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The receptive skills are listening and reading, because learners do not need to produce language to do these, they just need to receive and understand it. These skills are sometimes known as passive skills. They can be contrasted with the productive or active skills of speaking and writing. It is important for a teacher to figure out why students learn reading and listening before giving a class, so he can choose proper materials and design reasonable activities. One is for a purpose such as reading instructions of a new product, and another is for entertainment including watching a movie or listening to music. I used to teach adult students who studied English before but not deeply. For reading classes, i always trained them with two main methods, namely scanning and skimming. But first of all, i would allow them to predict the content of an article from a headline or a short introduction. Then I often gave students three minutes to skim the full passage, and asked them to conclude main points of the passage. The former is to catch specific information. For example, being given a text, students have to answer when the telephone was invented and developed. They just need to concentrate on the specific details instead of reading the whole passage. So i would like to put this part after skimming when giving reading classes. Students from different cultural backgrounds are likely to have their own understanding as culture has influenced their thinking modes. For example, a British scholar would realize an educated and intellectual woman when seeing the word bluestocking while non-native speakers might be confused and think of clothes. Therefore, a teacher is supposed to pre-teach keywords and disseminate cultural information before giving a reading or listening class in case there are students feeling confused. As for listening, a teacher should be careful when preparing texts as word length and unfamiliar words are likely to cause problems to English learners. From my point of view, it is ideal to choose a relative easy text under students’ language level at first. Unlike reading giving them the opportunity to think about difficult language, listeners may not have enough time to deduce the meaning when they hear it only once. In addition, learning to understand the text without knowing every single word is a necessary skill for students to study. Speaking for choosing materials, there are authentic texts and non-authentic ones. I suggest it is suitable for the very beginners to study the latter which is obviously easier, as they just start to learn a new language. For students who have learned for years, authentic materials will be their first choice. They need to be exposed to the real environment and try to build their confidence step by step. While sometimes unknown structures may not help them get out of the predicament. Because of this, learners’ confidence will be dampened, especially adults. Their enthusiasm is easily knocked by various hardships and reverses, and they might give up lessons easily. In order to help students finish reading, a teacher should remove some obstacles that learners might meet at the beginning of a class. Therefore giving students an access to unknown knowledge is the key point of a successful class. But a teacher has to pay attention to the boundary of familiar and unfamiliar points. From what has been discussed, it is important for a teacher to know how to receptive skills, and some key points are listed when preparing and giving receptive classes.
