Teaching reading (nature)
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This is an introduction to the nature of reading.
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Teaching reading (nature)
- 1. Teaching Reading Dr. Suhail Sarhandi
- 2. What does READING mean to you?
- 8. Some possible conclusions BOX 10.1 DECODING LETTERS SKIP OR MISREAD WORDS WHOLE MEANINGFUL UNITS OF TEXT CONSTRUCTING MEANING FROM A WRITTEN TEXT OUR OWN SCHEMATA
- 11. Some Guidelines Begin with basic knowledge Begin with single letters Most common sounds of letters Different forms of the letters Alphabetical order
- 12. Types of reading activities •Text + Comprehension question activities
- 14. What is it about these questions which makes them answerable in spite of the incomprehensibility of the source text?
- 16. Answering comprehension questions (3) Stage 1: Trying a task (1)
- 21. Let’s watch a video • You need to focus on different stages of teaching reading • The aims of each stage • Teaching procedure • Feedback • Practice How to teach a reading lesson
Editor's Notes
- For the purpose of this Reading means ‘ reading and understanding’… DECODING : Translating written symbols into corresponding sounds.
- Read carefully the three texts in Box 10.3. Which takes most time you to read and which least?
- Read the text as quickly as you can.
- Stage 3. Drawing conclusions In the light of above experiments, do you need to revise your original responses to the statements in Box 10.1?
- We depend on decoding letters to understand words, where there is little or no helpful context. As soon as there is a meaningful context, we tend to bring our own interpretation to the word according to its general ‘shape’ and the sense of the text rather than according to its exact component letters. We need to understand some words in order to understand the meaning of a text, but by no means all: we often ‘skip’ or misread words to make sense of the whole more quickly or conveniently. The implication of this for teaching is probably that we should not insist too strongly on our learners understanding every word, but rather encourage them to go for the overall meaning of a text. Very roughly, the more sense units there are in a text, the longer it will take to read it. If smaller units (words, sentences) are combined into bigger, coherent ones (sentences, paragraphs), the whole is much faster to read than if they are separate or incoherent. Learners therefore will probably read more successfully if given whole meaningful units of text to read rather than disconnected ‘bits’. The word ‘gather’ implies that somehow the meaning of a text is there in the words and all we need to do is puck it up. However, our understanding is based on far more than simple reception of the words themselves, and the process of reading would be better defined as ‘constructing’ meaning from a written text. The ‘construction’ of meaning that occurs in reading is a combination of ‘bottom-up’ processes (decoding and understanding words, phrases and sentences in the text) and ‘top-down’ ones (our expectations, previous knowledge constructs (schemata) of the text content and genre). It is very difficult, sometimes impossible, to read successfully a text where our own schemata cannot be brought to bear. Thus, learners should be encouraged to combine top-down and bottom-up strategies in reading, which means in practice doing such things as discussing the topic of a text before reading it, arousing expectations, eliciting connections between references in the text and situations known to the learners.
- TASK…. Look at the questions in Box 10.5 and note for yourself, or discuss with colleagues, what your own answers would be. Then compare these with ideas as laid out under GUIDELINE below. How far are the latter acceptable and appropriate in your situation?
- It is generally preferable to begin reading only after the learners have some basic knowledge of the spoken language, so that reading becomes as quickly as possible a matter of recognizing meanings rather than deciphering symbols. Such knowledge also enables us to give much more varied and interesting tasks for reading practice. I have found it most practical and productive to begin with single letters (the conventional ‘phonic’ method), starting with the most common and useful. A collection of known, common letters very quickly enables students to cope with a large number of words, whereas learning specific words as such does not readily generate further combinations. Having said this however, there are two important reservations. First, it is worth teaching some very common words globally very early on- for example: the, he, she, this, is, are in English- and practicing their recognition through tasks like identifying them in a newspaper extract. Second, some learners do actually prefer to learn ‘globally’, having a good memory for full-word combinations. In any case, whole words in tasks that involve understanding meanings should be used as soon as possible; phonetics learning is only an entry stage, and our aim is proficient reading that involves recognition of whole sense units. It is, surely, more useful for reading purposes if the learner knows the most common sound of the letter; its name can be left until later. My own preference is to teach the different forms of the letters together. This slows down the process a little, but means that the letters the learners do know can immediately be recognized in the context of a text. Alphabetical order can be learned later when the learners need to know it for dictionary use.
- Heir vocabulary simply echoes the text, while the grammar of both text and questions is fairly obvious and corresponds neatly, so that if you recognize the grammar context, you can simply slot in the appropriate vocabulary.
- Question; Here, the reader would have to understand the content of the passage in order to answer these questions (similar ones would be unanswerable if applied to the previous ‘nonsense’ text). Can you put your finger on why? In other words, in what ways-apart from the fact that they are in normal English-do these questions differ from those given in Box 10.6? Try answering before reading on. The questions here are different in that they do not quote verbatim from the text but paraphrase it, or request paraphrases, or invite some measure of interpretation and application for the reader’s background knowledge. They this demand real comprehension, and encourage an interactive, personal 'engaging’ with the text, as well as being more interesting to do. Interpretative questions often have more than one possible answer can be used as a basis for discussion. However, one disadvantage of the conventional text-plus-questions remains: the reader has no particular motive to read the text in the first place
- Stage 2: Reflection Before reading on, try answering the following questions (assuming that you did not cheat and read the source passage first!): Were your guesses as ti what the answers would be completely random? Or did you base them on some kind of evidence or knowledge? A suggested answer will be found under Comments below. Stage 3: Trying a task (2) Now look at Box 10.8.2, which is the text on which the questions are based. Try as you do so to compare your motivation to read and ease of comprehemsion with those you felt when reading the ‘new patient’ passage.
- Apart from READING COMPREHENSION , what other activities we can think about? What kind of questions can you make out of this task at PRE-READING STAGE?