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Unit 11 focuses on the two receptive skills - reading and listening. First of all, the unit states the equal importance of all the 4 skills involved in the learning process as well as in the normal use of a language. Balanced lessons are suitable for a good learning, unless the teacher is planning to go through all the skills in many lessons. A first important point is identifying the reasons why our students are more willing to improve their receptive skills: for a targeted purpose or for entertainment. Even though it is common that the reasons involve both the aims, it helps to provide more suitable material to match our students? interests and goals. Then the unit deepens the 5 different uses of receptive skills: predictive skills - understanding the content from very little information, scanning - getting specific information, skimming - having a general idea about the text, looking for detailed information, deducing the meaning from context seeing beyond the literal sense. All these usages are common for every language - in which we may be native speakers or not - but can present a different degree of difficulty because of the length of sentences, the difficulty of words, the presence of specific words, etc. To address these problems, it is useful to choose a proper text as well as pre-teach the most difficult and fundamental words to be able to grasp the general meaning. Another issue that has to be addressed is the lack of confidence and interest that some students might show. A good range of topics, the awareness of the students? interests and well-done engage and activate phases are wide-spread strategies to enhance at best the receptive skills.
