ELT365 · D152 — What ‘Receptive’ Really Means

Idea — Listening and reading are called ‘receptive’ — you receive language rather than produce it. But reception is active: predicting, inferring, and selecting are all cognitive work.

Example — A learner hears ‘the bank’ in a sentence about rivers and must activate the right meaning without being told.

Try — Think of three context clues that would tell you which ‘bank’ a speaker means. What makes each clue decisive?

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