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Unit 11 discusses the receptive skills reading and listening. Other skills that are important are called productive skills, which are writing and speaking. This unit focuses on reading and listening, but all four basic skills are important to learn when studying a language. We, as teachers of English, need to make sure that all of these skills are strengthened in our students. There are two basic motives for a person to want to read or listen: 1) for a specific purpose, such as reading instructions, and 2) for entertainment, such as listening to relaxing music after a hard day's work. The two motives are sometimes both present in our motives. There are several specific skills that are used in the receptive arena. First, predictive skills can be used. For instance, to help one guess the content of a lecture he may look at the title of the presentation. Second, for specific information, scanning skills can be used. This would be like looking through a recipe book quickly to find a recipe for pumpkin pie. Thirdly, skimming for a general idea is another skill. One would skim quickly through a report to find out in general if the outcome was positive or disappointing. A fourth skill would be looking for detailed information. A scientist would need to find out a lot of detailed information about an experiment to see if it was successful and to know how to recreate that same outcome. Another skill, which seems to be more intuitive, would be learning how to deduce information from something that is not clearly spelled out, or learning to \"see beyond a literal meaning\".... to read between the lines, so to speak. Unit 11 makes some suggestions in teaching English about different ways to approach teaching receptive skills. In presenting texts for students to study, for instance, it is very important to choose texts that have interest for the students, so that that are motivated to learn. A variety of topics can be introduced over time to make sure many types of interests are covered. If there is some vocabulary in a text that may present a problem for the students, pre-teaching some of this vocabulary to the students before the text is approached may be helpful for the students. Creating further interest about a text might be useful, by showing pictures,or discussing the subject matter, for instance. In giving the students tasks to complete after the text is read, it would be helpful if the tasks are not too easy, but also not too difficult for the students to complete, so that the students don't become too discouraged. Tasks should be achievable. In short, teaching reading and listening skills are part of a balanced approach to teaching English skills.
