Name : Eva Abdillah

S.R.N : 2201413112

Subject : Approaches and Methods in TESOL

Brief Summary Chapter 14

TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS

A. How We Read?
We are able to improve our ability by the determination of reading and
listening purpose

A1. What We bring to the Task?

Understanding of discourse involves much morethan just knowing the language. In

order to make sense of any text we need to have ‘pre-existent knowing language. Ex : British
cricket.

A2. Reasons for Reading and Listening

We can divide reasons for reading and listening into two broad categories :

 Instrumental : a large amount of reading and listening takes place because it will
us to achive some clear aim. E.g : we read a road sign so that we know where to
go.
 Pleasurable : reading and listening takes place largely for pleasure. Ex : people
go to poetry readings or listen to Tak Radio

A3. Top – down and bottom – up

In the top – down processing the reader or listener gets a general view of the reading
passage by in some way absorbing the overall picture.

In bottom – up, the doers focuse on individual words and phrase, and achieved understanding
by stringing these detailed elements.

A4. Different Skills

 Our use of the different skills will frequently depend on what we are reading or
listening for:

 Identifying the topic

Good readers and listeners are able to pick up the topic of a written or spoken text
ver quickly
 Predicting and Guessing
Sometimes, the listeners and readers look forward, trying to predict what is coming;
maybe they mae assumptions or guess the content.
 Reading and Listening for General Understanding.
Listeneres and readres are able to understand the gist of passage without worrying
too much about the details
 Reading and Listening for Detailed Information
Sometimes we read and listen in order to understand everything we are reading in
detail. Ex: when someone gives us their address and telephone number and we write
down all the details.
 Interpreting text :
The doers are able to see beyond the literal meaning of words in a passage, using a
variety of clues to understand what the wroter or speaker is implying to suggesting.
B. Problems and Solutions
The teaching and learning of receptive skills presents a number of particular problems
which will need to be addressed.

B1. Language

That text with longer sentences and longer words will be more difficult to nderstand.
If the readers do not know half the words in a text, they will have great difficulty. There are
specific ways of addressing the problem of language difficulty :

 Pre – teaching vocabulary.

One way of helping students is to pre – teach vocabulary that is in the reading or
listening text.
 Extensive reading and listening
 The former suggests reading or listening at length, often for pleasure and in a leisure
way, intensive reading or listening tends to be more concentrated, less relaxed, and
often dedicated not so much to pleasure as to the achievment of a study goal.
 Authenticity
Students have to practice dealing with written text and spech where they miss quite a
feww words but are still able to extract the general meaning.

B2. Topic and genre

To resolve such problems we need to think about how we choose and use topics, and
how we approach different reading and speaking genres :

 Choose the rights topics

We should try and choose topics which our students will be interested in
 Create interest
If we can get the students engaged in the task there is a much better chance that they
will read or listen with concentration
 Activate schemata
We create interest by giving students predictive tasks and interesting activities,
because we want to activetheir knowledge before they read, so that they bring their
sche,ata to the text.
 Vary topics and genres
A way of countering student unfamiliar with certain written and spoken genres are
we have to expose them to a variety of a different text types.

B3. Comprehension Tasks

To resolve these problems we need to use comprehension tasks which promote

understanding and we need to match text and task appropriately.

 Testing and teaching

Testing and teaching are the best way to raise the students` expectation, help them
tease out meanings, and provoke an examnation of the reading or listening passage.
 Appropriate challenge
We have to avoid texts and tasks that are either far too easy or far too difficult, we
want to get the level of challenge right.
B4. Negative expectation

If the students havelow expectations of reading and listening, it will be our job to
persuade them, through our actions, to change these negative expectations into realistic
optimism.

 Manufacturing success
By getting the level of challenge right we can ensure that students are successful,
and giving students a clear and achievable purpose
 Agreeing on a purpose
It is important for teacher and students to agree on both general and specific
purposes for their reading or listening.
Brief summary Chapter 16

Listening

A. Extensive and Intensive Listening

Students can improve their listening skills and gain valuable language input through a
combination of extensive and intensive listening material and procedures.

A1. Extensive Listening

Extensive reading helps students to acquire vocabulary and grammar, furthermore, it

make students better readers.

A2. Intensive listening : using taped material.

It has a number of advantages and disadvantages:

 Advantages : tapped material allows students to hear a variety of different voices

apart from just their own teacher`s, extremely portable and readily available.
 Dissadvantages : the audibility of taped and disk material often gives cause for
concern, it is often difficult to ensure that all students in a romm can hear equally
well, everyone has to listen at the same speed, where the speed dictated by the tape.

A3. Intensive Listening : ‘live’ listening

It means that the live listening where the tacher and visitars talking tothe students in the
class. Live listening can take the following forms :

 Reading aloud : it is done with conviction and style the teacher reading aloud to the
class.
 Story – telling : teachers are ideally placed to tell stories which,in turn, provide
excellent listening material.
 Interviews : students dream up the questions by themselves , and stuents really listen
for answers that they have asked for.
 Conversation : students have the chance to watch the interaction as well as listen to it

A4. Intensive listening : the roles of the teacher

As with all activities, we need to be active In particular we need to focus on the
following roles :

 Organiser : we need to tell students exactly what their listening purpose and give
them clear instruction about how to achieve it.
 Machine operator : we need to be as efficient as possible in the way we use the
tape player.
 Feedback organiser : we should give the feedback to check that they have
completed the task successfuly.
 Prompter : we can have them to listen the diks again to notice a variety of
langauge and spoken features.
B. Listening Lesson Sequences

B1. Examples of listening sequences

In the following examples the skills which are involved are detailed, and the way
that the listening text can be used within a lesson is explained. Ex : the teachers can bring
strangers into the class to talk to the students.

C. The sound of music

Music is a powerful stimulus for students engagement precisely because it speaks
directly to our emotions while still allowing us to use our brains to analyse it