STARTBODY

Productive and Receptive Skills in the ESL Classroom - Receptive Skills - Overview

 

This presentation is going to have a look at the idea of receptive skills and how we can go about teaching receptive skills lessons. There are two receptive skills and they are reading and listening. If we think about first of all, why do we read or listen, then there are probably two main answers to that. Firstly, it could either be for entertainment or it could be for a specific purpose. Within the reading and listening areas there are a number of sub-skills that we can teach our students. Firstly, what we can do is to show different examples of reading. So, let's say, for example, that we have just bought ourselves a new video camera and along with that video camera came a whole book of instructions. In order to find out how to get that camera working, then we would need to very carefully read each page of that brochure and that would be what is called detailed reading. Now unfortunately, most of us don't get our video cameras working straight away because we don't do that detailed reading. We tend to do something, which is slightly quicker, which is called scanning and in scanning what we're trying to do is to look for specific information. The other type of quick reading that we do is something called skimming and what we're doing in skimming is we're trying to get a general overview of what the text is actually saying. Other types of reading skill that we can actually teach is reading for prediction. So, having read a certain amount of various text, we can then say what we think is going to happen next and the final one for deduction; so from the information that's been given can we make some form of inference, for example about who actually wrote that?


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

In this unit I learned about different activities that can be used in each of the stages in a lesson. It was also a refresher on what should be in all of the different parts of a lesson plan. I like having the lessons in front of me to be able to see how I can plan a lesson for myself.I feel that this unit opened my eyes to many diverse teacing styles and methodologies and I look forward to considering them all in my future lessons. This lesson also included various example lessons that I found to be very insightful and beneficial to my understanding of the content.Unit 4 was a very good unit. It’s necessary to repeat tenses and have very clear idea of how they work as a teacher. Neither the less it is easy time to time to make mistakes, therefore tenses will always be a tricky area even for teachers. I feel very good of completing the unit.



ENDBODY