TESOL Tongcheng

Unit 11 describes how to teach receptive skills. These skills are very important and help students to understand their second language. From the unit future teachers can find out how exactly people read and listen and what kind of information they gain from those activities. We can divide those receptive skills into two groups which are reading and listening on purpose and/or for entertainment. Both motives may be mixed for example when somebody reads a tour book and listens to the interesting speech of the tour guide. It can be either enjoyable but also it can give a lot of information needed. Reading is obviously a very complex activity, which can be divided into 5 different motives. Firstly, there is skim reading which focuses on getting the general idea of the text. Students don't focus on every single word from the text. Second and one is scanning, which is a process of looking for a specific information, for example an interview with our favorite actress. To do so, there is no need to read the whole magazine. Thirdly, there is also predictive skill which allows us to guess what certain article is going to be about after reading only its headline. Moreover, there is also a process of looking for a specific information from the text or read everything very carefully to get every detail from the text.