Teaching Language Skills: Reading Comprehension

Reading as a Language Skill

• Reading is considered a passive language skill, similar to non-interactive listening (e.g., listening to a monologue, news broadcast, or lecture).
• Both reading and non-interactive listening involve processing ideas gathered by others that are transmitted through language.

Reading in Another Language

• Reading is not a skill that every individual learns to do, unlike speaking.
• Teaching reading is a significant investment in elementary and secondary schools worldwide.
• Being literate has been a mark of the educated person for hundreds of years.

Reading Purposes and Strategies

• There are seven main purposes for reading:
  • To obtain information
  • To obtain instructions
  • To act in a play, play a game, or do a puzzle
  • To keep in touch with friends or understand business letters
  • To know when something will take place or what is available
  • To know what is happening or has happened
  • For enjoyment or excitement
• There are different types of reading:
  • Receptive reading (rapid, automatic reading)
  • Reflective reading (pausing often to reflect on what has been read)
  • Skim reading (rapidly reading to establish a general understanding of a text)
  • Scanning (searching for specific information)

Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches

• Bottom-up approach: views reading as a process of decoding written symbols into their aural equivalents in a linear fashion.
• Top-down approach: begins with a set of hypotheses or predictions about the meaning of the text and selectively samples the text to determine whether predictions are correct.
• Criticisms of the bottom-up approach:
  • De-emphasizes meaning in the reading process
  • Ignores the complexity and unpredictability of sound-symbol correspondence in English
  • Research into human memory and speech processing shows that phonics is problematic

Schema Theory

• Research suggests that we do not process print in a serial, linear, step-by-step process.
• We interpret what we read in terms of what we already know, and integrate this knowledge with the content of what we are reading.
• Schema theory suggests that our knowledge and expectations about the world strongly affect our ability to understand new information.
• The process of interpretation is guided by the principle that every input is mapped against some existing schema, and all aspects of that schema must be compatible with the input information.

The Transfer Hypothesis

• A reasonable working hypothesis is that good readers in a first language will be able to transfer their skills to a second language.
• However, research has found that L1 reading skill does not predict second language reading proficiency.

Task Types

• The DART (Directed Activities Related to Text) model was developed as an alternative to traditional reading exercises.
• Good reading tasks:
  • Use authentic and challenging texts
  • Provide a rhetorical or topical framework for processing and analyzing the text
  • Involve students interacting with the text and with each other
  • Involve direct analysis of the text instead of indirect question answering
• Reconstruction activities:
  • Text completion
  • Sequencing
  • Prediction
• Analysis activities:
  • Labeling
  • Segmenting
  • Pupil-generated question
  • Summary

Designing Reading Courses

• Steps in the design process:

  1. Decide the overall purpose of the program
  2. Identify texts and tasks
  3. Identify linguistic elements
  4. Sequence and integrate texts and tasks
  5. (No specific information provided for this step)### Linking Reading to Other Language Skills

• Courses that focus exclusively on reading are rare, so it's essential to link reading to other language skills.

• Mirroring daily life sequences can be an effective way to link reading to other language interactions.

Classroom Implications

• Use pre-reading, schema-building tasks to help lower proficiency students apply their prior knowledge to reading.
• Teach learners various reading strategies, such as: • Predicting • Skimming • Scanning
• Provide opportunities for learners to match strategies to reading purposes.
• Offer a variety of reading purposes to cater to different learners.
• For higher proficiency students, develop activities to help them: • Identify logical relationships in texts • Track referential relationships in texts
• Use activities that require students to transform data from: • One modality to another • Textual to non-textual form
• Give students opportunities to go beyond the texts by: • Evaluating what they read • Critiquing what they read

Reading in Another Language

• Reading involves two approaches: bottom-up and top-down.

Bottom-up Approach

• Views reading as a process of decoding written symbols into their aural equivalents in a linear fashion.
• Involves discriminating each letter, sounding them out, blending to form words, and deriving meaning.
• Teaching beginning reading involves teaching learners sound-symbol correspondences, also known as the phonics approach.
• Alternatively, the whole-word approach teaches words by their overall shape or configuration.

Top-down Approach

• Begins with a set of hypotheses or predictions about the text's meaning, and then selectively samples the text to determine whether predictions are correct.
• Reading is a process of restructuring meaning rather than decoding form.
• The reader only resorts to decoding if other means fail.

Schema Theory

• Suggests that our knowledge and expectations about the world will strongly affect our ability to understand new information by providing a framework.
• Texts themselves do not carry meaning, but provide signposts or clues to be utilized by readers in reconstructing original meanings.
• Reading comprehension is an interactive process between the reader and the text, requiring the reader to fit clues to their own background knowledge.

Information Processing

• Bottom-up processing is evoked by incoming data, and features of the data enter the system through the best fitting, bottom-up schemata.
• Schemata are hierarchically organized, from most general to most specific.
• Bottom-up processing is therefore called data-driven.

Reading Purposes and Strategies

• There are four types of reading: receptive reading, reflective reading, skimming, and scanning.
• Receptive reading is rapid, automatic reading of narratives.
• Reflective reading involves pausing often and reflecting on what has been read.
• Skimming and scanning both involve fairly rapid, superficial reading, and are aimed at searching rather than deep processing of the text.