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There are two types of skills that are made of the four skills in a language. The receptive skills, listening and reading, and the productive skills, writing and speaking, should be taught in a balanced way that incorporates all these skills into our lessons. We may want to focus more on one skill in particular parts while bringing others in to balance them and create an 'integrated' lesson.
The reasons we listen and read are either a mix of or, just simply, for a purpose or for our entertainment.
How we process what we are listening to or reading is done by using a number of skills that each of us employ and how well we process this knowledge will depend on our abilities in each of these areas. Sometimes, we must be able to deduce what the text means from th context in which it is given or we may only require the gist of the text. Perhaps we wish to predict the content of an article from the headline or are just scanning for specific information in a newspaper or news story on the television. We may need detailed information that requires your full attention. Whatever the skill, there many potential problems that may arise when teaching using the receptive skills. The teacher's job is to mitigate this difficulty by a careful pr-selection of the listening or reading materials to make sure that sentence length, general length and word unfamiliarity is acceptable for the students'skill levels and by pre-teaching the vocabulary words that students must know to understand the text or listening material. The topic may help motivate the student if they have an interest, and, though this is not the only way to gain students' motivation or interest, we should try to diversify the topics and keep them relevant to the class to spark as much general interest from all the students as possible. Creating interest is also an extremely important part of the teacher's role, as well, by engaging the class in 'engage' phase activities and adding enthusiasm to fuel their own. Comprehensive tasks that the students can be challenged with but realistically achieve.
There are many ways of accomplishing a successful receptive skills lesson, but some key points to keep in mind are to choose the materials with your students in mind, building interest before being the receptive portion of the lesson, choosing 'activate' phases that follow up the text naturally, by keeping the types of topics and materials varied, teaching key vocabulary to students beforehand without defining the whole thing, use realistic tasks that create and aid in the comprehension of the language.
