary if necessary - Vary the type of materials - Use the materials to practice different skills - Use realistic activate phase that naturally lead on from the text. Going through this unit, I have personally learnt the different receptive Skills (reading and listening), reasons for teaching them, problems involved in teaching them, and finally how we can read and listen in English language.
