Understanding Receptive Skills in Reading Process
Receptive skills are essential in extracting meaning from written or spoken discourse. Reading involves employing previous knowledge to comprehend text, using a combination of receptive skills based on the purpose of reading. Schema theory plays a crucial role in making sense of text by activating pre-existing knowledge. Reasons for reading vary between instrumental and pleasurable motivations. The processing of reading can be categorized into top-down and bottom-up approaches, each focusing on different levels of understanding and detail.
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Receptive Skills 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. 2
How Reading works as Receptive Skill When we read a story or a newspaper, listen to the news, or take part in conversation, we employ our previous knowledge as we approach the process of comprehension we deploy a range of receptive skills which receptive skills we use will be determined by our reading or listening purpose. 3
How Reading works as Receptive Skill In order to make sense of any text we need to have pre- existent knowledge of-the world (Cook 1989: 69). Such knowledge is often referred to as schema (plural schemata). Each of us carries in our heads mental representations of typical situations that we come across. When we are stimulated by particular words, discourse patterns, or contexts such schematic knowledge is activated and we are able to recognise that we see or hear because it fits into patterns that we already know. 4
Reasons for reading We can divide reasons for reading into two broad categories: Instrumental Pleasurable Instrumental: a large amount of reading takes place because it will help us to achieve some clear aim. Pleasurable: another kind of reading takes place largely for pleasure. 5
Processing Top-down and bottom-up processing: In metaphorical terms Top-down can be likened to the difference between looking down on something from above - getting an overview - and, on the contrary, bottom-up is being in the middle of something and understanding where we are by concentrating on all the individual features. It is the difference between looking at a forest, or studying the individual trees within it. In top-down processing the reader gets a general view of the reading passage by, in some way, absorbing the overall picture. 6
Processing In bottom-up processing, on the other hand, the reader focuses on individual words and phrases, and achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a whole. It is probably most useful to see acts of reading as interactions between top-down processing. Without a good understanding of a reasonable proportion of the details gained through some bottom- up processing we will be unable to get any clear general picture of what the text is about. and bottom-up 7
Strategic skills Different skill-levels prompt different readers to employ different uses of those skills: Identifying the topic Predicting and guessing Reading for general understanding Reading for specific information Reading for detailed information Interpreting text 8
Extensive and intensive reading most researchers like to make a difference between extensive and intensive reading. Whereas the former (extensive) suggests reading at length, often for pleasure and in a leisurely way, intensive reading tends to be more concentrated, less relaxed, and often dedicated not so much to pleasure as to the achievement of a study goal. 9
Extensive and intensive reading Extensive reading frequently takes place when students are on their own Intensive reading is often done with the help and/or intervention of the teacher. Extensive reading enables students to read without constantly stopping and provide an increased word recognition (Richard Day and Julian Bamford 1998). 10
Extensive reading materials material which students can understand. Since pleasure is the main goal of this activity, if they are struggling to understand every word, they can hardly be reading for pleasure. teachers need to provide books which either by chance, or because they have been specially written, are readily accessible to the students. This type of materials have been called language learner literature (Day & Bamford 1988) A library of suitable extensive reading materials for graded learners should be established, coded and made available for the students. 11
Extensive Reading: the role of the teacher Students usually do not do much extensive reading if they are not prompted by the teacher. So the role of teacher is crucial. Teachers should espouse reading as a valid occupation and thus persuade students of its benefits. Teachers can, at times, read aloud excerpts from the reading materials they like to show their students how interesting and pleasing reading can be. 12
Extensive reading tasks Students should be allowed to make choice regarding reading Students can be asked to maintain reading diaries/journals about their reading with commentary about the texts They can be asked to review and rate the texts they are reading. 13
Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher In order to get students to read enthusiastically in class, we need to work to create interest in the topic and tasks. However, there are further roles teachers need to adopt when asking students to read intensively. Organiser: to tell students exactly what their reading purpose is, give them clear instructions about how to achieve it and explain how long they have to do this. Observer: just to observe and not interrupt the process / activities of reading and silently collect information about the whole event. 14
Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher Feedback organiser: to lead a feedback session to check that students have completed reading activities successfully. Prompter: to prompt them to notice language features within it and to direct them to certain features of text construction, ambiguities and making them aware of issues of text structure which they had not come across previously. clarifying 15
Intensive reading: the vocabulary question Though students are asked not to bother about the meaning of every single word, rather to read for a general understanding, students are usually desperate to learn the meanings of all the words they come across. It seems contradictory to insist that students "read for meaning" while simultaneously discouraging them from trying to understand the text at a deeper level than merely gist (Carol Walker 1998: 172). 16
Intensive reading: the vocabulary question To resolve this contradiction, students can be given a chance to ask about the meanings of particular words. The teacher may limit the amount of time spent on vocabulary checking in the following ways: Time limit: a time limit of, say, five minutes for vocabulary enquiry, whether this involves dictionary use, language corpus searches or questions to the teacher Word/phrase limit: only answer questions about five or eight words or phrases. Meaning consensus: get students to work together to search for and find word meanings. 17
Intensive reading: letting the students in Teacher should try to engage the students in a text by bringing their own feelings and knowledge to the task. Teacher can ask students whether they like the text or not as a whole. Teacher needs to activate the students schemata. To do this, she can discuss subject matter of the text before the students read it, ask them to work out some charts regarding the texts asserting what they know about it. 18
Reading lesson sequences Intensive reading may involve a lot of purposes like the students may have to skim, scan or read for communicative purposes To accomplish these different objectives, intensive reading activities involve lesson sequences Most reading sequences involve more than one reading skill. Teachers may start by having students read for gist and then get them to read the text again for detailed comprehension Students may start by identifying the topic of a text before scanning the text quickly to recover specific information Students may read for specific information before going back to the text to identify features of text construction. 19
The ultimate goal of the teacher should be to ensure that the students have understood the whole project of reading and that they have done by engaging themselves wholeheartedly in the process. Thank You 20
