The theme: teaching reading

THE THEME: TEACHING READING

PLAN:

1. 
   Principles in designing reading comprehension tasks and activities;
   
2. 
   Key strategies for successful reading comprehension;
   
3. 
   Types of classroom reading performance;
   
4. 
   Principles for teaching reading skills.
   

Micro and Macro skills for reading comprehension.

Micro skills:

• 
  Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns of English;
  
• 
  Retain chunks of language of different length in short-term memory;
  
• 
  Comprehend written language at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose;
  
• 
  Recognize a core of words and interpret word order pattern and their significance;
  
• 
  Recognize grammatical word classes, systems, patterns, rules and elliptical forms.
  

Macro skills:

• 
  Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling the relationship between and among clauses;
  
• 
  Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance for interpretation;
  
• 
  Distinguish between literal and implied meanings;
  
• 
  Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the appropriate cultural schemata;
  
• 
  Develop and use a battery of reading strategies such as scanning and skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning of words from context and activating schemata for the interpretation of texts
  

Strategies for reading comprehension:

• 
  Identify the purpose in reading
  
• 
  Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding;
  
• 
  Use efficient silent reading techniques for improving fluency;
  
• 
  Skim the text for main ideas;
  
• 
  Scan the text for specific information;
  
• 
  Use semantic mapping or clustering;
  
• 
  Guess when you are not certain;
  
• 
  Analyze vocabulary;
  
• 
  Distinguish between literal and implied meanings;
  
• 
  Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships
  

Types of classroom reading performance.

Oral and silent reading.

Advantages:

-it serves as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills;

-it doubles as a pronunciation check;

-it adds some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short segment of reading passage.

Disadvantages:

-oral reading is not a very authentic language activity;

-while one student is reading, others can easily loose attention;

-it may have the outward appearance of student participation when in reality it is mere recitation.

Intensive and Extensive reading.

• 
  Intensive reading, analogous to intensive listening, is usually a classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. It often calls students’ attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers and other surface structure details;
  
• 
  Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a usually somewhat longer text. Most extensive reading is performed outside class time. Pleasure reading is often extensive. Technical, scientific and professional reading , under some certain circumstances can be extensive.
  

Principles for teaching reading skills.

• 
  Offer reading on relevant, interesting, motivating topics;
  
• 
  Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts;
  
• 
  Encourage the development of reading strategies;
  
• 
  Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques;
  
• 
  Follow the SQ3R sequence: survey-question-read-recite-review;
  

Design pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading phases.

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  Before you read: Spend some time introducing a topic, encouraging skimming, scanning, predicting and activating schemata;
  
• 
  While you read: Not all reading is simply extensive or global reading. Give students a sense of purpose for reading rather than just reading because you ordered it;
  
• 
  After you read: Comprehension questions are just one form of activity appropriate for post-reading. Also consider vocabulary study, identifying the author’s purpose, discussing the author’s line of reasoning, examining grammatical structures.
  

Informal assessment.

1. 
   Doing-the reader responds physically to a command;
   
2. 
   Choosing-the reader selects from alternatives posed orally or in writing;
   
3. 
   Transferring-the reader summarizes orally what is read;
   
4. 
   Answering-the reader answers questions about the passage;
   
5. 
   Condensing-the reader outlines or takes notes on a passage;
   
6. 
   Extending-the reader provides an ending to a story;
   
7. 
   Duplicating-the reader translates the message into the native language;
   
8. 
   Modelling-the reader puts together a toy, for example, after reading directions for assembly;
   
9. 
   Conversing-the reader engages in a conversation.
   

REFERENCE:

• 
  H. Douglas Brown and Heekyeong Lee “Teaching by principles”, Pearson Education, 2015.