Republic of the Philippines

City of Taguig
Taguig City University
Gen. Santos Avenue, Central Bicutan, Taguig City
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

Name: Edwin S. Pecayo Jr.

Course/Major: BSE-English A41
Subject Code: Eng Major 12
Professor: Jocelyn M. Edillo

LANGUAGE AND LITERACY ASSESSMENT

Lesson II

II. Teaching the Receptive Skills

Receptive Skills

In language teaching, the receptive skills are those skills where meaning

is extracted from the spoken or written discourse. These skills
are listening and reading, respectively.

Receptive skills are the ways in which people extract meaning from
the discourse they see or hear. There are generalities about this kind of
processing which apply to both reading and listening - and which will be
addressed in this chapter - but there are also significant differences
between reading and listening processes too, and in the ways, we can
teach these skills in the classroom.
 TEACHING RECEPTIVE SKILLS

Three important things should be considered when teaching receptive skills:

1. The aim of teaching receptive skills is to help the learners

develop the necessary skills to understand and interpret spoken or
written materials. Consequently, the teacher must avoid focusing only
on testing the learners’ performance in getting the meaning of the texts
and aim, instead, at training them to use the reading and listening
strategies that enable them to deal with any type of text.

2. People read or listen for a purpose. This can be to get specific

information or to get a general idea of the text. Sometimes, listening
and reading are done just for pleasure as when we read poetry or
listen to a podcast.

3. The receptive skills are not passive. Listeners and readers make
use of important cognitive processing while listening or reading. Two of
the most important activities that occur in the mind while processing a
text are top-down and bottom-up.

TOP-DOWN PROCESSING

Top-down activities refer to the activities where the learners are asked to
get a general view of the passage. Here are some examples of top-down
processing activities:

 Using pictures to predict what the topic will be about.

 Providing three or four titles and asking the students to listen to
or read the passage to decide about the most appropriate title for the
passage.
 Providing headings and asking the students to match them with
the different sections of the passage.
 Providing different pictures to be matched with the different
sections.
 Putting a series of pictures or a sequence of events in the right
order.
 Listening to conversations and identifying where they take place
and the people involved.
 Asking the students to infer the type of relationships between the
people involved.
  Providing students with a set of information to be studied. They
then must listen to or read the main passage and decide whether the
same points are mentioned.

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING
Bottom-up activities are concerned with things such as individual words,
phrases, and sentences. These activities guide the students to construct a better
text meaning. For example, these activities help the learners to retain information
while it is being processed, identify word and clause boundaries, recognize key
transitions, locate referents, understand grammatical relationships between
syntactic elements in an utterance or sentence, and identify sentence functions.
Examples of such activities include:

 What do some underlined words refer to? Or who/what does a

pronoun refer to?
 Identify the order of a set of words in the discourse.
 Recognize linking words or sequence speech markers.
 Recognize the parts of speech of a set of words.
 Identify the tense of verbs.
 Identify synonyms or antonyms of a set of words in the text.

THE RECEPTIVE SKILLS LESSON PLAN

The comprehension tasks involved in the receptive skills should normally
follow a sequence of activities from getting a general view of the text (i.e., top-
down processing) to studying the more specific and smaller bits/elements that
constitute these texts (i.e., bottom-up processing).

The receptive skills lesson plan starts with preparing the students through
warm-up and lead-in activities. Then, the teacher focusses on the strategies
(e.g., predicting, inferring meaning from the context, locating referents, etc.)
needed to understand the spoken or the written text.  This is followed by
comprehension tasks that aim at, first general, then, detailed comprehension of
the content of the text. The lesson ends with a follow-up activity that summarizes
the text, connects it to the leaners’ daily life experiences, or pushes them to react
to it.
Figure 3 shows the procedure adopted to sequence the reading and
listening activities:

The receptive skills procedure

Figure 3 Receptive skills procedure

The procedure commonly adopted to teach receptive skills can be

summarized in the table below. The steps in this sequence are referred to
as pre, while and post stages:

Stages Procedures

Any activity that will put the students in the

mood of learning (e.g., riddle, chanting,
Warm-up
tongue twister, etc.). It should not take a
lot of time. Five minutes maximum.

