Teaching receptive skills. Reading and listening.

Teaching receptive skills. Reading and listening.

Receptive skills – are the ways in which people extract meaning from the discource they see or hear.

Reasons for reading and listening.

We can divide reasons for reading and listening into 2 categories:

• Instrumental – a large amount of reading and listening takes place because it will help us to achieve some aim, because we have some instrumental purpose in our mind (ex.: we read a road sign so that we know where to go).
• Pleasurable – another kind of reading and listening takes place largerly for pleasure (ex.: going to poetry readings or listen to comedy tapes).

Instrumental reading and listening can be pleasurable too (ex.: reading history books). It may be done for fun as well as for some utilitarian (практического назначения) purpose.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches.

In top-down processing the reader or listener gets a general view of the reading or listening passage by absorbing the overall picture (поглощая общую картину).

In bottom-up processing the reader or listener focuses on individual words and phrases, and achives understanding by putting these detailed elements together to build up a whole picture.

Different skills.

• Identifying the topic: good readers and listeners are able to pick up the topic of a written or spoken text very quickly. This ability allows them to process the text more effectively as it progresses.
• Predicting and guessing: both readers and listeners sometimes guess in order to try and understand what the text is about. Their subsequent (последующий) reading and listening helps them to confirm their expectations of what they have predicted.
• Reading and listening for general understanding: a term commonly used about reading is skimming (running your eyes over a text to get a quick idea of the gist (суть) of a text). Gist reading and listening are not „lazy“ options. The reader or listener has made a choice not to attend to every detail, but to use their processing powers to get more of a top-down view on what is going on.
• Reading and listening for specific information: here we go to written and spoken text in order to get specific details.
• Reading and listening for detailed information: here we read and listen in order to understand everything in detail (ex.: if we are in an airport and an announcement starts with „Here is an announcement for passengers on flight AA671 to Lima“, we listen in a concentrated way to everything that is said).
• Interpreting text: readers and listeners are able to see beyond the literal meaning of words in a passage, using a variety of clues to understand what the writer or speaker is suggesting. Successful interpretation depends on shared scheme (as in the example of the lecturer who, by saying to a student „You are in a non-smoking zone“ was understood to be asking the student to put her cigarette out).

Problems and solutions (language, topic and genre, comprehension tasks, negative expectations).

The teaching and learning of receptive skills presents a number of particular problems which will need to be addressed.

Language: Apart from the obvious point that the more language we expose students to the more they will learn, there are specific ways of addressing the problem of language difficulty: pre-teaching vocabulary, using extensive reading or listening, and considering alternatives to authentic language. 

• Pre-teaching vocabulary: one way of helping students is to pre-teach vocabulary that is in the reading or listening text. This removes some of the barriers to understanding which they are likely to encounter. An appropriate compromise is to use some (possibly unknown) words from a reading or listening text as part of our procedure to create interest and activate the students’ schemata, since the words may suggest topic, genre, or construction – or all three. The students can first research the meanings of words and phrases and then predict what a text is about. 
• Extensive reading and listening: extensive reading and listening take place when students are on their own, whereas intensive reading or listening is often done with the help of the teacher. Benefits of extensive reading: makes students more positive about reading, improve their comprehension skills, give them a wider passive and active vocabulary (according to Colin Davis) + it enables students to read without constantly stopping and they can easily recognise the words (according to Richard Day and Julian Bamford). Extensive reading develops automacity – that is the automatic recognition of words when students see them. Benefits for extensive listening: the more students listen, the more language they acquire, and the better they get at listening activities in general.
• Authencity: authentic material – it is normal, natural language used by native or comprehent speakers of a language. This is what students encounter in real life if they come into contact with target-language speaker. Authentic material can be demotivating for students because it it is difficult to understand. That is why we should let students read and listen to things they can understand. The language may be simplified, but it must not be unnatural.

Topic and genre: many receptive skill activities prove less successful than anticipated because the topic is not appropriate or because the students are unfamiliar with the genre they are dealing with. Here are the ways which can help us to resolve such problems:

• Choose the right topics: we should try and choose topics which our students will be interested in. Individual students have individual interests. For this reason we need to include a variety of topics across a series of lessons so that all students´ interests will be catered for in the end.
• Create interest: if we can get the students engaged in the task there is a much better chance that they will read or listen with concentration. we can get students engaged by talking about the topic, by showing a picture, by asking them to guess what they are going to see or hear on the basis of a few words or phrases from the text.
• Activate schemata:in the same way we create interest by giving students predictive tasks and interesting activities, we want to activate their knowledge before they read or listen so that they bring their schemata to the text.
• Vary topics and genres: in good general English course books a number of different genres are represented in both reading and listening activities. Ensuring students’ confidence with more than one genre becomes vitally important, too, in the teaching of productive skills. 

