Receptive skills-Listening and Reading: A sin qua non for Engineers
Tarjani Dakshesh Sheth
Teaching Assistant, ASH Department, Uka Tarsadia University, Gujarat, India
Tarjani.sheth@utu.ac.in
ABSTRACT
Today’s world considers English as a universal language because there has never been a language so extensively spread or spoken by so many people as English. That includes India as well. In communication, a receptive capacity for decoding foreign language and content of the message is a skill which can be trained and developed through teaching. Universities can play a key role to shape the future engineers to cope the growing demand of acquiring receptive skills in English Language. The aim of this paper is considering the present scenario
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Besides, as our main aim is to prepare the students for real-life social interaction, social listening could also be one of the skills. There is also a need to learn how to think about and respond to what we listen to; because we often take part in social interaction and face-to-face conversations. Therefore, and direct teaching of the skill followed by organized, sequential practice has to be assimilated in the second language curriculum. As Y.SREENIVASULU and R.V. J. KASYAP [6] puts it : “learners require a model of the target language to reproduce, a kind of Standard English, which is systematic in training. Teachers with such good model, play an essential role in teaching right pronunciation. The more a teacher cares his own pronunciation the better a learner cares and learn it. They will automatically mend their own pronunciation at the college level if they get a chance to listen to it regularly in the …show more content…
One must read the printed lines, as well as between the lines, behind the lines and beyond the lines for symbolic meanings, concealed meanings and ironic meanings. “The style or method of reading depends upon the reader’s purpose or intent. Reading any material is expected to make the reader more competent and give him more knowledge and insight.” [3] In fact, reading is one of the resources of knowledge. Effective reading is an active reading. Therefore one must know the drive and intent. Since reading is thinking under the stimulus of the printed page, it is a psycholinguistic guessing game, a technical teacher, student and other professional reader must focus on this intellectual soft skill which is a perplexing and lucrative activity for a modern reader to get success in his career.
Since reading is an active process, a reader can understand a text only when he actively puts to use his mental faculties. While reading, a reader interacts with a text, decodes it and constructs meanings in the process. What he constructs depends on not only what the writer writes but also on what the reader brings to the text. This intellectual soft skill is a challenging and profitable activity for a contemporary reader since current textual material is mostly abstract and
In the introduction of “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” , Thomas C. Foster focuses on the grammar of literature and the qualities of a professorial reader. He asserts that practise is crucial to learn how to read literature in a more rewarding way. In addition, he defines main elements of the context such as pattern , symbols, and conventions. The purpose of Foster appears to be informing students who is beginning to be introduced to literature. Although Foster’s style is slightly condescending, he utilizes the conventions of literature quite well, and mentions the arbitrariness of these conventions in a sensible way.
This grants more creative freedom for the writer, while also instilling the different template methods through practice. In spite of the logical advantages that the templates give the writer, some people are still skeptical of this type of method. Many believe that these templates are a juvenile form that inhabits creativity. One student even proclaims, “I’m in college now, this is third-grade-level stuff.” (10) Regardless of these students claims that templates are too simplistic and less imaginative, Graff and Birkensteins’ idea that one must learn through template forms in order to enhance their skills in the future should be endorsed.
The Synopsis that I gathered from Haas and Flowers’ “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning” was none the less another interesting read. Experienced readers might come to understand that both reading and writing can be “context-rich, situational, and have constructive acts”. Though a large number of students may find reading and writing more or less to be an exchange of valued or non-valued information. Continuing on, multiple studies that have been conducted have also found that on average 77 percent of experienced readers tend to use content strategies to expand their knowledge of the reading. These strategies usually include vigorous annotations of the reading/writing that have been shown to improve the readers/writers’ comprehension of the material.
Foster puts into words how these determine the setup and meaning of literature using examples and ideas that are useful for high school and college students.
