Nashua, Minnesota TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

UNIT 11 TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS There are four basic skills in any language but this unit covers the two receptive skills first; reading and listening as a natural reaction to its two opposite productive skills; writing and speaking. When it comes to reading there are two reason why we do it, first we do it for a purpose because it helps us achieve a certain valuable goal or when a reader is aiming to complete something and reading is a contributing factor. Secondly we read for entertainment, for mere pleasure by a particular topic that whets an individual's appetite. Sometimes it is an amalgamation of the two that gets a reader motivated to spend hours staring at a piece of written work. A good reader must at least posses some or all of the specialist skills below: I. Predictive Skills - a reader can predict the overall content with just headlines or what I call preliminary key words. II. Specific Information (scanning) - this is when a reader seeks for a particular information from the content. III. General Idea (skimming) - a reader read only to get the gist of the story mostly by skipping irrelevant or what the reader perceive as trivial to his quest of context. IV. Detailed Information - we read in order to understand everything in detail. V. Deduction from context - the reader tries to understand everything he/she is reading, a person reads to examine every meaning behind literal or metaphorical words and sentences, its theme, its topic and just the overall context of the story. However there are also problems with listening and reading activities that a teacher must address in order to know what to do about it by providing effective solutions: I. Language Difficulty What to do? >Pre-teaching vocab - a teacher can teach the meaning of important words necessary to understand at least the context of the topic. >Careful structure of texts authentic materials must be carefully selected to focus on what the students know rather than how much they don't know. II. Topics - sometimes topics can be boring therefore a teacher would choose topics that motivates the learners. What to do? > A variety of topics over period of time is needed to ensure that all of the students are equally catered for. III. Create interest What to do? >Know what the individual student wants and come up with a solution that will motivate their minds to learn. IV. Tasks What to do? >Comprehension tasks will be necessary challenge must be realistically achievable.