Teach English in Pickering - TESOL Courses

This unit discusses receptive skills, which are reading and listening. The reasons for reading and listening include pleasure and purpose. For example, reading for a purpose could include reading directions to assemble furniture or reading a menu at a restaurant. Skills used in reading include predictive skills, skimming, scanning, and detailed reading. One may predict the content of an article by reading its headline, using predictive skills. Skimming includes quickly reviewing the text to understand the general idea instead of grasping all of the detail and nuance. Scanning is looking through a text to find the part of the text that you want to read in more detail. One uses detailed reading when he or she wants to understand fully the content of the text. This may be for the purpose of learning new information. When teaching receptive skills, the teacher must select content that will be interesting to the students and that is appropriate for their level of language competency. A text that is too difficult may serve to undermine the confidence of the students and show them how much they don't know instead of how much they do know. It is also important to pre-teach any words or grammatical structures that are critical to understanding the content before the students read or listen to it. However, some words that are not important to the understanding of the content may be left for the students to look up later or deduce using context.