Teaching Reading in English Language Teaching.doc

Teaching Reading in English Language Teaching Abstract:This paper attempts to clarify and illustrate some aspects of the nature of reading. If the students fail to understand the nature of reading, they will adopt inappropriate and ineffective reading strategies; if teachers fail to do so, they will be unable to help the students to develop effective reading skills. Reading methods influence readers reading results. It is important for a reader to grasp a good reading method. Take reading aloud and silent reading for example, reading aloud and silent reading are two types of reading practice commonly found in classrooms. Are they the same or different? Many teachers use the activity of reading aloud in teaching reading in the classroom without understanding what it is for. Keywords:Read, reading skills, teaching reading, principles Content:1. Skills involved in reading comprehensionReading comprehension means extracting the required information from the text as efficiently as possible. Reading is a silent and individual activity since the writers intention was that the text should be read not heard. There are two broad levels in reading: 1) visual signals from the eyes; 2) a cognitive task of interpreting the visual information, relating the received information with the teachers own general knowledge, and reconstructing the meaning that the writer had meant to convey. In order to make reading more efficient, the students need the following strategic skills:l Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details l Skimming: reading for the gist or main idea.l Scanning: reading to look for specific information.l Predicting: guessing what is coming next.We will discuss some of these reading skills more in the following parts.2. Principles and models for teaching readingWhen teaching reading, great care should be taken regarding materials selection, the purpose of reading, the design of reading tasks and the skills involved. 2.1 Bottom-up modelThe way one teachers reading always reflects the way one understands reading and the reading process. Some teachers teach reading by introducing new vocabulary new structures first and then going over the text sentence by sentence. This way of teaching reading reflects the belief that reading comprehension is based on the understanding and mastery of all the new words, new phrases, and new structures as well as a lot of reading aloud practice. Also, this reading follows a linear process from the recognition of letters, to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs, and then to the meaning of the whole text. This way of teaching reading is said to follow a bottom-up model. 2.2 Top-down modelHowever, a different view believes that ones background knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. For example, we all have experiences of reading something which does not contain any new words or new structures, but we still find it difficult to understand its meaning. In other cases, we may read an article with some new words or new structures in it, but we can guess the meaning of the article based on our knowledge about the topic without too much difficulty. Therefore, it is believed that in teaching, the teacher should teach the background knowledge first so that students equipped with such knowledge will be able to guess meaning from the printed page. This process of reading is said to follow the top-down model of teaching reading just as Goodman (1970) once said that reading was “a psycholinguistic game”. 3. Common types of activities in teaching reading3.1 Pre-reading activities By pre-reading activities, we mean tasks/activities that students do before they read the text in detail. Such activities could be pooling existing knowledge about the topic, predicting the contents of the text, skimming or scanning the text or parts of the text for certain purposes. The purpose of pre-reading is to facilitate while-reading activities. Harmer (1983) calls this stage of reading Lead-in, where the students and teachers prepare themselves for the tasks and familiarize themselves with the topic of the reading exercises. One of the major reasons for this is to create expectations and arouse the students interest in the subject matter for the text. There are four pre-reading activities which are used commonly in the teaching reading process: predicting, setting the scene, skimming and scanning. 3.2 While-reading activitiesDifferent texts offer opportunities for different kinds of exploitation. Yet a reading passage in a traditional reading comprehension book has generally been exploited by means of asking multiple choice questions, T/F questions, open questions, paraphrase, and translation. In this section, we will look at different ways of exploiting different texts focusing on the process of understanding rather than the results of reading. 3.1.1 Information transfer activitiesInformation presented in plain text form is not facilitative for information retention. When information in text form is transferred to another form (for example visual form), it can be more effectively processed and retained. The way to transfer information from one form to another is called a transition device. 3.1.2 Summary on transition devicesWhen using transition devices, we need to ensure that it is an appropriate form to encapsulate the main information contained in the text. We need to bear in mind the purposes of transition devices. 3.1.3 Reading comprehension questionsOne of the most frequently used methods in teaching reading is asking the students to answer comprehension questions.3.1.4 Understanding referencesSometimes students have difficulty with certain texts because they are unable to follow clearly the use of references. All natural language, spoken or written, uses referential words such as pronouns to refer to people or things already mentioned previously in the context. Understanding what these words refer to is crucial for comprehension. 3.1.5 Making inferencesMaking references, which means “reading between the lines”, is an important reading skill. It requires the reader to use background knowledge in order to infer the implied meaning of the author. 3.2 Post-reading activitiesAt the post-reading stage, teachers often rely upon reading aloud, asking comprehension questions or asking students to paraphrase sentences of a text. Sometimes sentence by sentence translation is conducted. I consider these activities inadequate to fulfill the functions of post-reading tasks. Post-reading tasks should provide the students with opportunities to relate what they have read to what they already know or what they feel. In addition, post-reading tasks should enable students to produce language based on what they have learned. There are some other types of post-reading activities. l Discussion l Role-playl Gap-fillingl False summaryl Retellingl Writing 4. Conclusion I think the teaching of reading in traditional pedagogy does not reflect how and what people read in real life. Most of the traditional reading exercises are actually testing students reading comprehension. I have emphasized that the teaching of reading should focus on developing students reading skills and strategies, which can be achieved through pre-, while- and post-reading activities. Of course different texts need different teaching methods. References：Harmer, J. (1983) The Practice of English Language Teaching. LongmanNattall, C. (1982) Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Oxford: Heinemann