Preparing the students to the topic

through:
The activation of the schematic knowledge
about the topic (e.g., using related
pictures or graphs, discussion of related
quotes, etc.)
Lead-in
Vocabulary pre-teaching (i.e., pre-
teaching a limited set of key vocabulary.)

Grammar pre-teaching (e.g., the plural

forms, time expressions, form of certain
verbs, etc.)

Explicitly teaching the learners about how

to use a reading or listening strategy (e.g.,
Strategy teaching
using prior knowledge, skimming,
Pre-stage scanning, locating referents, etc.)

While-stage Strategy practice The learners apply the strategy. They do

the task first individually, then they
compare answers in pairs or groups.
 True/false exercise
Matching
Comprehension
tasks Wh-questions

Sentence completion

Locating referents.
Matching words with their definitions.

Finding in the text synonyms or antonyms

of given words.

Inferring the meaning of words from the

Text work text.

Identifying verb tenses.

Identifying linking words.

Recalling information from the text.

Re-telling the story.

Reviewing Summarizing the text.

Completing a chart with the main ideas

discussed in the text.

Connecting the text with other texts.

Connecting the texts with the learners’
Connecting lives.

Connecting the text with the world.

Post-stage

Using the text as a springboard for

Using the text teaching other components such as
Follow-up writing, speaking, or grammar.
 TESTING LISTENING
Testing English listening skills involves a variety of skills. Sounds are
sometimes difficult to discriminate in a language that is not one's native tongue,
so testing phoneme discrimination, the ability to tell the difference between
sounds, is important. Picture choice items are a good way to select among
alternatives to demonstrate discrimination of the phonemes. Discriminating stress
and intonation can be tested by having test takers listen to a sentence that they
have in front of them and indicate the main stress of the sentence. This can be
useful but will not demonstrate student understanding of meaning. Ability to
understand the meaning of difference in intonation can be tested by asking for
interpretations of a sentence, but this also can lack context information.
Teachers can test student understanding of individual sentences and
dialogues or they can ask test takers to choose among responses to an
utterance. Some types of listening tasks make use of visual materials in true-
false or matching situations. Map and drawing tasks can also be used to assess
listening ability, and tasks involving talks and lectures are particularly appropriate
for students who will be using English in schools where it is the language of
instruction. Testing listening is difficult, and teachers must be aware that listening
tests frequently do not reflect real-world listening tasks. (SLD)

TESTING LISTENING
 Listening may be tested for diagnostic purposes.
 Because it is a receptive skill, the testing of listening parallels in most
ways the testing of reading.
 The special problems in constructing arise out of the transient nature of
the spoken language.
 
SPECIFYING WHAT THE CANDIDATE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO:
As with the other skills, the specifications for reading tests should say what is that
candidate should be able to do.
 
OPERATIONS
-          Some operations may be classified as global
           They include the ability to:
 Obtain the gist:
 Follow an argument.
 Recognize the attitude of the speaker.
-          Other operations may be classified in the same way as were oral
skills.
-          It is worth adding to each operation whether what is to be understood
is explicitly stated or only implied.
 

INFORMATIONAL

 Obtain factual information;

 Follow instructions (including directions);
 Understand requests for information;
 Understand expressions of need;
 Understand requests for help;
 Understand requests for permission;
 Understand apologies;
 Follow sequence of events (narration)
 Recognize and understand opinions;
 Follow justification of opinions;
 Understand comparisons
 Recognize and understand suggestions;
 Recognize and understand comments;
 Recognize and understand excuses;
 Recognize and understand expressions of preferences;
 Recognize and understand complaints;
 Recognize and understand speculation.
 
  
INTERACTIONAL

o Understand greetings and introductions;

o Understand expressions of agreement;
o Understand expressions of disagreement;
o Recognize speaker’s purpose;
o Recognize indications of uncertainty;
o Understand requests for clarification;
o Recognize requests for clarification;
o Recognize requests for opinion;
o Recognize indications of understanding

TESTING FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS

o Recognize indications of failure to understand;

o Recognize and understand corrections by speaker;
o Recognize and understand modifications of statements and
comments;
o Recognize speaker’s desire that listener indicate understanding;
o Recognize when speaker questions assertions made by other
speakers;
o Recognize attempts to persuade others.

