21. Improving listening proficiency

Strategies

As readers or listeners, we never start reading or listening completely from a “zero starting-point.” We always use our prior knowledge to predict what the text will be about or to make sense of what is said or written. In addition to that, we always look for contextual clues to help us in our quest for making sense of the text. We also often recall and connect the information in the text to other texts, to ourselves and the world.
As teachers, we have to train our learners to make use of strategies such as those described below so that they can become better readers and listeners. Here are short descriptions of some of these strategies:


32.READING AS AN INTERACTIVE PROCESS
"What is reading?" Ask a random person on the street this question and he or she might shrug and say, "Gee, it's just looking at the words on the page. If you can see, you can read." Well, the act of creating meaning from the symbols on the page is considerably more complex and draws on linguistic, cognitive, and experiential abilities beyond just the mere perception of typographical marks. The comprehension of written texts requires interpretation of language in print form. To make sense of those symbols, one must have a grasp of the "language code"-to have a storehouse of words in one's personal vocabulary and to understand how sentences are constructed in the language.
Reading is more than just knowing words and grammar, however. Think of a piece of text you perceive as gobbledygook: the annual report from your stock fund, tax publications, etc. You, as a fluent user of the language, can "read" the words but may have no understanding of the intended message.
To derive meaning from print, for it to make sense beyond mere "decoding," the reader must have a knowledge base, or "mental schema," in order to make associations with the concepts presented in the text. A person in the act of reading is actively, if unconsciously, engaged in a dialogue with the text, figuring out its meaning, linking it with known material or world experience, perhaps questioning or challenging the ideas presented on the page.