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This unit explained the importance of teaching and (for students, learning and acquiring) receptive skills, which include reading and listening. Coming from an Italian immigrant family myself, I know from personal experience how important it is to be able to understand when listening and to understand when reading. Sometimes with listening, body language and facial expression cues can help a learner understand the main point of what is being said or what is being asked of them. With reading, sometimes familiar words within the text can help a student draw predictive meaning of what is being said. However, a common difficulty (for me) was not always getting the main message right and not being able to respond back to the person or summarize what I read in the new language. This is why i believe it is vital that teachers teach the needed grammar and vocabulary that may pose understanding problems to students in prior to giving them a receptive task. This follows the teaching approach that was mentioned in this lesson: Engage, Study-Study-Study-Activate-Activate. I also support the importance of providing learners with materials (texts, topics, videos, music) that are of interest to the students, and not the teacher, while keeping a variety as lessons continue. If curiousity and interest are established in students, they will be intrinsically motivated to complete the tasks at hand with a goal of mastering the material/vocabulary. The use of videos, songs, and pictures will also be helpful for students to draw answers to any questions that they may have, as well as help them develop the skill of predicting meaning from cues that they do understand. I believe that this is a vital skill for any language learner, as well as anyone who interacts with another individual who's first (and comfortable) language is not his or her own. Furthermore, to continue building receptive skills, something that I learned from my Spanish language teacher in undergraduate university was to watch tv shows in Spanish (the language being learned) with the subtitles on (Spanish), as well as listen to Spanish music. The more listening exposure to a language, my professor had argued, the more use our brains will be to the sounds and structure of that language. Therefore, I believe that learning of receptive skills should be extended outside the classroom if possible.
