21. Improving listening proficiency

37.TEAChING SPECIFIC SUBSKILLS AND STRATEGIES
The act of learning a language involves working on the language skills: writing, speaking, listening, and reading. We cannot rely on students’ background knowledge of reading in their L1 and believe they will transfer all the ones they already have 一 mostly, subconsciously 一 to the additional language. When a reading task comes up, some teachers simply ask students to read the text and do the exercise; they might even explain a few words students do not know. Moreover, there are some who tend to test students’ skills instead of teaching them how to read more effectively. In both cases, it is probably part of the teachers’ beliefs that learners transfer skills from L1 to L2 naturally. Therefore, it is more profitable to use different approaches in order to teach sub-skills and strategies.



Reading sub-skills
Even though reading is a receptive skill, readers do not need to be simple receivers of the message. Silberstein (1994) says that it is the interaction with the text that tends to create meaning. However, the product approach, that most teachers tend to use more often, makes reading a passive process. This approach encourages the use of top-down sub-skills as the first contact with the text to understand the general idea. It is usually a stage to check predictions, find out the topic, read for gist etc. Then, a bottom-up activity would follow, which is often reading for detail or specific information, and finally a follow-up activity.
According to Brown (2001), specialists used to argue that different text comprehension exercises working on bottom-up sub-skills would result in text comprehension. However, later research has shown that we should make use of different types of activities and help students develop a mix of bottom-up and top-down sub-skills. This will value reading as an active process, to get our learners to interact with the text, rather than simply gather information from words and sentences.
It is by applying interactive approaches that learners can dialogue with texts. Eskey & Grabe (1988) claim that these incorporate the use of background knowledge, reading between the lines, context and inferences, etc. while it can also deal with accurate and fast written language recognition. Consequently, interactive approaches work with both top-down and bottom-up sub-skills. To exemplify some of the many sub-skills we can teach using an interactive approach, I will describe three of them below.