Everybody knows that reading is the process of constructing meaning through the dynamic interaction among:
– the reader's existing knowledge,
– the information suggested by the written language, and
– the context of the reading situation.
Four general purposes of reading are:
– to gain information
– to perform a task
– to experience and enjoy literature
– to form opinions
When you read, it is important to have a strategy or a plan for reading effectively. If you do not have a plan, you may be easily distracted or may not focus on the right things in the text. As a result, when you are finished reading, you may not understand very much of what you have read. Also, you may not have developed your English very much, either.
When you read, you must be actively involved in the reading process in order to understand most effectively. [1]
Questions are very helpful when you read a text. Most of the time, people read first, and then look at questions at the end of the text. However, this is not the best way to read. If possible, read the questions provided for you FIRST. This will help you know what specific information to look for. Questions (those that are provided with text and those provided by your teacher) are designed to focus on the main points. Therefore, if you read to answer these questions, you will be focusing on the main points in the text. This helps you read with a goal in mind — answering specific questions.
Once you have some idea of what the text is about and what the main points might be, start reading. Do not be afraid if the text has many words you cannot understand. Just read!
Follow these suggestions:
– Do not use your dictionary the first time through the text.
– Try to understand as much as you can from the context.
– Take notes as you go.
– Make a note of places that you do not understand, or words that are unclear.
– Go through the text a second time.
– Try to answer the questions.
The important thing is to have some clear objectives before you begin to plan the lesson. [2]
The following three objectives are possible to be achieved in one lesson:
– To improve reading skills: According to some teachers, the best way to teach reading is to break the reading skills down into separate sub-skills by looking at what a good reader does when he goes about reading something, teach these separately and then put them all together. The other big group is skeptical and believes that there is no chance of putting all the sub-skills together and at the end they add up to the complete picture. In my opinion, if a student is able to use his reading sub-skills in the mother tongue, then the only problem is the English language.
On the other hand, if they are still read badly and with difficulties in the first language, then it takes twice as much time to perform the given task. To study language: The teacher focuses the students’ attention on vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse features. Although studying language for the sake of studying language is fairly pointless outside universities, there is little doubt that students need a very good command of language if they are going to be able to read.
To read for content: The students focus on the facts or ideas contained in the text. Extracting meaning is obviously essential in order to achieve this objective. This is usually why we read in real life. The first two objectives, developing reading skills and studying language, are really only tools for achieving this broader educational objective. However, many textbooks contain uninspiring texts and you should consider supplementing them with other texts.
This correlation, however, does not mean that teaching vocabulary will increase readers’ comprehension, for that is a causal conclusion. As it turns out, however, when reading educators conducted experiments in which vocabulary was either taught to students or not, comprehension improved as a function of vocabulary instruction.
Subsequent comprehension tests. One counterargument to this advice to teach vocabulary is that children learn vocabulary incidentally — that is, they learn the meanings of many words by experiencing those words in the actual world and in text worlds, without explicit instruction. [3]
In conclusion we can say that reading comprehension can be affected by world knowledge, with many demonstrations that readers who possess rich prior knowledge about the topic of a reading often understand the reading better than classmates with low prior knowledge. That said, readers do not always relate their world knowledge to the content of a text, even when they possess knowledge relevant to the information it presents. Often, they do not make inferences based on prior knowledge unless the inferences are absolutely demanded to make sense of the text.
References:
- Day R. R., Bamford J. Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading / Richard Day, Julian Bamford // Reading in a Foreign Language. — 2002. — Vol.14
- Ellis R. Task-based Language Learning and Teaching / Rod Ellis. — Oxford: OUP, 2003. — 387 p.
- Macalister J. Teaching Reading: Research into Practice / John Macalister //Language Teaching. — 2014. — Vol. 47, Issue 3.