She believes the syllabus provided to students do not include any challenging books, and her belief toward high school teachers becoming too lazy to examine thoroughly if the book the education system provides them with represent any true and significant value is a recurring concern of hers’- therefore ineffective to students. All in all, Prose used ethos, pathos, logos and the usage of specific words to help her argument. She successfully persuades her point of view and makes it clear that if schools want their curriculum to improve, they must change their way of teaching and push their students to view literature in a new
They also appear to enjoy learning the content due to their involvement. The goal of this activity was to build students reading skills by working them through the subject and allowing them to discuss amongst each other any information that relates to the subject of the reading. It is also intended to help the students think as they read. This helped enable the students understand the subject of the reading, offer their own insight, and identify words more easily. This will also allow students to identify new words and will increase their ability with word identification and reading skills.
This chapter can help young writers in English class with their papers in many different ways. For instance, Trimble gives examples on what a veteran writer does in order to make their writing interesting. He also gives out techniques on how you can get a reader’s attention or how you can fix your writing to make it readable instead of having nonsense. What makes this difficult for me as a writer is that I write what ever comes to my mind and it will not make sense. Another thing that makes it difficult for me as a writer is that I am not good at getting the readers attention and having him hooked on to my work.
In “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Readers” by Kavitha Rao, she express her opinion on the topic that the current generation is not reading for fun. She mentions several experience she had with other people, that don 't see the benefit in reading for fun. She says that since people aren 't reading more leisure anymore they 're becoming less creative, inarticulate, have poor communication skills and low confidence, which is caused by parents forcing their kids to read, and the education system need to have students memorize textbooks and nothing else. After reading this article I find myself disagreeing with Rao on several points she made, I don’t believe the modern attitude towards reading is causing people to be self absorbed and unimaginative, she also claims that book clubs don 't encourage reading for fun, parents are forcing their children to read boring books which turned them away from reading and that the educational system is to blame for college students for being inarticulate.
In Mike Bunn’s reading “How to Read Like a Writer” he discuss the importance of being able to read as a writer. He explains why it’s necessary to be able to understand what the author is trying to get across. Being able to identify why a writer chose is a certain tone for his/her writing is what makes one a better reader. One should put to themselves in the author’s shoes and be able to connect with the writing and understand from what point the author is coming from. When reading like a writer it facilitates one’s ability to understand to do this.
The study of literature is also another topic that relies of an individual to have educated the intellectual and emotional aspects of their bodies to master their imagination. When someone has developed this ability they are able to fully understand literature. For example, Achilles the typical hero archetype is explained by Frye as “Achilles is greater than any man could ever be (Frye, 24).” A regular person would be in awe of Achilles great prowess in battle and would use their imagination to become the mighty Achilles in their dreams. The individual with an educated imagination on the other hand, would be relate to Achilles strengths while at the same time identify with his weaknesses as we humans share them as well.
While traveling towards the path of seeping knowledge and analyzing critical ideals, we’ve become absent minded towards the components that gave us the ability to read. Since reading is always a part of our everyday routine, we have lost the idea that when it comes to learning how to read, we must start from the basics. From reading a case study, to reading a letter from a loved one, comprehension, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and oral language are the six essential components of reading. Before a child develops the ability to read, they begin to develop comprehension. Comprehension can be defined as the ability to understand.
New Criticism as a whole emphasizes understanding the text
During the two day observations, I had the opportunity to experience how Mrs. Carbone teaches listening, speaking, & pronunciation by incorporating different approaches. During my first observation, the class was a follow up class designed to promote listening skills and oral language development. Mrs. Carbone explained that the class
Reading is the act or skill of reading and Strategy is a plan of action made to reach a goal. Reading strategy is a decisive, intellectual action that an individual acquires when they are reading to help build and preserve meaning. There are two reading strategies that are used mostly in schools, colleges and technical institutions and are taught in communication and study skills course which is extensive reading and intensive reading. Extensive reading is the widening of knowledge of a pointed topic through large quantity reading. It is commonly used for knowing the country and the world as a whole which increases knowledge and widens our perspective though general understanding and pleasure.
Aural means related to sense of hearing and oral related to verbal communication. Surely when the student is getting better in both listening and speaking they will reach communicative competence. Communicative competence refers to the level of language learning that enables language users to convey their message to others and to understand others’ messages within specific context (Hymes, 1972). Of course to reach this competence, both listening and speaking improvement is really needed. The Aural-Oral approach is very effective to be implemented in English Language Teaching in case to build communicative competence of student.