Reading Strategies Book 12

7/21/2019 Reading Strategies Book 12

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PREDICTING CONTENTBASED ON KNOWLEDGE OFGENRE SKIMMING THETEXT FOR GIST TAKINGBRIEF NOTESHIGHLIGHTING IMPORTANTINFORMATION IGNORINGUNKNOWN WORDSDETERMINING MEANINGOF UNKNOWN WORDSFROM CONTEXT MAKINGPREDICTIONS WHILEREADING PAYINGATTENTION TO GRAMMATICALFUNCTION OF WORDS RE-READINGTO REPAIR COMPREHENSION

IDENTIFYING TOPIC SENTENCESRECOGNIZING KEY WORDS MAKINGCONCLUSIONS AND INFERENCESPARAPHRASING WHILE READINGINDENTIFYING WRITER’S ATTITUDETIMED READING SCANNING ORSKIMMING SECTIONS OF TEXTRECOGNIZING FUNCTION OFDISCOURSE MARKERSCOMPOSING COMPREHENSIONQUESTIONS ANSWERINGCOMPREHENSION QUESTIONS ABOUTCONTENT LOCATING AND CATEGORIZING COHESIVE DEVICES IDENTIFYINGFEATURES OF GENRE PREDICTING CONTENTBASED ON KNOWLEDGE OF GENRE SKIMMINGTHE TEXT FOR GIST TAKING BRIEF NOTESHIGHLIGHTING IMPORTANT INFORMATION IGNORINGUNKNOWN WORDS DETERMINING MEANING OF

UNKNOWN WORDS FROM CONTEXT MAKINGPREDICTIONS WHILE READING PAYING ATTENTIONTO GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION OF WORDS RE-READING TO REPAIR COMPREHENSIONIDENTIFYING TOPIC SENTENCES RECOGNIZINGKEY WORDS MAKING CONCLUSIONS AND INFERENCESPARAPHRASING WHILE READING RECOGNIZINGFUNCTION OF DISCOURSE MARKERS INDENTIFYINGWRITER’S ATTITUDE TIMED READING SCANNING ORSKIMMING SECTIONS OF TEXT RECOGNIZING

Teaching

StrategiesReading

Ken Lackman

HELPING STUDENTSTO BECOME

BETTER READERS

INSTEAD OF JUSTTESTING THEM



Teaching Reading Strategies

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Contents

Introduction

Before Reading

Pre-reading Tasks

While Reading

While-reading Tasks

Post Reading

Post-reading Tasks

Lesson Framework for any Text

Copyright Ken Lackman 2012. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to beshared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materialsand notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires writtenpermission from the author.




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Introduction. Most classroom reading materials use some basic strategies to helpstudents improve their reading skills. Most typically the first task is one toget students to think about the topic using any knowledge they alreadyhave (activate schemata). Following that there may be a quick read to get

the overall gist (skimming) and then a set a comprehension questions toanswer. Those questions are usually of three type, reading for main points,reading for details and reading between the lines. However, extensiveresearch into reading habits of native speakers has identified a myriad ofreading strategies that they use to help with comprehension of readingmaterial. Most existing ELT materials focus primarily on the aforementionedstrategies and have adapted them for students. For example, the activateschemata tasks comes from studies of readers who displayed a bettergrasp of the material because they thought about it before they read it. Theway this real-world strategy was adapted to the classroom was to supplyquestions to prompt students to think about the topic and usually discuss itwith others.

One of the problems with trying to approximate the reading strategies usedby native speakers is that the classroom is an artificial environment andstudents who practice the skills ther e often don’t take them into the outsideworld. The reasons for this could be that the student is not aware of theactually skill they are practicing; the strategy itself is difficult or impossibleto transfer to the real world or, in the case of skills that can be transferred,the student has no idea how to adapt it for outside use. For example,nobody in the real world is going to hand the students comprehensionquestions before they read something. In addition, nobody will give them aquestion before they read to get them thinking about the topic. Yes, thisparticular strategy is easy to adapt and transfer. The students can use

titles, photos or a quick skim to determine the topic of a text and then theycan spend a few minutes thinking about it before they do a intensive read ofthe text. Therefore, it is imperative that teachers make students aware ofthe skill that they are practicing and, taking it one step further, the teachereither explains to students how they can transfer or translate the skill to thereal world, or, as in the case with many of the activities in this collection, thestudents are guided through a process of taking a skill and making itindependent of the classroom setting.

