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There are four basic skills in any language but in this unit we tackled about the two receptive skills-reading and listening. There are two main and wide-ranging category for reading and listening: for a purpose and for entertainment. When reading and listening we must not only be able to recognize and understand the words but also be able to gasp their overall gist. The expertise of the readers and listeners depends on a number of special skills and these areas are: predictive skills, scanning, skimming, detailed information and deduction from context. We must also consider that when teaching and learning receptive skills some potential problems must be addressed such as language contained in the text, the topic and the task of the students will perform. We can help our students with their language difficulties by pre-teaching difficulty/unknown vocabulary and structures. By doing so we help the students understand the context without knowing every single word. Secondly we must also know how to choose texts/materials carefully so as to focus on what the students know rather than how much they don’t know. Being able to cater a variety of interesting topics over a period of time can help motivate the students. Getting to know them is essential to be able to create interest, a beguiling engage phase is a must. After a successful engage phase we must also provide a comprehension tasks that would promote understanding and must be realistically achievable. We can use a typical ESA patchwork on teaching receptive skills. To summarize the basic keys to successful receptive skill lessons are: 1.) Choose materials that motivate students, 2.) Build interest before reading/listening 3.) Pre-teach difficult vocabularies/structures 4.) Vary the type of materials, 5.) Use the materials to practice different skills, 6.) Use realistic comprehension task and 7.) incorporate active phases that naturally lead on from the text.
