Receptive skills  (Type-1 & Type-2) The reader or listener employs a number of specialist skills when reading or listening and his success at understanding the content of what he sees or hears depends to a large extent on his expertise in these specialist skills. (a) Predictive skills (Type-1) The efficient listener or reader predicts what he is going tohear or read and the process of understanding the text is theprocess of seeing how the content of the text matches up to these predictions. In the first instance his predictions will be the result of the expectations he has -which we discussed above. As he continues to listen and read, however , his predictions will change as he receives more information from the text. One of the main functions of the lead-in stage when teaching receptive skills will be to encourage predictive skills, and the examples of materials and techniques are especially designed for this purpose. (b ) Extracting specific information  (Type-1) Very often the listener or reader is involved in the use of receptive skills for the sole purpose of extracting specific information. In other words the reader, for example, may look at a piece of written language not in order to understand it all, but for the purpose of finding out only one or two facts. He may quickly read a film revue only to find out the name of the star .The listener may turn on the radio and listen only for a particular item of news that he wants to hear. In both cases the reader/listener will disregard everything except the information he is interested in. This skill when applied to reading is often called scanning and we will concentrate on the skill of ; extracting specific information. ( c ) Getting the general picture (Type-1) Readers and listeners often read or listen to something because they want to 'get the general picture'. In other words they want to read something, for example, and as a result of their reading have a general idea of the main points of what they have read: it is the main points that they are interested in, not the detail. Indeed the skill of reading in order to get the general picture (often called skimming) presupposes the reader's ability to pick out the main points and discard what is irrelevant, or what is only detail. The reader is able to skim rapidly over information that is repeated more than once. The skill of getting the general picture, then, is concerned with rapidly assessing the main points of a text and notpaying attention to irrelevance or detail. In listening, too, this skill is necessary and widely practised, particularly since speakers often include language which is not relevamto the main points they are making or which is redundant (i.e. they have already said the same thing in a different way). ( d) Inferring opinion and attitude  (Type-2) A reader or listener often has to be able to work out what the writer or speaker's opinions and attitudes are, particularly since they are not always directly stated. The experienced reader or listener will know , from various clues he receives while reading and listening, whether the writer or speaker approves of the topic he is discussing, or whether his opinion of the personality he is describing is favourable or not. The ability to infer opinion and attitude is largely based on the recognition of linguistic style and its use to achieve appropriate purposes. ( e ) Deducing meaning from context (Type-2) Even native speakers often come across words in written and spoken texts that they do not understand. Most usually , however , the fact that a word is unknown to them does not cause any particular problem. Based on the context in which the word occurs (the sentences, information and grammar that surround it) the native speaker guesses its meaning. Usually, too, his guess will be right. The point is that the deducing of meaning is important for  a language user who will often meet unknown words and we will try to train students in the same way to guess the meaning of unknown words. It should be said, of course, that for a native speaker or a foreign language user there is a point at which they are not able to deduce meaning from context where there are a great number of words that they do not understand. (f) Recognising function and discourse patterns and markers (Type-2) Native speakers know that when they read or hear someone say 'for example' this phrase will be followed by an example. When they read 'in other words' a concept will be explained in a different way .Recognising such discourse markers is an important part of understanding how a text is constructed. It is important to know , for example , which sentence in a paragraph is a generalisation and which sentence then backs up that generalisation with evidence. It is also important to be able to recognise devices for cohesion and understand how a text is organised coherently. The skills  fall into two main categories which we will call type 1 and type 2. Type 1 skills are (a), (b) and (c) above and type 2 skills are (d), (e) and (f) above.