The activities in this collection are designed to get students to practice themany strategies that are associated with proficient native speaker readers.Many of the activities have suggestions on how the skill can be transferred

to the real world. Typically, in the real world, proficient readers usestrategies before they read and while they are reading. ELT has added thepost-reading stage, where the students can explore the topic more or lookfor useful language in the text. The activities in this collection are brokendown into those three stages.




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Introduction.

Before Reading.

Pre-reading strategies are of three types, those that draw attention tolinguistic features of the text, those that give student information to preparethem for conceptual or cultural aspects of the text and those that get

students to activate knowledge or opinions they may already have aboutwhat will be presented in the text.

Pre-reading Strategies LinguisticFeatures

ConceptualCultural

ActivateSchemata

1 Predicting content of text based on titles and visuals

2 Predicting content based on knowledge of topic

3 Predicting content based on knowledge of genre

4 Reading or listening to background information

5 Brainstorming vocab that might appear

6 Discussing ideas that appear in the text

7 Learning the meaning and use of discourse markers

8 Pre-teaching vocab in text

9 Skimming the text for gist comprehension

10 Scanning the text for specific information

11 Reading comprehension questions to answer

Strategy 1.

Strategy 2.

Pre-reading Tasks

Predicting content of text based on titles or visuals.

Students can use the title, headings, photos or other visuals to predict whatthey are going to read about. Regardless of whether they guess correctly ornot, studies have shown that if readers (native speakers or languagelearners) have predictions in mind when they are reading, theircomprehension is greatly improved.

Try putting students in groups and have each group predict the content ofthe text. You can tell the class it is a competition to see who can guess the

content most accurately. Elicit their ideas (put then on the board, if youwant) and then get students to vote on whose ideas seem most likely to becorrect.

Predicting content based on knowledge of topic

There will be times when the students will already have enough knowledgeabout the text topic or text type to make predictions about what they willread about. If the text topic is not evident from the title of the text, you can




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Strategy 3.

Strategy 4.

Strategy 5.

Strategy 6.

let them know what it is about and then have them discuss what they knowabout the topic in pairs or small groups. You can ask them to makepredictions while they are doing this or you could get feedback from eachgroup just on what they know about the topic and once all groups havespoken, ask the groups to consider what they’ve heard and then makepredictions.

3. Predicting content based on knowledge of genre

For texts of specific genres, clarify for the students what the genre is andthen put them in pairs or small groups and have them make a list ofcharacteristic content of that particular genre that they would expect to findin the sample they are about to read. For example, if the genre was a filmreview, they would expect to get a synopsis of the plot, a description of themain characters, some mention of the visual aspects of the film, anassessment of the quality of the film, and so on. You can list their ideas onthe board and eliminate any that are not characteristic of the genre. It’s agood idea to use the genre aspects they chose as a task for a gist read.

They read the text to see if the features they expect to be there are there.Then check with them how many they found in the text.

4. Reading or listening to background information

In some cases, learners may lack the cultural knowledge to understandcrucial aspects of the text. If native speakers would have this knowledgebefore reading, then it is unfair to expect a language learner to understandimportant points in the text that a native speaker would. So, it would makesense to try to give them that cultural knowledge before they read. Oncethe cultural information has been explained to them, the best approachwould to have them discuss in small groups how the background

information might be involved in the text. This not only serves to increasecomprehension when they read, but it also makes sure that they tie thebackground information to the content of the text

5. Brainstorming vocab that might appear

Put students in groups and get each group to brainstorm words that theythink might appear in the text based on the title, headings, visuals and/oryour brief synopsis. You can make this more motivating for students bymaking it competitive. Award a point for each word they come up with.

