TEACHING

RECEPTIVE SKILLS
Reading & Listening
Receptive skills=
The ways in which people extract meaning
from the discourse they see or hear. (Harmer
2002:199).
There are generalities about this kind of
processing which apply to both reading and
listening but there are also significant
differences.
Types of reading and listening
skills
1. Identifying the topic- the ability to pick up the topic of a written or spoken
text very quickly.
2. Predicting and guessing: both readers and listeners sometimes guess in
order to try and understand what is being written or talked about, especially if
they have first identified the topic.
3. Reading and listening for general understanding: the ability to understand
a text without worrying too much about the details (also called reading for
gist). Skimming is a term connected to this skill: by skimming a text students
are encouraged to have a quick look at the text before reading in detail
4. Reading and listening for specific information: the ability to look for
specific details in a spoken or written text (e.g. listening to the news only
concentrating when the particular item that interests us comes up).. This skill
is also referred to as scanning.
5. Reading and listening for detailed information: sometimes we read or
listen in order to understand everything in detail. This is usually when we are
given instructions or directions or when procedures are described. E.g. in an
airport we listen very carefully to an announcement about our flight.
Types of reading and listening
activities
Extensive
reading and listening
Intensive
Extensive reading and
listening
Take place when students are on their own,
reading or listening for pleasure in a leisurely
way.
The aim of extensive activities is to develop
language, make students more positive about
reading, improve their overall comprehension
skills, give them a wider passive and active
vocabulary, develop comprehension of
spoken language.
Intensive reading and listening
Activities performed in the classroom with the
help and intervention of the teacher.
They are usually accompanied by study
activities that focus on developing different
reading or listening skills or on the
construction of texts written in different
genres (magazine articles, poems, stories,
emails).
A basic methodological model for
teaching receptive skills ( Harmer
1991:189)
1. Lead-in
2. Teacher directs comprehension task
3. Ss listen/read for task
4. Teacher directs feedback
5. Teacher directs text-related task
Teacher directs text-related task

This is a follow-up task related to the text

It could be either a response to the content of
the text or a focus on aspects of language in
the text.
Teacher directs feedback

Students may check their answers with each

other first
The teacher will check if students have
completed the task successfully and they will
find out how well they have done
Ss listen/read for task

The students read/listen to a text to perform

the task the teacher has set
Lead-in
Here the students prepare themselves for the
task and familiarize themselves with the topic
of the reading or listening text.
The aim is to create expectations and
motivate students to participate in the activity.
Teacher directs
comprehension task
Once students are ready the teacher sets a
comprehension task ( reading for gist)
The second comprehension task comes after
the second reading or listening and focuses
on scanning or finding detailed information