The practise of english languaje teaching

ESCUELA NORMAL SUPERIOR DE MEXICO

LICENCIATURA EN EDUCACION SECUNDARIA CON ESPECIALIDAD EN LENGUA
EXTRANJERA: INGLÉS

SEMESTRE: SEGUNDO

ASIGNATURA: OBSERVACION DEL PROCESO ESCOLAR

CICLO ESCOLAR: 2010 – 2011

REPORTE DE: THE PRACTICE OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (CHAPTER 16)

ALUMNO: OMAR SALAZAR URIBE
Receptive skills are the ways in which people extract meaning from thediscourse they see or hear. There are generalities about this kind of processing which apply to both reading and listening - and which will be addressed in this chapter - but there are also significant differences between reading and listening processes too, and in the ways we can teach these skills in the classroom.
How we read and listen?
When we read a story or a newspaper, listen to the news, ortake part in conversation we employ our previous knowledge as we approach the process of comprehension, and we deploy a range of receptive skills; which ones we use will be determined by our reading or listening purpose.
What we bring to the task?
If a British reader walks past a newspaper stand and sees the headline' England in six- wicket collapse' he or she will almost certainly guess that theEngland cricket team has been beaten in an international match. This guess will be based on the reader's pre- existing knowledge of newspapers, their experience of how headlines are constructed, their understanding that wicket is a cricketing term, and their knowledge that England has not been doing too well in the sport lately.
If the reader then goes on to buy the newspaper he or she will useall this pre-existing knowledge to predict the relevant article's contents both before and during the reading of it. However, a reader who did not has such pre-existing knowledge (because he or she did not know anything about cricket, for example), would find the reading task more difficult.
What the above example suggests is that understanding a piece of discourse involves much more than justknowing the language. In order to make sense of any text we need to have 'pre-existent knowledge of the world. Such knowledge is often referred to as schema (plural schemata). Each of us carries in our heads mental representations of typical situations that we come across. When we are stimulated by particular words, discourse patterns, or contexts, such schematic knowledge is activated and we areable to recognize what we see or hear because it fits into patterns that we already know. As Chris Tribble points out, we recognize a letter of rejection or a letter offering a job within the first couple of lines Tribble When we see "a written text our schematic knowledge may first tell us what kind of
text genre we are dealing with.
Thus if we recognize an extract as coming from a novel we willhave expectations about the kind of text we are going to read. These will be different from the expectations aroused if we recognize a piece of text as coming from an instruction manual.
Knowing what kind of a text we are dealing with allows us to predict the form it may take at the text, paragraph, and sentence level. Key words and phrases alert us to the subject of a text, and this againallows us, as we read, to predict what is coming next.
In conversation knowledge of typical interactions helps participants to
communicate efficiently. As the conversation continues, the speakers and listeners
draw upon various schemata - including genre, topic, discourse patterning, and the use of specific language features - to help them make sense of what they are hearing. As with readers, suchschemata arouse expectations which allow listeners to predict what will happen in the conversation. Such predictions give the interaction a far greater chance of success than if the participants did not have such pre-existing knowledge to draw upon.
Shared schemata make spoken and written communication efficient. Without the
right kind of pre-existing knowledge, comprehension becomes much more...