Teaching receptive skills

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog😊

We've reached the end of the four macro skills and this entry will be about the receptive skills: Reading and listening.

You may be wondering why are these called receptive skills. Since we are dealing with spoken and writen language we are receiving information and we a student has fully developed this skills, they will be able to understand and comprehend the spoken or written language..

From a teacher's perspective, when you teach reading and listening it is important for the student to feel comfortable and they need their teacher to motivate them to keep going even if they make mistakes so it is crucial to create a supportive and engaging learning environment.

For the students to feel comfortable while they are learning it is important that the teacher takes into account the differentiated instruction, which means to adapt the listening and reading skills (In this case) to the different levels the students are in, a teacher will never give material containing advanced English to students with a basic level, so teachers have to be very careful so that the students won't back down from learning.

Teachers that want to help improve students' listening can use material like CD's that come with the text book or they can get creative and use an authentic input (Explained in one of my past entries), they can use in the classroom songs, movies, videos and even podcasts about the students' interest so they feel excited while learning. Roleplay and group discussions are also great activities for students to learn listen what they classmates have to say and listen to different opinions. But the teacher's job doesn't stop once they finished explaining the topic, they need to provide their students with feedback for them to build their confidence and understand their strengths and weaknesses so that they can continue improving.

For teaching reading, again, it is important for the students to have the material according to the level they are in, if a teacher gives students from a basic level to read a composition with difficult words, no images and five pages long, of course they won't understand a thing. They should start with short stories that use simple words and simple grammar structures. A teacher can assign their students the following readings, according to their level: News articles, short stories, novels and reading articles.

Like I was saying, the teacher's job is not done until they help and assess the students to they can identify in what areas they are lacking, what they are lacking and they can do to improve.

And last not but no least, the students' progress in this receptive skills, and like in any other, has to be determined with quizzes, tests and performance tasks so they can continue imprving and learning even more while getting ready for this tests.

And with that we've wrapped up the topic of the four macro skills, we will be presenting different activities in class for students to develop this skills separately and be equally good in all four, each group as been assigned one skill, so stay tuned for that on my next entry, bye-bye!👋