61. Activity design and presentation on receptive skills

67. TEACHING SPECIFIC SUB SKILLS 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.
1. Guessing meaning from context
As we tend to tell students, they do not need to know all the words in a text to reach comprehension. Silberstein (1994) has argued that knowing how to grasp meaning is one of the most important sub-skill effective readers must develop. Besides helping develop fluency, it also provides ‘semantic links that aid readers in remembering vocabulary items’ (Silberstein, 1994:107). Nonetheless, in order for readers to have enough tools to infer meanings of words, they need to be familiar with 95 - 98% of the lexical items in it. Then, they are capable of making inferences through synonyms in apposition, antonyms, descriptions, examples, glossing, affixation and others.
As there is a minimum of how much readers should be familiarised with the lexis in a text, they need enough aids to make inferences. It might be due to a short-circuit problem. According to Nuttall (1982), this kind of issue happens when learners lack linguistic knowledge to reach a goal. In this case, students sometimes do not have enough previous knowledge of vocabulary. Additionally, some ineffective readers are so used to asking for definitions and consulting dictionaries that they have not developed the suitable strategies to guess meaning from context. Some are also afraid to take risks and do not even try to deduce because they prefer to be safe and resort to dictionaries, the Internet, the teacher or a classmate.
Guessing meaning from context is a sub-skill we should present to our students. A possible way to do so could comprise four steps. Firstly, tell students the list of ways to infer the meaning, which Silberstein cited, and I mentioned above.