 It may also be worthwhile testing lower level listening skills in a diagnostic

test, since problems with these tend to persist longer than they do in
reading.

These might include:

·         Discriminate between vowel phonemes;
·         Discriminate between consonant phonemes;
·         Interpret intonation patterns
 

TEXTS
 Texts should be specified as fully as possible.
 
 Text type might be specified as monologue, dialogue, or multi- participant and
further specified: conversation, announcement; talk or lecture, instructions,
directions, etc.

Text forms include: descriptions, exposition, argumentation, instruction,

narration.

Length may be expressed in seconds or minutes.

Speed of speech may be expressed as words per minute (wpm) or syllables

for seconds (sps).
-          Reported average speeds for samples of British English:
wps     sps
Radio monologues                160     4.17
Conversations                      210     4.33
Interviews                           190     4.17
Lectures to non- native speakers      140     3.17
 
DIALECTS may include standard or non-standard varieties.

ACCENTS may be regional or non- regional.

Intended audience, style, topics, range of grammar and vocabulary may be
indicated.

 SETTING CRITERIA LEVELS OF PERFORMANCE

-          If the test is set at an appropriate level, then, as with reading, a near
perfect set of responses may be required for a ‘pass’.
-          ACTFL, ILR or other scales may be used to validate the criterial
levels that are set.

SETTING THE TASKS

Selecting samples of speech (texts)
o Passages must be chosen with the test specifications in mind.
o Possible sources are the radio, television, spoken- word
cassettes, teaching materials, the Internet, and our own
recordings.
o Poor recording introduces difficulties additional to the ones that
we want to create, and so reduces the validity of the test.
 o It may also introduce unreliability since the performance of
individuals may be affected by the recording faults.
o It may simply be used as the basis for a ‘live’ presentation.
o To remove redundancy in spoken language is to make the
listening task unnatural.
o Avoid passages originally intended for reading.

Example:

   She found herself in a corridor which was unfamiliar, but after trying one
or two doors discovered her way back to the stone-flagged hall which
opened onto the balcony. She listened for sounds of pursuit but heard none.
The hall was spacious devoid of decoration: no flowers, no pictures.
 
·         It is better to base the passage on a genuine recording, or a transcript
of one.
·         If a recording is made, care should be taken to ensure that it fits within
the specifications in terms of speed of delivery, style etc.
·         Suitable passages may be of various lengths, depending on what is
being tested.

10 minutes: Academic lecture
20 seconds: Set of directions.
 
WRITING ITEMS

 For extended listening, such as a lecture, a useful first

step is to listen to the passage and note down what it is
that candidates should be able to get from the passage.
 In testing extended listening, it is essential to keep items
sufficiently apart from the passage.
 Students should be warned by key words that appear
both in the item and in the passage that the information
called for is about to be heard.

Example:

Item question: ‘the second point that the speaker makes’

Candidates will hear: ‘my second point is…’
o Less obvious examples should be revealed through trialling.
 o Students should be given sufficient time at the outset to
familiarize themselves with the items.
o There is no sound reason not to write items and accept
responses in the native language of the candidates.
 
POSSIBLE TECHNIQUES
A. MULTIPLE CHOICE
 
 There is the problem of the candidates having to hold in their heads
four or more alternatives while listening to the passage and after,
responding to one item of taking in and retaining the alternatives for
the next item.
 If multiple choices is to be used, the alternatives must be kept short
and simple.
 
 
 
Examples:
 
Too complex:
When stopped by the police, how is the motorist advised to behave?
 
a.    He should say nothing until he has seen his lawyer.
b.    He should give only what additional information the law requires.
c.    He should say only what the law requires.
d.    He should in no circumstances say anything.
 

Better examples would be:

(Understanding request for help)
 
I do not suppose you could show me where this goes, could you?
 
a.    No, I do not suppose so.
b.     Of course, I can.
c.    I suppose it will not go.
d.    Not at all.
 
