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The receptive skills are listening and reading, as students don´t need to produce language, they receive and understand it. These skills are equally important and play a supporting role with developing other skills. Among the four basic language skills, listening is the first language that a person learns. In real life people read or listen to language because they want to, and because they have a purpose for doing so. The reason we read affects how we read, so for example when we´re following instructions we will read differently than when we´re reading a book for pleasure, or newspaper to find out information. We use a range of reading styles including scanning (extracting specific information), skimming (getting the general idea), accurate reading (for detail) or reading to deduce meaning. A reading skills lesson should include activities that will practice these skills as well as comprehension tasks to check and aid understanding. The key difference between listening and reading is that when we listen to information we have much less support than when we are working with the written word on the page. Listening requires ‘real-time’ processing of language and may pose a greater challenge for learners to master. Listening is a demanding activity and choosing a proper content in regard to level of English we´re teaching as well as interesting topics and tasks are keys to successful receptive skills lesson. Three basic stages of a listening skills lesson are pre-listening (this includes motivation and pre-teaching problematic language), listening stage with comprehension tasks to ensure understanding and post-listening (for example reactions to the content, as it is something we naturally do in our everyday lives, among other activities). All language users have greater receptive competence than productive competence. That is because we can understand what we´re listening to or what we´re reading without having to know every word. I think it´s an important element of foreign language teaching to encourage the students to get past the stage of having to understand each and every word. To sum it up, when teaching receptive skills we need to put more focus on the engage phase of the lesson to motivate the learners and give them a purpose for reading/listening, select our materials carefully and grade the tasks following the listening/reading activity. It´s important not to put too much pressure on the students and give them confidence in their skills.