Comprehension tasks: 

• Testing and teaching: the best kinds of tasks are those which raise students’ expectations, help them tease out meanings, and provoke an examination of the reading or listening passage. Unlike reading and kistening tests, these tasks bring them to a greater understanding of language and text construction. Some tasks seem to fall half way between testing and teaching, however, since by appearing to demand a right answer they could, in theory, be used to assess student perfomance. Indeed when they are done under test conditions, their purpose is to explore student strengths and weaknesses. By the simole expedient of having students work in pairs to agree or wether a statement about part of a text is true or false – the comprehension items help each individual to understand something, rather then challenging them to give right answers under test-like conditions.
• Appropriate challenge: when asking students to read and listen we want to avoid texts and tasks that are either too easy or too difficult. Thus, where the text is difficult, we may still be able to use it, but only if the task is appropriate. We could have beginnres listen to the famous Hamlet and ask them how many people are speaking or we can ask them to read Ulysses and ask them how many full stops they can find. Despite the difficulty of the texts, both tasks are achievable.

Negative expectations: When students have low expectations of reading and listening, it will be our job to change these negative expectations into realistic optimism.

• Manufacturing success: by getting the level of challenge right we can ensure that students are successful.
• Agreeing on a purpose: it is important for teacher and students to agree on both general and speciefic purposes for their reading and listening. If students know why they are reading or listening they can choose how to approach the text. If they understand the purpose they will have a better chance of knowing how well they have achieved it. 

Extensive and intensive reading.

• Extensive reading materials: one of the fundamental conditions of a successful extensive reading programme is that students should be reading material which they can understand. Specially written materials are often reffered to as `readers´ or `simplified readers`. Such books succeed because the writers or adaptors work within speciefic lists of allowed words and grammar.
• Setting up library: in order to set up an extensive reading programme, we need to build up a library of suitable books. We should organise static libraries in the classroom or in some other parts of school or to work out some way tof carrying zhe books around with us. Then we should code them for level and genre so that students can easily identify what kinds of books they are.
• The role of the teacher in extensive reading programmes: we need to promote reading and persuade students of its benefits. Doing it, we can organise reading programmes where we indicate to students how many books we expect them to read over a given period. We will act as part organiser, part tutor.
• Extensive reading tasks: one approach is to set aside a time at various points in a course at which students can ask questions and/or tell their classmates about books they have found interesting or awful.students can also write short book reviews for the class noticeboard. At the end of a month/semester/year they can vote on the most popular book in the library.

Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher.

• Organiser: we need to tell students what their reading purpose is, and give them instructions how to achive it and how long they can do it.
• Observer: while students are reading we can observe their progress since this will give us information about how well they are doing individually and collectively.
• Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we can lead a feedback session to check that they have completed the task successfully.
• Prompter:  when students have read a text we can prompt them to notice language features in the text.

Intensive reading: the vocabulary question.

• Time limit: we can give a time limit for vocabulary enquiry, whether it involves dictionary use, language corpus search or questions to the teacher. 
• Word/phrase limit: we can say that we will only answer questions about 5 or 8 words/phrases.
• Meaning consensus: we can get students to work together to search for and find word meanings.

Reading lesson sequences: We use intensive reading sequences in class for a number of reasons: students´ practice of reading to extract specific information or reading for general understanding. We may get students to read texts for communicative purposes or in order to identify specific uses of language. Reading is a prelude to a speaking or writing activity.

Extensive and intensive listening.

Extensive listening: it helps students to aquire vocabulary and grammar and it makes students better readers, so extensive listening can have a adramatic effect on a student´s language learning. In order to encourage extensive listening we can have students perform a number of tasks: they can record their responses on what they´ve heard in a personal journal; fill in report forms; write comments on cards and add their responses to a large class `listening` poster or write comments on student web site. The purpose of it – to give students more and more reasons to listen.

Intensive listening: using taped material.

• Advantages: allows students to hear a variety of different voices apart from just their teacher´s.
• Disadvantages: in a big class with poor acoustics, the audibility of taped and disk material often gives cause for concern. Another problem – everyone has to listen at the same speed dictated by the tape, not by the listener + having a group of people sit around listening to a tape is not natural occupation.

Intensive listening: „live“ listening.

• Reading aloud: the teacher reads aloud to a class and it allows to hear a clear spoken version of written text.
• Story-telling: teachers tell stories and students try to predict what is coming next or describe the story.
• Interviews: students dream up the questions and in such situations they listen for answers they themselves asked for.
• Conversations: we can hold conversations with our collegues and students have the chance to watch the interraction and listen to it.

Intensive listening: the roles of the teacher.

• Organiser: we need to tell students what their listening purpose is, and give them instructions how to achive it.
• Machine operator: when we use tape, we need to be as efficient as possible in the way we use tape player.
• Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we can lead a feedback session to check that they have completed the task successfully.
• Prompter: when students have listened to a tape for comprehension purposes we can have them listen to it again for them to notice a variety of langyage and spoken features.

Listening lesson sequences: most listening sequences involve a mixture of language skills. Frequently students listen for gist; at another time they may listen for specific information. In general we should aim to use listening material for as many purposes as possible – both for practising a variety of skills and as source material for another activities – before students finally become tired with it.