(Recognizing and understanding suggestions)
  
I have been thinking. Why don’t we call Charlie and ask for his opinion?
 
Response:
a.    Why is this opinion?
b.    What is the point of that?
c.    You think it is his opinion?
d.    Do you think Charlie has called?
 
-          Multiple choices can work well for testing lower-level skills, such as
phoneme discrimination.

Example:
 
The candidate hears bat
and chooses between pat  mat  fat   bat
 
B. SHORT ANSWER
 
-          This technique can work well, provided that the question is short and
straightforward, and the correct, preferably unique, response is obvious.

C. GAP FILLING
 
-          This technique can work well where a short answer question with
unique answer is not possible.
Example:
 
Woman: do you think you can give me a hand with this:
Man: I’d love to help but I’ve got to go round to my mother’s in a minute.
The woman asks the man if he can _______________ her but he must visit
his __________.

TESTING READING
Of the four language skills, reading is probably tested most often, and it may
seem to be the easiest to test. However, testing reading proficiency has its
difficulties, and the test constructor must be aware of several issues. Reading
involves several skills, and the number and complexity of these must be
recognized. Choosing the text to test reading can have an impact on the results.
It is useful to use a variety of texts, and they should reflect the goals of the
language teaching situation, whether, for example, the intended language use
will be academic or conversational. It must be recognized that background
knowledge plays a part in comprehension, so that intended difficulty levels are
not confused by the test taker's lack of familiarity with the context.

Reading tasks frequently begin with assessment of low-level skills and often
involve word and sentence recognition tasks. In testing middle and higher-level
students, true/false questions, multiple-choice items, short answer, or completion
questions, and ordering tasks are often used. The selection of test items and
passages should reflect the context in which the student expects to use the
language. (SLD)

TESTING READING
Operations
o refer to the skills that readers perform when reading a text.
o we know that, depending on our purpose in reading and the kind of text
we are dealing with, we may read in quite different ways.
o if we reflect on our reading, we become conscious of other skills we have.
o it is important to know the skills that readers perform when reading a text
so that language teachers have the idea of what kind of text, he/she will
give.

EXPEDITIOUS READING OPERATIONS

SKIMMING
The candidate can:
o Obtain main ideas and discourse topic quickly and efficiently;
o Establish quickly the structures of a text;
o Decide the relevance of a text (or part of a text) to their needs.

SEARCH READING
o The candidate can quickly find information on a predetermined topic.

SCANNING
The candidates can quickly find:
o Specific words or phrases;
o Figures, percentages;
o Specific items in an index

CAREFUL READING OPERATIONS

o Identify pronominal reference
o Identify discourse markers
o Interpret complex sentences
o Interpret topic sentences
o Recognize writer’s intention

MAKE INFERENCES:
o Infer the meaning of an unknown word from context.
o Make pragmatic inferences.  
 o Make propositional explanatory inferences concerned with motivation,
cause, consequence, and enablement, answering questions beginning
with why and how.
o Make propositional explanatory inferences concerned with motivation,
cause, consequence, and enablement, answering questions beginning
with who when and what.

Propositional inferences are those which do not depend on information from

outside the tex.t
Pragmatic inferences are those where we must combine information from the
text with knowledge from outside the text.

TEXTS
Texts that candidates are expected to be able to deal with can be specified along
several parameters: type, form, graphic features, topic, style, intended readership,
length, readability or difficulty, range of vocabulary and grammatical structure.

Text types include: text books, handouts, timetables, handouts, manuals, computer

Help systems, notices, and signs
Text Forms include: description, exposition, argumentation, instruction, narration.
(These can be broken down further if it is thought appropriate: e.g. expository texts
could include outlines, summaries, etc.)

Graphic Features include; tables, charts. Etc.

Topics may be listed or defined in a general way(such as non-technical , non-specialist)
or in relation to a set of candidates whose background is known (such as familiar to the
students)

Style may be specified in terms of formality.

Intended readership can be quite specific (e.g. native speaking signs undergraduate
students) or more general (e.g. young native speakers)

Length is usually expressed in number of words.

Readability- the readability is an objective, but not necessarily very valid, measure of
the difficulty of a text.

