The document discusses reading as a process of negotiating meaning between a text and reader based on the reader's background knowledge, expectations, and strategies. It advocates a holistic approach to teaching reading that connects it to other language skills and emphasizes how parts relate to form the whole. The pedagogical stages of reading include pre-reading, initial reading, and rereading tasks of increasing complexity. Readability depends on factors like concreteness, familiarity and cultural acceptance rather than just text properties. The goal of reading instruction is enabling students to discover new knowledge through engaging with a text.

1. Reading, Writing and
Assessment
Alvin S. Taneo

2. What is Reading?
• Reading is a process undertaken to reduce uncertainty about
meanings a text conveys.
• The process results from a negotiation of meaning between the
text and its reader.
• The knowledge, expectations, and strategies a reader uses to
uncover textual meaning all play decisive roles way the reader
negotiates with the text's meaning.

3. Background Knowledge
• For foreign language learners to read, they have to be prepared to
use various abilities and strategies they already possess from their
reading experiences in their native language. They will need the
knowledge they possess to help orient themselves in the many
dimensions of language implicated in any text. Researchers have
established that the act of reading is a non-linear process that is
recursive and context-dependent. Readers tend to jump ahead or go
back to different segments of the text, depending on what they are
reading to find out.

4. Goals
• Asking a learner to "read" a text requires that teachers specify a
reading goal. One minimal goal is to ask the learner to find particular
grammatical constructions or to identify words that relate to
particular features or topics of the reading. But such goals are
always only partial. For example, a text also reveals a lot about the
readers for which it is written and a lot about subject matter that
foreign language learners may or may not know or anticipate.

5. A Holistic Approach to Reading
• The curriculum described here is called a holistic curriculum,
following Miller (1996). Holistic education is concerned with
connections in human experience—connections between mind
and body, between linear thinking and intuitive ways of knowing,
between academic disciplines, between the individual and the
community.

6. • A holistic curriculum emphasizes how the parts of a whole relate
to each other to form the whole. From this perspective, reading
relates to speaking, writing, listening comprehension, and
culture.

7. Pedagogical Stages of Reading
• Pre-Reading: The initial levels of learning, as described in
Bloom's Taxonomy, involve recognizing and comprehending
features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks involve
speaking, reading, and listening.

8. Initial Reading:
• Initial reading tasks orient the learner to the text and activate the
cognitive resources that are associated with the learner's own
expectations. For example, discussions of genres and
stereotypes may help the learner to identify potential reading
difficulties and to strategize ways to overcome these challenges.
Simple oral and written reproduction tasks should precede more
complex production tasks that call for considering creative
thinking about several issues at the same time

9. Rereading:
• In rereading, the learner is encouraged to engage in active L2
production such as verbal or written analysis and
argumentation. These activities require longer and more
complex discourse. At this point, the language learners' critical
thinking needs to interact with their general knowledge. Ideally,
cultural context and the individual foreign language learner's
own identity emerge as central to all acts of production.

10. Readability and the Holistic Approach
• In general, a text is more readable when:
• it presents concrete issues rather than abstract ones
• it provides the "who," "what," "where," and "when" familiar to the
reader
• it is age-appropriate
• it is in a genre familiar to the reader
• it is acceptable to the reader's cultural background
• it is longer, with context clues, or it is a short text on a familiar topic

11. • Overall, readability and reading goals need to be set vis-à-vis
the reader, not as a property of the text in its own right. And
through reading an accessible authentic text, the reader is also
likely to confront the stereotypes about a culture as well as
those held by that culture. By learning to recognize ways
authentic media reflect particular viewpoints, readers begin to
engage in the practice of multi-literacies—explorations of self
and other.

12. Reading as a Process
• Many students believe that they must know every word in a text
before they can read proficiently. Given our definition of
reading as a process, this widespread belief presents a problem
for teachers. How can we show students that they are able to
draw meaning from a text even when they don't know all the
words and much of the grammar?

13. • Reading experts assert that only about half of what people
understand when they read in any language has to do with knowing
that language's vocabulary and its grammar. The other half involves
factors such as:
• background knowledge about the topic or the medium (e.g.
what kind of a hero Batman is, and what an action movie looks
like)
• knowledge of a genre (e.g. what information is in a movie
review and what importance is attached to who writes the
review and where it's published)

14. • strategies for guessing and working with uncertainty ("I don't
know this term, but it has been mentioned twice so it's probably
important and I'll continue reading to see if I can figure it out.")
• strategies for identifying cognates and other textual clues
(illustrations, subtitles, etc.).

15. • The Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA) Results from PISA 2018 revealed that reading is
among the areas that fifteen-year-old students in the
Philippines scored lower than those in majority of the
countries and economies that participated in PISA 2018.
The country’s average reading score was 340 score points,
on a par with that of the Dominican Republic. No country
scored lower than the Philippines and the Dominican
Republic. In mathematics and science, students in the
Philippines scored 353 and 357 points, respectively, on a
par with performance in Panama.

16. • The ultimate goal in reading is the discovery of new knowledge.
Enabling students to work toward that goal, even if only in small
or periodic increments, contributes significantly to their
development