When they are finished, find out who got the longest list, get them to read

the words out and ask other groups to listen and afterwards add whateverother words they had to the list. You can also make this part competitivealso by awarding second place to the group that has the most words thatthe first group didn’t have.

6. Discussing ideas that appear in the text

With some texts, the students may not need any extra backgroundinformation but a discussion of the ideas that will appear in the text will




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Strategy 7.

Strategy 8.

activate any knowledge they already have on the topic. This is commonlyknown as activating schemata. The usual way to do this is to prepare oneor more questions for students to answer relating to the topic of the text.They can discuss the questions in pairs or small groups. Another good ideais to use a survey. For example, if the text is a film review, students couldsurvey each other on what aspects of film they enjoy or appreciate (e.g.,acting, special effects, soundtrack, etc.). Although learners may never dothese tasks in the real world, it’s important to remind them that thinkingahead about the topic of what they are about to read will improve theirreading comprehension.

7. Learning the meaning and use of discourse markers

Making students aware of discourse markers may prove useful before theyread certain kinds of texts. For texts such as essays, discourse markers(firstly, on the other hand, in conclusion) may give students valuableinformation about how the text is organized. Knowing that will help themcomprehend certain information and how it relates to the rest of the text.

8. Pre-teaching vocab in text

Although pre-teaching of vocabulary has been frowned on for quite sometime now, it is justifiable when certain unknown words would impede thelearner’s ability to understand the text as a whole, or crucial elements of thetext. Generally, the thinking has been that pre-teaching vocabulary takesthe words out of context and doesn’t allow the students to practice thesupposedly important skill of determining meaning from context. However,recent studies in learner reading comprehension have suggested thatstudents do not effectively process meaning of unknown words whenreading for comprehension. Taking that into account, it still makes sense to

not do extensive (if any) pre-teaching of vocabulary as students should getpractice in understanding as much as possible without worrying about themeaning of unknown words. Afterwards, they can go back over the text, orpassages in the text, and try to deal with the unknown words, either byinference or by use of a dictionary.

If one is to pre-teach vocabulary, the following method is suggested as itstill encourages the student to use the skill of determining meaning fromcontext. Simply take the words out of the text and re-contextualize them, orin other words, plant each word in a sentence similar to the context in thetext. Then students can still guess the meaning from the context. It’s a goodidea to have them do this in pairs or groups as the discussion about the

words will give them a better chance of coming up with the correct meaningbut also help them to remember the words and their meanings. Forstudents who may have problems determining meaning from context, youcould supplement the contextualized words with a list of definitions to matchthem to. They will make determining meaning from context easier,especially for lower level students.




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Strategy 9.

Strategy 10.

9. Skimming the text for gist comprehension

The gist task is designed to get the students to read the text quickly to get just a general idea of what it is about. Gist reading is important as it hasbeen proven to increase comprehension for the

second reading, even in one’s native language. The important thing with thegist task is that it is a very quick read and that the task should encouragethe students to read the entire text and to think about the question(s) all theway through the reading. For this reason, the best gist questions are thosethat encompass the entire text. Questions that ask the students to predictwhat they will read are often used as gist tasks.

To encourage students to read the text quickly, you can give them a timelimit (try using your gist speed x 2) and stop them when the time has runout. This should mean that next time they do a gist read, they will readmore quickly. Another idea is to ask the students to stand up when theyhave finished. Students who are still seated when most are standing will getthe message that they need to speed up and with this method, there’s noneed to stop them in their reading process. An even more effective activityis to ask all the students to stand and tell them to sit when they havefinished.

