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teaching the receptive skills
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Teaching the Receptive Skills This study aims to present some useful techniques to teachers who are aiming to improve the students’ receptive skills (reading, listening). Researchers and teachers of second languages realized that most of their students were able to ask questions from foreigners but were not able to understand what they had answered. It is one of the various good reasons for teaching reading/listening. Students may actually need to read/listen for their work or study, or they want to read/listen for pleasure. In each case, the process needs to be as easy as possible for them. Exercises focusing on the receptive skills allow the study and practice of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and punctuation, and the reading/listening can provoke conversation and discussion. At first, the teachers’ main task is to get familiar with the different types of reading and listening activities. In case of reading there are: skimming, scanning, receptive/intensive reading and extensive reading. In the followings I would like to present them separately. Skimming means when students are examining a text rapidly with occasional periods of close inspection, i. e., quickly running their eyes over the text to get the general idea. In the case of scanning students are locating a specific symbol or group of symbols (e. g.: a date or a name of a person or place). So, students are quickly searching for some particular pieces of information. Receptive/intensive reading means a careful reading aimed to discover exactly what the author seeks to convey; often reading for information; readers need to understand linguistic and semantic detail and pay attention to the text. At last, we speak about extensive reading when readers read for pleasure; readers need to understand all details of the text; speed and skill in getting the general idea are most important (Knutson 1998). According to Harmer (1991; p. 217-228) there are 5 types of listening: • Listening to extract specific information: students listen for specific information at word level (e.g.: filling in charts) • Listening for communicative tasks: ‘asks students to listen in order to perform some kind of communicative tasks which is as much like real life as possible, and which involves students working together to solve a problem’ (Harmer 1991; p.
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