NOTTING HILL COLLEGE

Basma Mohamed Mohamed Okasha

Module 2, assignment 1,

Question 1, state the challenges that an EFL learner would encounter

As long as the main aim of learning receptive skills is to develop the learners’ ability in order to
comprehend the written or spoken language not only learning more grammar and vocabulary.
So The EFL learners may face difficulties to understand these language skills. It’s essential for
teachers to recognize these difficulties that are related to listening comprehension and the
others that are related to reading comprehension in order to help the learners overcoming
them using different solutions and strategies.

Teaching receptive skills is not focusing on the learning task only but on creating the purpose
and desire to read a text or listen to a speech in order to understand the given information. To
achieve this purpose teacher should know the challenges that face the learners while learning
reading or listening to avoid and overcome them. Reading comprehension is not only reading
vocabulary in a text but also understanding the meaning of this vocabulary in context, so
vocabulary is considered as the major difficulty in reading, because most of the students have
difficulty in understanding the text, they can’t guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, translate
word by word, Also they may know the meaning of each word but still can’t understand,
sometimes they don’t know the purpose of why they read and that may lead them to use
ineffective reading strategy. In addition, they face other difficulties related to sentence length
and level. Also using the same strategy in reading in L1 may not work in reading English because
English doesn’t have correspondence between written letters and their sounds (i.e. rough,
sought). Learners also face difficulty in vocabulary knowledge and lack of culture knowledge of
L2, as sometimes they face problems in reading between the lines which depend on using
Schema. The schema is the learners' background knowledge of the word which helps them in
understanding the text. So it's important to provide the students with background knowledge
about the topic in order to build their Schema and increase the culture.
To overcome the above-mentioned problems, teachers can apply some strategies and
solutions. Such as “refer to the top-down and bottom-up strategies working together to achieve
comprehension” (MC Donough and Shaw, 2003, p. 97). And “set a clear task, set a time limit,
clarify the reading aim, have a clear policy on vocabulary pre-teaching” (Grains and Redman,
2003, p.170). Also teachers can help the learners learning new vocabulary independently and
how to pronounce the vowels whether in stressed or unstressed syllables and the English
sound-symbols correspondence. Moreover, teachers can teach them how to apply their
metacognitive knowledge from their L1 to support the L2 reading such as how to deal with the
unfamiliar words and what to do when they don’t understand the text. Above all teachers
should help in using effective reading strategies at all literacy levels to improve vocabulary
knowledge. Here are some integrating reading strategies. First before reading: when teachers
should plan for the reading task, set a purpose for reading, determine the needed background
knowledge or linguistic, and decide to introduce the text from the top-down( to get the overall
meaning) or bottom-up (focus on the words or phrases). Second during reading: when teachers
should monitor the learner's understanding, predict the main idea, check the learners'
comprehension by rereading the text. Finally, after reading: when teachers should evaluate the
comprehension and the used strategies in a specific task area, evaluate the learner's overall
progress in a specific reading task , then decide if the used strategies were appropriate for the
task’s purpose or not.

On the other hand, listening comprehension is a complex skill. It’s not only hearing the words,
but it's also an active process that requires hearing and understanding the speaker and reacting
with him to grasp the meaning. That’s why the students face many problems while listening to
comprehend the speech. Some of these problems are related to the choice of the material, the
listening task, or setting up the task in the classroom.
The problems that are related to the choice of the material are : the students find it's difficult to
listen to a message than read it, as they prefer reading a written message on a paper than
listening to the same message on a tape, because they may not cope without having images or
body language, and the solution is to prepare some visual aids for people or events and put
them in order as they listen or draw diagrams related to the topic. Sometimes they don’t
understand because the speed of the speech is too fast, and here teachers should revise the
material before the session to make sure that it isn’t too fast or use the pause button in order
to give them the chance to catch up the part they missed. Another point is, that they don’t
know the important words, and here teachers can pre-teach the important vocabulary and help
them to guess the meaning. Also students may not recognize the words they already know in
the stream of the speech because of the linking words, elision and the word stress, here
teachers can provide the students with pronunciation work as possible as they can, and they
also can grade the materials from semi-authenticity to total-authenticity in order to help the
learners to understand the natural speech gradually. Moreover, learners have problems with
different accents, teachers here can use a variety of British and American accent but they have
to avoid the strong regional accents. Furthermore, learners may become distracted because of
the background noise in the material or inside the class, so teachers should put in consideration
while choosing the material that there is no background noise, and make sure there is no noise
inside or outside the class.
Other problems related to the listening task are: the task is too challenging which makes the
students feel frustrated and tired, teachers here need to bear in mind the length of the material
while choosing it to not overload the learners' brain and to create a suitable task for the text. In
addition, learners may feel uninterested in listening, here teachers can create a task-oriented
exercise to encourage them and help them to develop the listening skills by giving different
tasks. “listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed around a task. That is to
say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear, that will
demonstrate their understanding” (UR, 1984, p. 25).
Finally, problems related to setting up task in the class: the learners get confused about what to
do because the CD is not cued , there is no lead-in for the listening session, teachers forget to
explain the context of the dialogue or, there is no chance to learners to check their answers in
pairs before feedback. Here are the solutions for these problems: check the CD player and
make sure it’s cued, explain the kind of text and give clear instructions for the required task
before playing the CD, and give the learners the chance to check their answers together before
the final feedback.
Finally there are some listening strategies teachers can follow: first, top-down strategies which
depend on the background knowledge of the learner, they include listening for gist, predicting,
practicing inference, and summarizing. Second, bottom-up strategies that depend on the
language in the text (sounds, words, etc.), they include detailed listening and understanding the
word-order patterns. Finally, metacognitive strategies that the learners use to plan and
evaluate their listening strategies to know whether they were effective or not.

In short, receptive skills are the learners’ tools to extract the meaning from the text they read
or speech they hear. By recognizing the problems that face the students while listening like the
problems that are related to the material, listening task, or related to setting up the task and
reading comprehension problems such as the problems related to vocabulary knowledge and
meaning, using ineffective reading strategies, recognize the reading purpose, or the ability to
understand the hidden information between the lines. Teachers can adopt different strategies
and solutions in order to help the student overcoming these problems such as top-down and
bottom-up strategies, in addition to teach different listening and reading skills using a variety of
interesting tasks.
References

https://www.academia.edu/36404691/TEACHING_RECEPTIVE_SKILL

Renukadevi, Dhandapani. "The role of listening in language acquisition; the challenges &
strategies in teaching listening." International journal of education and information studies 4.1
(2014): 59-63.

Yagang, Fan. "Listening: Problems and solutions." English Teaching Forum. Vol. 31. No. 2. 1993.