Range of vocabulary may be indicated by a complete list of words, by reference, either

to a word list or to indications of frequency in a learner’s dictionary

Range of Grammar may be a list of structures, or a reference to those to be found in a

course book or a grammar of the language.

CRITERIA LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE

Setting the tasks
   Successful choice of the text depends ultimately on experience, judgment, and a
certain amount of common sense. Practice is necessary.
1. Keep specifications constantly in mind and try to select as representative
a sample as possible.
2. Choose text of appropriate length.
 3. To obtain both content validity and acceptable reliability, include as many
passages as possible in a test, thereby giving candidates a good number
of fresh starts.
4. To test search reading, look for passages which contain plenty of discrete
pieces of information.
5. For scanning find texts which have the specified elements that have to be
scanned for.
6. To test the ability to quickly establish the structure of a text has a clearly
recognizable structure.
7. Choose texts that will interest candidates, but which will not over excite or
disturb them.
8. Avoid text made up of information that may be part of candidates’ general
knowledge.
9. Do not choose texts that are too culturally laden.
10. Do not use texts that students have already read.

WRITING ITEMS
   The aim must write items that will measure the ability in which we are interested, that
will elicit reliable behavior from candidates, and that will permit highly reliable scoring.

POSSIBLE TECHNIQUES
    It is important that the techniques used should interfere as little as possible with the
reading itself, that they should not add a significantly difficult task on top of reading.

MULTIPLE CHOICE
 The candidate provides evidence of successful reading by making a
mark against one out of several alternatives.

SHORT ANSWER
  The best answer questions are those with a unique correct
response, for example:
 In which city do the people described the 'Urban Villagers' live?
 The response may be a single word or something slightly longer
(e.g., China and Japan; American women).
 Short answer works well for testing the ability to identify referents,
testing the ability to predict the meaning of unknown words from
context, to test the ability to make various distinctions, such as that
between fact and opinion.

GAP FILLING
 This technique is particularly useful in testing reading. It can be
used any time that required response is so complex that it may
cause writing (and scoring) problems.
 If one wanted to know whether the candidate has grasped the main
idea(s) of the following paragraph, for instance, the item might be:

Complete the following, which is based on the paragraph below.

'Many universities in the Europe used to insists that their students speak and write only
________ . Now many of them accept _________ as an alternative, but not a _______
of the two.'

It can be used to test the ability to recognize details presented to support the main idea
and for scanning items.

Weakness of this item is that the candidate must provide one word (mixture or
combination) which is not on the passage.
INFORMATION TRANSFER
·         One way of minimizing demands on the candidates' writing ability is to require
them to show successful completion of a reading task by supplying simple information in
the table, following a route map, labeling a picture and so on.

WHICH LANGUAGE FOR ITEMS AND RESPONSES?

 The wording of reading of test items is not meant to cause
candidates any difficulties of comprehension.
 It should always be well within their capabilities, and less
demanding than the text itself. In the same way, responses should
make minimal demands on writing ability.
 Where candidates share a single native language, this native
language can be used both for items and for responses.
 There is a danger, however, that items may provide one candidate
with more information about the content of the text than they would
have obtained from items in the foreign language.

PROCEDURES FOR WRITING ITEMS

 The start of this is a careful reading of the text, having the specified
operations on mind. One should be asking oneself what a
competent reader should derive from the text.
 Where relevant, a note should be taken of main points, interesting
pieces of information, stages of argument, examples, and so on.
  The next step is to decide what tasks it is reasonable to expect
candidates to be able to perform in relation to these.
 It is only then that draft items should be written. Paragraph
numbers and line numbers should be added to the text if items
need to refer to these.
 The text and items should be presented to colleagues for
moderation. Items and even to the text may need modification. 

REFERENCES

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED398257

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED398258
https://sites.google.com/site/evaluationandlanguagetesting/t

esting-listening

https://sites.google.com/site/evaluationandlanguagetesting/t

esting-reading

https://www.academia.edu/36724039/TEACHING_THE_RECEP

TIVE_SKILLS_Listening_and_Reading_Skills

https://www.myenglishpages.com/blog/teaching-receptive-

skills/