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Receptive And Productive Skills Ways To Teach Them In An EFL Classroom

15th February 2023

Teaching language skills is probably one of the trickiest things to do in a language classroom. This is because it considerably differs from the approach adopted to teach functions, vocabulary, and grammar. Teachers who have pursued a TEFL/TESOL bachelor's degree online program are aware that to teach vocabulary, functions, and grammar you can either take up the PPP or TBL methods.

However, language skills follow completely different procedures, and this is when teachers find themselves in a fix. If you are sailing in the same boat and have no idea how to teach productive and receptive skills to your students, take a look.

What Is Productive Skill?

Productive skills are considered to be the skills used by a learner to produce language in spoken or written forms. These are the skills they use to put together the language and turn it into something that others would understand. In simple terms, productive skills are the means of communicating properly with one another.

What Is Receptive Skill?

Receptive skills on the other hand comprise the skills that learners use to receive a language. In language teaching, these skills are used by the students to extract the meaning from a written or spoken discourse. Receptive skills comprise listening and reading and are used as means of measuring the proficiency of a person learning the language. 

Ways To Teach Receptive Skill

The aim of teaching receptive skills is to help the learners develop the necessary measures required to interpret and understand spoken or written materials. Here are two ways to develop receptive skills within your ESL learners.

1. Top-Down Processing

This refers to activities where the learners try to figure out the general message of a reading passage.

Here are some ways you can conduct these activities:
 

• Use pictures and let the students predict what the topic will be all about.
• Providing various titles to the learners and asking them to select the most appropriate title after reading the passage.
• Providing a variety of pictures and then matching them with the appropriate sections.
• Asking the students to listen to various conversations and identifying who all are involved and where they take place.
• Asking the students to figure out the types of relationships that they heard in the audio.

2. Bottom-Up Processing

These activities are concerned with phrases, sentences, and individual words. They are supposed to guide the students to construct texts with better meaning. Additionally, these activities allow the learners to retain the information while it is being processed.

Some examples of such activities are:
 

• Ask your students to determine what the underlined words mean. Are they a noun, pronouns, verbs, etc?
• Allow them to identify the order of a set of words in the text.
• Ask them to recognize sequence speech markers, parts of speech, or linking words.
• Enable them to identify the synonyms, antonyms, or tenses of verbs in the text.

Ways To Teach Productive Skill

The aim of productive skills is to allow the learners to produce coherent and appropriate messages either in written or spoken forms. Productive skills essentially involve the ability to convince, share ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and convey information.

Here are some steps to teach productive skills in an ESL classroom:
 

1. Offer them a model of the target genre you want your students to produce.
2. Allow them to work on the model while focusing on form and meaning.
3. Guide your students to analyze and enable them to discover formal and linguistic features by themselves
4. Ask them to separate the various features and work on accuracy activities to produce clear messages in terms of sentence structure, spelling, verb tense, pronunciation, etc.
5. To teach writing skills give the learners a rundown of specific processes like planning, collecting ideas, first draft, editing, and revision.
6. To teach speaking skills ask the learners to prepare and structure their discourse either individually or in pairs.
7. Record their conversations or read a sample of their writing to highlight the improvement areas and provide them with strategies to do better.

The Final Takeaway

Receptive and productive skills are extremely crucial when you are trying to foster language acquisition. However, you as a TEFL teacher must be aware of the potential difficulties that might occur while conducting these sessions and be cautious in explaining every aspect where your students find themselves stuck. However, if you are just thinking about starting your TEFL/TESOL journey, consider pursuing a bachelor of education in TESOL to gain valuable insights into learner types and teaching methodologies.

Looking for earning a bachelor of education in TESOL certification to teach English globally? If yes then contact us at 66-21055721. You can send us an email at asiancollegeofteachers@gmail.com too! Happy TEFLing!