TEACHING RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

WHY? WHAT? HOW?

Associate Professor Titela Vilceanu, PhD

Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching R skills

Perhaps more than the other language skills, R is said to pave the way to
independent learning.
1. Behaviorism
R is conceptualized as a passive process: words acting as stimulus and triggering
response as word recognition, i.e. recognition and discrimination of letters (graphic
symbols) and words. Frequently, reading was done by sounding out (reading aloud).
Similarly to teaching L skills, the techniques used mainly consist in repeating, imitating
and memorizing of prefabricated language (for instance, word lists), while totally
disregarding cognitive processes.
2. Cognitivism
Readers become active agents rather than passive recipients, they guess or predict
the meaning on the basis of textual data/cues and activation mechanisms of background
knowledge, then confirm or correct their guesses, and thereby reconstruct the message
with respect to both morpho-syntactic and semantic levels. R is considered a dynamical
process of cognitive nature. Admittedly, comprehension is of paramount importance
based on the idea that understanding language facilitates learning (rather than acquisition)
and that learners develop reading skills by reading intensively and extensively (free
voluntary reading).
3. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn): CLT, The Post-
Communicative Turn
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of language learning
focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather than on isolated pieces. There is also a
shift from centering on formal aspects of language to content and meaning, to

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communicative intent (purposeful reading). Information processing while listening
(sequential order of input, perception, recognition, and understanding stages) is coupled
with a constructivist stance: readers actively construct meaning according to their own
purposes for reading as well as their own prior knowledge (linguistic knowledge and
extra-linguistic / encyclopaedic knowledge) and protocol of experience. Prior knowledge
is identified to schemata, further subdivided into content schemata (topic familiarity,
cultural knowledge and previous experience with a particular field) and formal schemata
(knowledge about text types - stylistic conventions as well as the structural
organization/variety of formats).
The socio-cultural context has gained ever increased importance in language
learning as the process does not take place in a social vacuum. Admittedly, special
attention is paid to the author – reader relationship in meaning construction while readers
read in a dynamic way (selectively). Reading is also coupled with detecting and
interpreting the cultural
To put it in a nutshell, reading, on a par with listening, provides the input for
language learning, acting as reference framework in language production.

Reading skills and intercultural communicative competence

Activity
Select a representative passage on a particular cultural topic that has been brought
in by the learners. Carry out critical reading with your learners by encouraging them to
answer the questions presented below, which are grouped into the three phases of pre-
reading, while-reading and post-reading.
Critical reading
Pre-reading questions
 Do you think the topic of (…) is representative of the target culture and of your
own culture? Why or why not?
 What content do you think the text entitled (…) is going to cover?
While-reading question
 How is content presented to deal with that particular topic?
Post-reading questions

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  What other aspects should be incorporated within the passage to deal with this
topic in a more comprehensive way?
 How could the content of the text vary if it was written by another writer or read
by another reader in a different context?
(Source: Uso´-Juan, Martınez-Flor, Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of
the Four Language Skills, 2006: 272-273)

Controlling factors in teaching R skills (principles)

1. Ensure word recognition fluency or automaticity, particularly in the early
developmental stages of reading skills, via extendend exposure to high frequency
(printed) words
2. Emphasize vocabulary learning and create a vocabulary-rich environment:
reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge are inextricably linked. At this point,
pre-teaching key vocabulary items proves to be crucial.
3. Activate background knowledge in appropriate ways (top-down processing):
familiarity with topic enables inferencing skills and meaning disambiguisation (detection
of the intended contextual meaning). Text previewing secures the activation of specific
knowledge relevant to the reading of the text in question instead of general background
knowledge.
4. Ensure effective language knowledge and general comprehension skills:
vocabulary items, grammar items, word integration processes (from word units to the
sentence level meaningful units).
5. Teach text structures and discourse organization: familiarity with text type, text
layout, coherence and cohesive devices and other textual parametres.
6. Promote the strategic reader rather than teach individual strategies: coordinated
use of multiple strategies while students actively seek to comprehend texts, i.e. teacher
modelling, teacher scaffolding and support, and gradual independent use of strategies to
increased text comprehension. The range of strategies includes summarizing, clarifying,
predicting, imaging, forming questions, using prior knowledge, monitoring, and
evaluating.

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7. Build reading fluency and rate: it means efficiency in reading - training for a rapid
speed of processing across extended text.
8. Promote extensive reading: there is a strong relationship between reading
comprehension abilities and extensive reading over a long period of time.
9. Develop intrinsic motivation for reading: motivation and engagement with reading
were significantly related to amount of reading.