10. Scanning the text for specific information

Scanning is just glancing over a text looking for specific information with noattempt at comprehension. For some text types, scanning is an essentialskill. Texts like phone books, dictionaries and menus are often scanned asthe reader is only looking for certain information and is not concerned withthe rest of what is on the page. However, a quick scan over any text will

improve comprehension during the more intensive reading of that text. Oneway to prepare a scanning activity is to read the text over beforehand andmake a list of specific details that would prove informative for the students.For example, if the text was a narrative, the students might be asked toscan for character names, place names and words indicating the time of thestory. For certain text genres it will not be necessary for you to read themover first as they will typically contain certain information. For example, ifthe text was a job application letter, students could be asked to scan for the

job applied for, the educational qualification of the candidate, etc. And if youhave two different texts, you can have students prepare the list of items toscan for one text and then they give it and the text to the members of theother group. Whichever way you do it, you should make sure the students

do not actually read the text but go through it as quickly as possible. Oneway to do this is to time them and make it a challenge for them to find asmany of the items on the scanning list as possible. If you give them awritten list of items to scan for, they can simply write the found informationbeside each item on the list.




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Strategy 11. 11. Reading comprehension questions to answer

These questions are primarily used to test a reader’s comprehension ofimportant points in the text. However, to really work towards developingreading skills that students can take outside the class, the focus on thesequestions should be more about giving the students clues as to what

information they should be reading for when they read. Consequently, it isimportant that students read the questions BEFORE they read the textrather than after it. It is also important the teacher’s focus not be so muchon whether the exact correct answer is produced but more on that thestudents were guided to the appropriate information in the text. To ensurethat students realize that these questions are meant to help them focus oncertain information, get them to read the questions first, then ask them tohide the questions and try to remember what they were supposed to bereading them for. One way to do this is to put students in pairs, have both ofthem read the questions and then have one student close their book andtell the other one what the questions were,. paraphrasing, of course. Ifyou’d like, you could make a game of it and have the students get points for

each question they remembered.

Introduction.

While-reading.

These strategies, as the name suggests, are employed as the reader isactually reading through the text. They are a bit more problematic toimplement with students as it is hard to monitor what a learner is actuallydoing while reading (note that reading out loud is not considered validreading practice) and there is sometimes a danger that the use of astrategy will interrupt or hinder the relatively natural flow of reading that isoften so hard for learners to achieve. For example, studies have shown that

the most effective readers are those who learn to gloss over words whosemeaning they’re not sure of and continue on reading through the text.Learners often fall into the trap of “tunneling” where they get overlyconcerned about the meaning of one word and in trying to decipher it losesome comprehension of what they have already read. So, the trick toimplementing these strategies is to try not to hinder optimum reading speedand also not to take the learners focus off comprehension of the text as awhole. What has been shown through studies is that strategies that get thestudents to interact with the text greatly improve comprehension. Forexample, texts with questions to the reader, even if rhetorical, seem to beunderstood by readers more than texts without them. What do you think?

Because of the danger of hindering the flow of reading some of the tasksbelow are best done after the initial reading for comprehension as the aimis not so much that the students use the strategy to process the particulartext that they are working with but that they practice the strategy with thattext for use on other texts in the future.




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While-reading Tasks While After

1 Taking brief notes

2 Underlining/highlighting important information or key words and phrases

3 Ignoring unknown words 4 Determining meaning of unknown words from context

5 Making predictions while reading

6 Paying attention to grammatical function of words

7 Recognizing function of connectors (but, or, etc.) and referencers (it, this, etc.)

8 Re-reading to repair comprehension

9 Identifying topic sentences that contain main ideas

10 Recognizing key words

11 Making conclusions and inferences

12 Paraphrasing while reading 13 Distinguishing between fact and opinion

14 Indentifying writer’s opinion or attitude

15 Timed reading

16 Scanning or skimming sections of text

17 Recognizing function of discourse markers (for example, in conclusion, etc.)

18 Composing comprehension questions

Strategy 1.

While-reading Tasks.

1. Taking brief notes

Note taking is a task which is usually done by native speakers while readingbut often during a second read of the text, even if the first read was just agist read. Language learners should at least do a gist read beforeattempting to read for note taking purposes. However, it might be best forlower level learners – or for higher learners with challenging material – todo a quick gist read and a more intensive read for comprehension and thenhave them do the note-taking read. As students become more proficientwith reading for meaning, you can try eliminating the second reading stage.

