1、Third Edition Completely Revised & UpdateJeremy Harmer A How we read and listen B Problems & solutions Receptive skills are the ways in which people extract meaning from the discourse they see or hear. When we read, listen or take part in conversation we employ our previous knowledge and dep

2、loy a range of receptive skills. Example A British reader comes across “England in six-wicket collapse.” He or she will almost certainly guess that the English cricket team has been beaten in an international match. Pre-existing knowledge: how headlines are constructed; wicket is a cricketing team;

3、England has not been doing too well in the sport lately. Therefore, understanding a piece of discourse involves much more than just knowing the language, and the “pre-existing knowledge of the world” is what we call schemaschema. Shared schemata make spoken and written communication becomes efficien

4、t. This is why it is difficult for a foreign learner to understand what they see or hear. InstrumentalInstrumental Example We read a road sign so that we know where to go, we read the instructions on a ticket machine because we need to know how to operate it. PleasurablePleasurable Example Spending

5、hours buried in the Sunday Paper. Top-down: studying the individual trees in it. Bottom-up: looking at a forest. Sometimes it is the individual details(top-down) that help us understand the whole; sometimes it is our overview (bottom-up) that allows us to process the details. Identifying the topicId

6、entifying the topic Good readers quickly get an idea of what is being talked about with the help of their own schemata. Predicting and guessingPredicting and guessing Readers sometimes look forward, trying to predict what is coming; sometimes they make assumptions or guess the content from half-hear

7、ing. Reading and listening for general Reading and listening for general understandingunderstanding Such kind of reading( eg. skimming) & listening strategy is not “lazy” options, the reader or listener has made a choice not to attend to every detail, but they use more of a top-down view of what

8、 is going on. Reading and listening for detailed Reading and listening for detailed informationinformation Example Reading the instructions; description of scientific procedures; remember the address and telephone numbers; listening to airport announcement. Interpreting textInterpreting text To unde

9、rstand what the writer or speaker is implying or guessing. Example “You are in a non-smoking zone.” was understood as asking the student to put her cigarette out. B1 LanguageB1 Language It is clear that both sentence length and the percentage of unknown words both play their part in a texts comprehe

10、nsibility. Pre-teaching vocabularyPre-teaching vocabulary There is dilemma: where students are likely to be held back unnecessarily because of three or four words, pre-teaching vocabulary is OK. When the students are asked to tackle authentic reading and listening texts for general understanding, we

11、 can leave vocabulary work later. Extensive reading and listeningExtensive reading and listening According to Richard Day and Julian Bamford, two of the many goals for extensive reading are enabling students to read without constantly stopping & providing an increased word recognition. The benef

12、its of extensive reading are echoed by the benefits for extensive listening: the more students listen, the more language they require, and the better they get at listening activities in general . AuthenticityAuthenticity Authentic material is language where no concessions are made to foreign speaker

13、s. This is what our students encounter in real life if they come into contact with target-language speakers. Deciding what is authentic is not easy: a stage play written for native speakers & “baby talk” a father talking to his baby daughter are not authentic. Topic and genre are important becau

14、se if students are not interest in a topic or not familiar with the genre they are dealing with, then they will be reluctant to engage fully with the activity. Choose the right topicChoose the right topic We can find this out by questionnaires, interviews, or by the reactions of students in both cur

15、rent and previous classes to various activities and topics we have used. And, individual students have individual interests, so we need to include a variety of topics to cater for all our students interests. Create interestCreate interest Example (lead-in) Talk about the topic; show a picture for pr

16、ediction; ask them to guess what they are going to see or hear; have them look at the headlines or captions before they read the whole thing. Activate schemataActivate schemata We want to activate their knowledge before they read or listen so that they bring their schemata to the text. Eg. Talk abou

17、t the kinds of questions an interviewer might use with a celebrity if they were going to listen to an interview with a sports star. Vary topics and genreVary topics and genre To make sure that students will experience an appropriate range of texts: from written instructions and tapes announcements t

18、o stories in books and live, spontaneous conversation, from Internet pages to business letters, from pre-recorded messages on phone lines to radio dramas. Possible problems Sometimes such tasks appear to be testing students rather than helping them to understand. Sometimes texts or the tasks are far

19、 too easy or far too difficult. Testing & teachingTesting & teaching Unlike reading and listening tests, comprehension tasks bring students to a greater understanding of language and text construction. Example: asking if certain statements about the text are true or false; asking questions a

20、bout the text with what, when, how many, & how often. Appropriate challengeAppropriate challenge When asking students to read and listen we want to avoid texts and tasks that are either far too easy or far too difficult. As with many other language tasks we want to get the level of challenge right, to make the tasks “difficult but achievable”. Students sometimes have low expectations of reading and listening. And such attitudes are often due to previous unhappy or unsuccessf