The four skills / reading

1. TEACHING Reading

2. Receptive Skills
Receptive skills are the ways in which
people extract meaning from the discourse
they see or hear. There are generalities
about this kind of processing which apply to
both reading and listening.
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3. How Reading works as Receptive Skill
When we read a story or a newspaper, listen
to the news, or take part in conversation, we
employ our previous knowledge as we
approach the process of comprehension
we deploy a range of receptive skills
which receptive skills we use will be
determined by our reading or listening
purpose.
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4. How Reading works as Receptive Skill
In order to make sense of any text we need to have ‘pre-
existent knowledge of-the world’(Cook 1989: 69). Such
knowledge is often referred to as schema (plural
schemata).
Each of us carries in our heads mental representations of
typical situations that we come across. When we are
stimulated by particular words, discourse patterns, or
contexts such schematic knowledge is activated and we are
able to recognize that we see or hear because it fits into
patterns that we already know.
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5. Reasons for reading
We can divide reasons for reading into two
broad categories:
 Instrumental
 Pleasurable
Instrumental: a large amount of reading takes
place because it will help us to achieve some clear
aim.
Pleasurable: another kind of reading takes place
largely for pleasure.
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6. Processing
Top-down and bottom-up processing:
In metaphorical terms Top-down can be likened to the
difference between looking down on something from
above - getting an overview - and,
on the contrary, bottom-up is being in the middle of
something and understanding where we are by
concentrating on all the individual features.
It is the difference between looking at a forest, or studying
the individual trees within it.
In top-down processing the reader gets a general view of
the reading passage by, in some way, absorbing the overall
picture.
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7. Processing
In bottom-up processing, on the other hand, the reader
focuses on individual words and phrases, and achieves
understanding by stringing these detailed elements together
to build up a whole.
It is probably most useful to see acts of reading as
interactions between top-down and bottom-up processing.
Without a good understanding of a reasonable proportion
of the details gained through some bottom-up processing
we will be unable to get any clear general picture of what
the text is about.
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8. Strategic skills
Different skill-levels prompt different readers to
employ different uses of those skills:
 Identifying the topic
 Predicting and guessing
 Reading for general understanding
 Reading for specific information
 Reading for detailed information
 Interpreting text
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9. Extensive and intensive reading
most researchers like to make a difference
between ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ reading.
Whereas the former (extensive) suggests reading
at length, often for pleasure and in a leisurely way,
intensive reading tends to be more concentrated,
less relaxed, and often dedicated not so much to
pleasure as to the achievement of a study goal.
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10. Extensive and intensive reading
Extensive reading frequently takes place when
students are on their own
Intensive reading is often done with the help
and/or intervention of the teacher.
Extensive reading enables students to read without
constantly stopping and provide an increased word
recognition (Richard Day and Julian Bamford
1998).
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11. Extensive reading materials
material which students can understand.
Since pleasure is the main goal of this activity, if they
are struggling to understand every word, they can
hardly be reading for pleasure.
teachers need to provide books which either by chance,
or because they have been specially written, are readily
accessible to the students.
This type of materials have been called ‘language
learner literature’ (Day & Bamford 1988)
A library of suitable extensive reading materials for
graded learners should be established, coded and made
available for the students.
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12. Extensive Reading: the role of the teacher
Students usually do not do much extensive
reading if they are not prompted by the
teacher. So the role of teacher is crucial.
Teachers should espouse reading as a valid
occupation and thus persuade students of its
benefits.
Teachers can, at times, read aloud excerpts
from the reading materials they like to show
their students how interesting and pleasing
reading can be.
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13. Extensive reading tasks
Students should be allowed to make
choice regarding reading
Students can be asked to maintain
reading diaries/journals about their
reading with commentary about the texts
They can be asked to review and rate the
texts they are reading.
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14. Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher
In order to get students to read enthusiastically in
class, we need to work to create interest in the
topic and tasks. However, there are further roles
teachers need to adopt when asking students to
read intensively.
Organiser: to tell students exactly what their
reading purpose is, give them clear instructions
about how to achieve it and explain how long they
have to do this.
Observer: just to observe and not interrupt the
process / activities of reading and silently collect
information about the whole event.
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15. Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher
Feedback organiser: to lead a feedback session
to check that students have completed reading
activities successfully.
Prompter: to prompt them to notice language
features within it and to direct them to certain
features of text construction, clarifying
ambiguities and making them aware of issues
of text structure which they had not come
across previously.
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16. Intensive reading: the vocabulary question
Though students are asked not to bother about
the meaning of every single word, rather to
read for a general understanding, students are
usually desperate to learn the meanings of all
the words they come across.
‘It seems contradictory to insist that students
"read for meaning" while simultaneously
discouraging them from trying to understand
the text at a deeper level than merely gist’
(Carol Walker 1998: 172).
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17. Intensive reading: the vocabulary question
To resolve this contradiction, students can be given a
chance to ask about the meanings of particular words.
The teacher may limit the amount of time spent on
vocabulary checking in the following ways:
 Time limit: a time limit of, say, five minutes for vocabulary
enquiry, whether this involves dictionary use, language
corpus searches or questions to the teacher
 Word/phrase limit: only answer questions about five or
eight words or phrases.
 Meaning consensus: get students to work together to search
for and find word meanings.
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18. Intensive reading: letting the students in
Teacher should try to engage the students in a
text by bringing their own feelings and
knowledge to the task.
Teacher can ask students whether they like the
text or not as a whole.
Teacher needs to activate the students’
schemata. To do this, she can discuss subject
matter of the text before the students read it,
ask them to work out some charts regarding
the texts asserting what they know about it.
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19. Reading lesson sequences
Intensive reading may involve a lot of purposes like
the students may have to skim, scan or read for
communicative purposes
To accomplish these different objectives, intensive
reading activities involve lesson sequences
 Most reading sequences involve more than one reading
skill. Teachers may start by having students read for gist
and then get them to read the text again for detailed
comprehension
 Students may start by identifying the topic of a text
before scanning the text quickly to recover specific
information
 Students may read for specific information before going
back to the text to identify features of text construction.
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20. The ultimate goal of the teacher should be to
ensure that the students have understood the
whole project of reading and that they have
done by engaging themselves wholeheartedly
in the process.
Thank You
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