Reading Skills

TEFL PST OMN 111February, 2014

Let’s Think Back!

•What are some differences between good readers and poor readers?

•Make a list of 3 concepts about how we build reading comprehension capacities.

Step 1: Frontloading Vocabulary and Activating Background Knowledge

•Frontloading: Introduce 3 to 5 words or expressions necessary for understanding the text. This way, students begin reading knowing what they’ll be learning about.

•Activating Background Knowledge: Giving examples or asking questions about the general idea of the reading so that students can connect what they know with what they are going to read.

Step 2: Reading quickly for different reasons

(a) Scanning

We Scan Scan when we read quickly to see if specific information we are seeking is available.

What kinds of texts or situations do YOU scan in?

• When we scan, we make use of Advance Advance OrganizersOrganizers that show us--

a) How the text is organized,b) Important features of the text.

Advance Organizers

Advance organizers include:•Headings and subheadings•Bold-faced items in the text• , images, charts and graphs •Sidebars giving information•Glosses (definitions or information given in the

margin to facilitate reading)•Bulleted or numbered lists (that break

information out to make it more visible)•Columns, lines or boxes that direct our vision

Teaching Scanning

• Give students a few prompts (say 3 to 6) indicating elements that they should scan for.

e.g., when was the Mongol Empire at its peak?

• Give them a very short time (1-3 minutes) to complete the activity.

• Announce the time every minute to push them to read quickly.

Step 2 (Cont.) Reading Quickly for Different Reasons (b) Skimming

SkimmingSkimming asks “What’s it about?

We usually skim when we want to determine if a particular reading is—

a) worth our time,b) what we thought we wanted to read.

Teaching Skimming

We teach skimming in the same way we teach scanning except—

▫instead of looking for specific information we look for what the text is about—for main ideas.

An authentic skimming activity: give each student several readings and one minute to decide which reading the student wants to

read.

Step 3: Comprehension Questions for Thorough Reading

There are two levels of reading comprehension

questions:•Lower Order Questions are--

Literal questions, where you look to find a specific piece of information. For example–

What were the Pilgrims’ reasons for coming to the New

World?

Higher Cognitive Order Questions

•Higher cognitive order questions are questions that require learners to engage in (in order of complexity):

▫ Description▫ Analysis▫ Comparison▫ Synthesis▫ Evaluation

So a higher order question might be, --What were the pros and cons of each of the “Three

Little Pigs’” houses?

Step 4: Guessing New Words from Context

• Another skill we must teach our students, is learning unknown words from context.

• For example in, “This jacket is drkwtx for work. I’ll buy it,” drkwtx must mean something positive because the speaker intends to buy the jacket.

• But Beware! Often the context may not provide any clear sense of the term’s meaning. Don’t ask students to guess words from context unless you’re sure that explicit context clues are available.

Ignoring Unknown Words by Means of Context

•Many readers think that they have to stop and look up every unknown word.

This actually hinders comprehension.

Students need to be encouraged to skip over unknown words if they can still understand the text. This requires practice.

Step 5: We need to teach learners what we do after we read.

•In real life, we always read for a purpose—even if it’s entertainment or to relieve boredom.

What are some reasons you’ve read in the past week?

•In school, learners need to know how to demonstrate to their teacher they have done the reading.

How can we ask students to show usthey’ve done the reading?

Even low proficiency learners need to learn “what you do with a reading.”

Some very easy to follow guidelines for pre- / mid- / & post- reading strategies.

Post Reading Discussion…

…is probably one of the easiest post reading activities to organize.

•Discussion helps student recall what they read and connect it to their personal experience.

Other Post Reading Activities include…

•Doing or making something based on information in the text

•Having students produce an example of the genre of the reading (for example, if they read a limerick, they write their own limericks).

•Compose a response to a reading (a summary, an analysis, an evaluation)

•Reviewing notes made on the reading•Making connections to one’s self, the world and

other readings•A jigsaw sharing (when different students have read

different texts on the same topic)

Cloze Tests –

An Easy Reading AssessmentActivity

Cloze tests

• Cloze testsCloze tests are tests where words are deleted (ideally randomly; e.g., every 6th word) and we test learners’ reading skills by their ability to predict an acceptable substitute for each blank space.

• Some researchers claim that cloze test can not only be used to assess reading proficiency but also general language proficiency because cloze tests call on grammar, spelling, phonology (e.g., is it “a” or “an”), semantics and to some extent world knowledge to provide acceptable answers. In any case, we call on many strategies to compete a cloze test.

Reading Skills JeopardyPre & First

ReadingMore Reading Post-Reading

$100 $100 $100

$200 $200 $200

$300 $300 $300

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$500 $500 $500

For your group’s reading passage, come up with:1. 3 to 5 words to frontload and suggest how frontloading will be done.

Also, how will you activate student background knowledge about the topic?

2. a quick reading activity that combines skimming and scanning

3. at least 4 reading comprehension questions that require a mix of lower and higher order thinking

4. your choice of: (i) a “learning from context” activity, (ii) a cloze exercise (for no more than one short paragraph in the text), or (iii) a discussion activity with at least 4 discussion prompts.