Receptive skills

A quick summary of what we looked at on Wednesday.

1. Language skills are all about what learners should be able to do with language, i.e. reading, writing, speaking and listening. Reading and listening are usually labelled as receptive skills although this is slightly misleading. They are not passive skills: it can take a lot of mental effort to read or make sense of an audio. 2. These macro skills can be divided into micro or sub-skills: prediction, skimming, scanning and intensive reading and listening, for example. We looked at top down and bottom up approaches. Top down approaches are concerned with looking at the overall picture of a text. Texts/audios can be very daunting for learners and it is a good idea to activate their schemata, to find out what they know about the topic and build on this. In the warmer, we can ask learners to discuss the topic of the audio/text,and show them a headline/audio and ask them to predict what the content will be. 3. To avoid the learners becoming too bogged down with vocabulary they do not know, decide which words, if any, should be pre-taught. Look at what they need to be able to understand to complete the tasks and check this vocabulary. Do not introduce too many words as vocabulary is not the main focus of the lesson (you can always look at some words later). Decide on the best way of presenting the vocabulary. If you have a few words to pre-teach, you can elicit and check the lexis, but if you have more than 4 words to pre-teach, you could use more student-centred ways of looking at the new vocabulary. For example, you could provide the learners with definitions which they match to the lexical items. 4. A gist task is a good way of looking at the overall meaning of the text/audio. This will help build confidence before looking at the text in more details. An example of a gist task is 'tick the topics you hear on the audio' or 'choose the best headline'. 5. Give learners an opportunity to compare their ideas after they have completed the gist and detailed tasks. This will give them confidence and allow you to assess progress. If you believe the learners are struggling, you will need to make some decisions. For example, you might decide to play the audio again in 'chunks' or do a few examples with the learners. 6. Provide extension tasks for learners who have finished more quickly than others. Instead of 'more of the same', think about how you can stretch and challenge these learners. 7. Finally, remember to encourage the learners to engage with what they have read/heard by providing a follow-up writing or speaking task. Remember - you language skills related tasks assignment is due in April. Please listen to the audio below for a recap of the stages. I apologise if the audio is a bit quiet or you can hear my kids shouting in the background!

listen to ‘Language skills related tasks’ on Audioboo