Christin Butler
The ways in which native speakers of a language approach a text is often different than the ways in which language learners approach it. It is important that learners develop these skills in order to better understand a text as a whole.
The following handout discusses effective ways teachers can stage receptive skills lessons to encourage students to use these approaches when reading and listening.
What are the receptive skills?
Receptive language skills, or reading and listening, are skills that only require students to receive and understand language rather than produce it themselves, such as with speaking and writing.
When we read in our native language, we don’t focus on individual language parts, or labor over each individual word and sentence, while reading. Instead, we employ various strategies for quickly understanding a text including:
1. Reading/Listening for Gist: when we read very quickly only to understand the gist, or main idea, of a text. Included with this idea is prediction, or when we glance quickly at pictures, tables, graphs, etc. that accompany the text in order to predict, or guess, what the general idea of a text may be.
2. Reading/Listening for Detail: this refers to when we read an entire text more carefully in order to find out specific information, such as numbers,dates, evidence, or specific ideas and arguments.
3. Scanning (reading only): this strategy is used when we are looking at a more non‐traditional text, such as a bus schedule, a phone book, a calendar,etc, for very specific information. Rather than read the entire document, we only scan quickly for the information with is important to us.
How to Effectively Design a Reading/Listening Lesson
The following order is an effective way of staging a receptive skills lesson to maximize the students’ understanding of any given text:
Engage: Before the students ever see or hear the text, you should get them to start thinking about the topic to be discussed. For example, if the text is about dream homes, you might start by showing the students pictures of famous mansions and having them guess from a list of celebrities which home belongs to which celebrity.
Similarly, if the text is about someone’s vacation, you might start by showing them pictures from your last vacation and then having them talk about a vacation they’ve recently taken. This helps activate any associated vocabulary or language patterns in their mind that they’ve either seen or used before, making the text much easier to understand.
Blocking Vocabulary: Before the students read/listen, teach any words that will block their understanding of the main idea. However, it isn't necessary to teach all new or difficult words, only words that will keep them from understanding the core of the text.
Read for Gist: Students are asked a question graded to their ability about the main idea of a text before they ever encounter the text. Then, have them read or listen in order to find the answer. Another way to encourage the students to read for the overall meaning of a text is to have them predict what will happen based on the pictures and graphs that illustrate the story, and then read to see if they were right. Alternately, the students can match subheadings and section titles to their associated sections of text.
Read for Detail: The students read/listen to the text again in order to answer detail‐oriented questions that help them to understand the specifics and subtleties of the text. Again, the students should have the questions before they read.
Related Language or Productive Skills Practice: From this point on, the students should understand the overall meaning of the text, even if they don’t know every word. You can follow up by studying new vocabulary that was in the text, practicing specific grammar points they encountered in the text, or just practicing their speaking and writing skills by having the students discuss the text in a meaningful way.
Related Issues
- Authentic texts vs. texts designed for ESL/EFL learners: What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
- Using authentic texts more effectively: Grade the task, not the text.
- When to teach vocabulary: Before listening/reading, teach blocking vocab. only.
For any other vocab., have the students try to infer the meaning from context. You can use activities designed to strengthen this skill after the reading portion of the lesson. - Useful resources: npr.org, Student Times, Intermediate Reading Practices, songs,
breakingnewsenglish.com.
