TESOL Illinois

The receptive skills are two of the four basic skills in any language and are reading and listening. The specialist skills needed for reading and listening is as below. i. Predictive skills: this is the ability to predict the content of a piece of writing or dialogue from the headline or introduction. An example would be when one decodes a headline on the news. ii. Specific Information: scanning while focussing on the particular piece of information we are looking for e.g. time and place of an event. Listening selectively to a news broadcast. iii. General idea: skimming - we might do this if we want to get the general gist of a text or dialogue when there is no need to read every word. iv. Detailed information: in this case we would read to understand everything in detail. If we are listening for directions every detailed would need to be absorbed to get the full benefit. v. Deduction from context: in this case we would want to understand or deduce the meaning of individual words or phrases from the context in which we hear or read them. We need to be able to see beyond the literal. An example would be, \" Traffic lights ahead\". One would need to deduce that it might be necessary to slow or stop the vehicle.