Teaching Reading and Listening Strategies

Encouraging Extensive Reading and Listening

• Make reading and listening a habit to recognize bigger chunks of information, especially from context.
• Provide students with reading time in class to lower anxiety.
• Allow students to choose their own texts, including picture books, comics, and podcasts, to cater to their interests.

Teaching Linguistic Aspects and Genre Knowledge

• Teach syntax, grammar, and vocabulary to improve reading and listening skills.
• Provide different texts to teach genre knowledge and help students recognize various text types.

Selecting Suitable Texts and Promoting Positive Reading

• Choose texts suitable for learners' linguistic level, topic, and world knowledge to help them relate to the content.
• Promote positive reading habits by linking literature with audio books and movies.
• Encourage post-reading activities, such as personal reactions to a text and critical reading.

Reading and Listening as Interactive Processes

Bottom-Up Processing

• Data-driven processing involves decoding letters, words, and language features in a text.

Top-Down Processing

• Knowledge-driven processing involves applying prior knowledge to understand a text.
• Cognitive schemata refer to knowledge about how things normally are, such as school life and families.
• Social scripts are mental structures about conventionalized routine situations and associated forms of behavior.

Designing Reading and Listening Tasks

• Set aims and objectives for reading and listening tasks, such as encouraging word recognition and skimming.
• Segment sentences into units of meaning to help with comprehension.

Reading Tasks

• Skimming tasks:
• Decide on the text genre based on a quick look.
• Make a list of keywords that reappear in the text.
• Choose a summary that best represents the text.
• Scanning tasks:
• Find words related to a topic, such as summer.
• Find specific information in a text, such as the result of a soccer game.

Top-Down Processing Tasks

• Activate prior knowledge before reading or listening to a text.
• Formulate questions about a text based on titles, topics, images, headlines, or captions.
• Reconstruct what a text could be about by giving key terms or expressions.
• Speculate on the mood, emotions, and setting of a film clip with the sound off.

Interactive Processing: Reciprocal Reading

• Questioning: Ask about unclear parts of a passage.
• Summarizing: Briefly summarize the content of a passage in your own words.
• Clarifying: Ask for explanations of certain words or chunks.
• Predicting: Make predictions about how the story could continue.

Process of Listening

• Real-life listening situations include conversations, instructions, loudspeaker announcements, and more.
• Listening goals include understanding main information, specific information, detailed understanding, implications, and pleasure.

How to Teach Reading and Listening in Class

• Set specific listening tasks and purposes to help learners focus on relevant content.
• Teach listening skills, rather than just testing them.

This quiz covers effective methods for teaching reading and listening skills, including encouraging extensive practice, providing in-class reading time, and teaching linguistic aspects.