21. Improving listening proficiency

29.SPOKEN INTERACTION FROM SPOKEN PRODUCTION
Speaking
I think that I haven't got problems with speaking about some general things such as weather, work, field of study, hobbies, travelling etc. But I have some problems discussing specific topics. For example I have serious problems talking about technological methods, processes - all the topics where you need to know specific terminology (like Biology, Economy, etc.) and that's where I am struggling with my poor vocabulary.

Sometimes I have difficulties to remember or recall the exact word, but I'm always trying to explain the word/thing in different words. Other people usually haven't got problems to understand what I'm talking about and some of them even told me that it's very easy to understand me. But for me, sometimes it takes me some time to get used to different accents or speed of someones speech. 

I haven't got many (if any) friends who would like to talk with me, so I didn't have anyone to talk. But few months ago I found out that there are some free English conversations and meetings with foreigners, so I started to attend them and I am talking again. This really helps me and makes me grateful for living in the city with such opportunities. 

Spoken interaction
Here are two audio records which were recorded by me and one of my classmates - Míša. They are very "unprepared" and improvised. But they are showing our skills to react immediately and answer the questions.
Spoken production
Here is the audio record of me reading the first page (and a half) of one of my favourite books Veronika decides to die by Paulo Coelho and a photo of those pages. I've chosen this book to demonstrate the level of the text I have no problems to understand.

31.ACTIVITY DESIGN AND PRESENTATION ON RECEPTIVE SKILLS
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.
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:
Teaching reading or listening comprehension is not testing comprehension. A receptive skill lesson aims at training the learners to use the necessary tools to understand any type of text. In other words, the teacher should initiate learners to make use of different strategies to get meaning from written or spoken text. These strategies are related to either top-down or bottom-up cognitive processing. Ideally, the teacher should start with a general understanding of the text (i.e. top-down processing) and end up with a more detailed understanding (i.e. bottom-up processing).