Teaching Receptive Skills

 Hi dear teacher and classmates!

Welcome to another entry1 Once again, I will be reviewing last class activities and topic. So, the topic for today will be: 🥁🥁🥁 "Teaching Receptive Skills". 

In my last entry, I described teaching productive skills, however, to produce, we need to receive. So today, we will get a little more into deep into this topic.

Receptive skills are what we commonly known as listening and reading; they refer to the ability to understand spoken and written language. Teaching Listening and reading comprehension might be very challenging for teachers since for new learners English might be a completely different world and they might not be accustomed to certain structures or sounds, for that reason, teachers need to make sure they teach in a supportive and engaging environment.

To achieve our purposes of teaching receptive skills, we need to make sure that we use authentic materials in our classroom, the idea is to make the students exposed to the language, and have interactive activities and differentiated instructions (I will get in-depth in a sec.)

Aspects to consider when:

Teaching Listening Comprehension:

• We should use interesting authentic material like songs, podcasts, interviews, short stories, tales, and many more multimedia tools.
• We should promote roleplays, group discussions, listening games, storytelling, and if we have advanced students, raps and movies without subtitles.
• We should provide timely feedback on their listening skills.

Teaching Reading Comprehension:

• We have to use materials that are appropriate to the learner´s level and interest, including authentic materials like articles, novels, short stories, etc.
• We should promote interactive activities such as discussion groups after reading, reading circles, and summarizing exercises.
• We should also teach learners strategies like skimming and scanning to help them become more efficient readers.

Another key point on this is assessing students so that we can notice their progress, can pass some tests quizzes, and performance tasks. Assessing is a more positive way of checking progress; it is more individualized, and it is not judgmental.

I would like to end up saying that differentiated instruction considers our type of students, their age, level, and interests and I think that a big part of the success relies here. Imagine if you were to assign a NASA article for basic-level learners, or if you give advanced students something like listening to the colors. That's not a bit challenging and that would stop them from improving.

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice weekend.

 

Bye-bye!