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People understand or use languages through receptive (reading and listening) and productive skills (speaking and writing). They can never master a language without using all the skills, as they are equally important. When it comes to the receptive skills, people read and listen for a variety of reasons, which can be classified into reading for a purpose or reading for entertainment. When we read/listen for a purpose, we read/listen to achieve a certain goal like reading a manual of a car or kitchen appliance. On the other hand, when we read/listen for entertainment we read novels, listen to jokes, or watch a series on television. Sometimes, we read for both motives at the same time. When reading or listening, we use some specialist skills like predicting, scanning, skimming, reading details, or deducing of content. We sometimes build a forecast of an article by just reading the headline, when we are predicting. We concentrate on a specific piece of information and not the whole content, when we are scanning. We read/listen for a gist of the content, when we are skimming. We read/listen carefully to understand a topic in detail, when we are reading detailed information. Lastly, we understand or deduce meanings of words/phrases, when we are deducing from the content. However, there are some obstacles that could be faced while reading or listening, and some of them are the length of the sentence or word, and encountering unfamiliar words for example. As teachers, we can overcome these difficulties by, pre-teaching unfamiliar or difficult vocabulary prior to the lesson, and carefully selecting the texts. Moreover, teachers should choose topics carefully and bare in mind what the students are interested in reading about or listening to. After that, the teacher can create more hype and steer the interest of the students by eliciting information about the text before they engage it. Then, the teacher should ensure that the tasks accompanied by the text are not too easy or too difficult, and promote the understanding of the text. The teacher should also use various types of materials and realistic comprehension tasks in class to practice different skills.
