Teaching by Principles: Chapter 18 Teaching Reading

Teaching by Principles: Chapter 18 Teaching Reading

RESEARCH ON READING A SECOND LANGUAGE

1. Bottom-up and top-down processing

- In bottom-up processing (data-driven operation), readers must first recognize a multiplicity of linguistic signals (letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues, discourse markers) and use their linguistic data-processing mechanisms to impose some sort of order on these signals.

- In top-down processing (conceptually driven processing), we draw on our own intelligence and experience to understand a text.

- Field-independent and field-dependent cognitive styles are analogous to bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively.  

- Interactive reading: “In practice, a reader continually shifts from one focus to another, now adopting a top-down approach to predict probable meaning, then moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says.”(Nuttall 1996: 17)

2. Schema theory and background knowledge

- Content schemata: what we know about people, the world, culture, and the universe

- Formal schemata: our knowledge about discourse structure

3. The role of affect and culture

-“Love” of reading

-Autonomy gained through the learning of reading strategies

-Culture

4. The power of extensive reading

- Extensive reading (free vocabulary reading; FVR) is a key to student gains in reading ability, linguistic competence, vocabulary, spelling, and writing.

- Reading for pleasure and reading without looking up all the unknown words were both highly correlated with overall language proficiency.

-Extensive reading component in conjunction with other focused reading instruction is highly promising

5. Adult literacy training

TYPES OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE
-Teachers should enlighten students on features of various genres of written language and help them to develop strategies for extracting necessary meaning from each.

CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE
1. Permanence

-Written language is permanent, and therefore the reader has an opportunity to return again and again, if necessary, to a word or phrase or sentence, or even a whole text.

2. Processing time

-Most reading contexts allow readers to read at their own rate.

- Except for the time factor itself, fast readers do not necessarily have an advantage over slow readers.

3. Distance

-Physical/temporal distances give different interpretation.

-Decontextualized nature of writing is one of the things that makes reading difficult.

4. Orthography

-Unlike in spoken language, we have only graphemes in writing, which cause the frequent ambiguity.

5. Complexity

-Spoken language tends to have shorter clauses connected by more coordinate conjunctions, while writing has longer clauses and more subordination.

-The linguistic differences between speech and writing are another major contributing cause to difficulty.

6. Vocabulary

-Written English typically utilizes a greater variety of lexical items than spoken conversational English.

-Because the meaning of a good many unknown words can be predicted from their context, and because sometimes the overall meaning of a sentence or paragraph is nevertheless still clear, learners should refrain from the frequent use of a bilingual dictionary.

7.Formality

-Until a reader is familiar with the formal features of a written text, some difficulty in interpretation may ensue.

MICROSKILLS FOR READING COMPREHENSION: Table 18.1

STRATEGIES FOR READING COMPREHENSION

1. Identify the purpose in reading

- Whenever you are teaching a reading technique, make sure students know their purpose in reading something.

2. Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (especially for beginning level learners): probably not practical for Taiwanese EFL learners.

-Learners have become acquainted with oral language and have some difficulty learning English spelling conventions.

3.Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension. (for intermediate to advanced levels)

-You don’t need to “pronounce” each word to yourself.

-Try to visually perceive more than one word at a time, preferably phrases

-Unless a word is absolutely crucial to global understanding, skip over it and try to infer its meaning from its context

4. Skim the text for main idea.

-Skimming consists of quickly running one’s eyes across a whole text (such as an essay, article, or chapter) for its gist.

-Skimming gives readers the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic, or message, and possibly some of the developing or supporting ideas.

5. Scan the text for specific information

-Quickly search for some particular piece or prices of information in a text.

-The purpose of scanning is to extract specific information without reading through the whole text.

6. Use semantic mapping or clustering

-The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos.

7. Guess when you aren’t certain

-Guess the meaning of a word.

-Guess a grammatical relationship (e.g., a pronoun reference)

-Guess a discourse relationship

-Infer implied meaning (“between the lines”)

-Guess about a cultural reference

-Guess content messages

-You can help learners to become accurate guessers by encouraging them to use effective compensation strategies in which they fill gaps in their competence by intelligent attempts to use whatever clues are available to them.

-Language-based clues include word analysis, word associations, and textual structure

-Nonlinguistic clues come from context, situation, and other schemata.

8. Analyze vocabulary

-Look for prefixes (co-, inter-, un-, etc.) that may give clues

-Look for suffixes (-tion, -tive, -ally, etc.) that may indicate what part of speech it is.

-Look for roots that are familiar.

-Looks for grammatical contexts that may signal information

-Look at the semantic context (topic) for clues

9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

-Require the application of sophisticated top-down processing skills

-Implied meaning usually has to be derived from processing pragmatic information

10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships: Table 18.2

TYPES OF CLASSROOM READING PERFORMANCE

1. Oral and silent reading

-Serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills

-Double as a pronunciation check

-Serve to add some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short segment of a reading passage (only advantage for advanced levels.)

2. Intensive and extensive reading

-Intensive reading

˙A classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage

˙Call students’ attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships, and the like.

˙May be a totally content-related reading initiated because of subject-matter difficulty in that a complex cognitive concept may be “trapped” inside the words of a sentence or paragraph, and a good reader will then very slowly and methodically extract meaning therefrom.

-Extensive reading

˙General understanding of a usually somewhat longer text (book, long article, or essays, etc.)

˙Performed outside of class time

˙Pleasure reading is often extensive

˙Technical, scientific, and professional reading can, under certain special circumstances, be extensive when one is simply striving for global or general meaning from longer passages.

˙Stimulating reading for enjoyment can lead to students’ appreciation for the effective and cognitive window of reading

PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGNING INTERACTIVE READING TECHNIQUES

1. Focus on reading skills and extensive reading

2. Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating

-Language Experience Approach (LEA): students create their own material for reading.

-Carefully sequenced readings and success-oriented instructional strategies.

-Periodic instructor-initiated and self-assessment

3. Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts.

-Suitability of content: material that students will find interesting, enjoyable, challenging, and appropriate for their goals in learning English.

-Exploitability: a text that facilitates the achievement of certain language and content goals, that is exploitable for instructional tasks and techniques, and that is integratable with other skills (listening, speaking, writing)

-Readability: a text with lexical and structural difficulty that will challenge students without overwhelming them.

4. Encourage the development of reading strategies

5. Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques

6. Follow the “SQ3Q” sequence

-Survey: Skim the text for an overview of main ideas

-Question: The reader asks questions about what he or she wishes to get out of the text.

-Read: Read the text while looking for answers to the previously formulated questions.

-Recite: Reprocess the salient points of the text through oral or written language.

-Review: Assess the importance of what one has just read and incorporate it into long-term associations

7. Subdivide your techniques into pre-reading, during-reading, and after-reading phases.

-Before you read: Introducing a topic, encouraging skimming, scanning, predicting, and activating schemata.

-While you read: Students take note of certain facts or rhetorical devices while they read.

-After you read: Comprehension questions, vocabulary study, identifying the author’s purpose, discussing the author’s line of reasoning, examining grammatical structures, steering students toward a follow-up writing exercise

8. Build in some evaluative aspect to your techniques

-Accurately assess students’ comprehension and development of skills

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