Why Reading and Listening Skills are Important?
It is well-known that when we learn any language, listening, speaking, reading and writing are all important during language learning. Why do we learn a language the final goal is to communicate with others. Today I'd like to talk about the importance of learning reading and listening. The reasons for reading and listening can be contributed to the following parts. Firstly, we may read or listen for a particular aim or goal. Secondly, we may for entertainment, such as listening to their favorite songs and so on.
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This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Yajun D. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
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Ways to Learn
When it comes to the way of learning reading and listening, there are many effective ways that we may follow. Let's take skimming and scanning for instance. When we do skimming, we can keep in mind that read quickly, nothing only the chief point. We read and listen for the gist of the text. So we only need to get a general understanding of the content by skimming. But when we do scanning, we normally read or listen for some specific information, this may be very practical for reading advertisements. We should choose the correct way when doing the reading and listening.
Also Read: English as a Foreign Language in The Kindergarten
Anticipated Problems
No matter what we are going to learn, we may face some difficulties during our learning, there is no exception for learning reading and listening. We may come across many difficult words and very long sentences with many clauses during our reading our listening. There are some tips that we may follow during our teaching. First, we may pre-teach some difficult or unknown language, structures or words, in this way, it may reduce some obstacles for students during reading and listening. Second, we should select the teaching materials carefully according to the students' language level. We should try our best to encourage our students when encountering difficulties.
Also Read: Teaching Groups of Beginners
Personal Experience
According to my personal teaching experience, when doing a reading, most students spend too much time on each passage when doing exercise and they just can't move on to the next, they don't know how to capture the keywords and of course can't understand the passage. What's more, they don't have a rich vocabulary and so on. When students doing listening, they don't understand what is said in the radio, cassette, DVDs and so on, they may think they are speaking so fast or they may lack understanding and practice of lisping, weak reading, loss of blasting, sound assimilation, the different accents between different countries.
Also Read: What does TEFL mean?
Forming Good Habits
Vocabulary is too poor, lack of grammar knowledge. All in all, they didn't form a good habit during reading and writing and they did few practices on reading and listening, and most importantly, they didn't master the correct and effective way of doing reading and listening. When students facing these difficulties, I always encourage students to practice more and do more exercises. Try to memorize as more words as they can and review them very often. They can often listen to their favorite songs and watch movies, which is also a good way to improve their reading and listening. And keep in mind the effective ways that they can use during reading and listening.
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All in all, the receptive skills: reading and listening are essential. Where there is no input, there is no output of the language.
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