Learners tend to have problems taking notes as they tend to write toomuch. Remind them of these strategies for note taking:

Be clear of the purpose for your notes

Write down key words only (Nouns, verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs)

Ignore functional words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, etc.)

Use abbreviation and symbols

Review your notes to make sure you understand them




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Strategy 2.

Strategy 3.

One way you can prevent the students from writing too much is to givethem a word limit. Try taking notes yourself with the text, count the numberof words you use and use that as a guide for students (you can allow thema few extra, if you want). You can also limit the length of the notes bylimiting the space that they can use for their notes, e.g., give them smallpieces of paper. Students can check the effectiveness of their notes byusing them to orally summarize the text to another student. That studentcan use his/her notes to check to see if anything has been left out. Thelistener would let the speaker know what was left out and then take theirturn at summarizing the text.

2. Highlighting important information or key words and phrases

As with the activity above, you may want have the students do a gist readand possibly a comprehension read before getting them to read andunderline key words and phrases. Students have the same problemshighlighting as they do taking notes – they tend to highlight far too much. Tocombat this, give them a word limit per line, e.g., they can only highlight 3

words per line. This not only gives them practice in highlighting only themost important words but it also forces them to make decisions as theyread about which words are the most important, a most valuable readingskill. You could also try weaning them off by gradually reducing the numberof words they can underline on each line every time you have them practicethis skill.

You can have students check the effectiveness of their highlighting bygetting them to summarize the text to another student or two by focusingonly on the highlighted words. The listening students can compare whatthey’ve heard to their own highlighting.

3. Ignoring unknown words

It is imperative that students learn to ignore words they don’t know whilereading instead of stopping to ponder them or looking them up in adictionary. In order to prove to them that they do not have to understandthese words for general comprehension, get them to scan for unknownwords and black them out with a marker. Then give the students a list ofcomprehension questions to answer and have them read the blacked-outtext carefully to answer them. They should be able to understand the mainpoints in the text without those words. Obviously, if there are too manyblacked-out words to make comprehension possible, the text is too difficultto be used at that level. Alternatively, you could give them another

comprehension task like summarizing the text after they have read it.

Once you feel that students are able to read a text without focusing on theunknown words, you can try getting them to scan and underline theunknown words before carefully reading the text for comprehension. In thiscase, the underlining will be a signal to gloss over those words whenreading. This is advantageous to blacking out because learners will begin todraw conclusions about the unknown words in the context of the sentencewhile glossing over them and certain clues contained in the form of the




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Strategy 4.

Strategy 5.

word will help them do that, e.g., recognizing that a prefix denotes a certainpart of speech.

4. Determining meaning of unknown words from context

This was considered an essential reading skill to get students to practiceuntil fairly recently when certain studies suggested that learners do notreally effectively determine meaning of unknown words from context. Untilthat point, the following guidelines were suggested to students to help themin the task of inferring meaning of unknown words:

Try to identify the part of speech of the word

Look at the sentence that the word occurs in.

Look at the sentences before and after the one that word occurs in.

Guess the meaning of the word.

Try using your guess in the sentence (e.g., a synonym) to check if itmakes sense.

It seems that by getting students to jump through all the hoops, we wouldslow them down considerably in terms of reading speed and possibly inhibittheir overall understanding of the text. It is also clear that native speakersmake inferences about unknown words in split seconds without affectingthe natural flow of reading. Perhaps, in this light, the best way to havestudents practice determining meaning from context would be to separatethis task from the reading for general comprehension of the text. One wayto do that would be to handle determining meaning from context as a pre-reading task with the words from the text recontextualized in othersentences meant to draw out the same meaning. It would even be a goodidea to supply pairs of students with these sentences and have them gothrough the steps above together, with explicit discussion of their guessing

strategy. Then, once they have guessed at the meaning of the words, havethem read the text at normal reading speed emphasizing that they shouldnot dwell on the unknown words. The point of having them make inferencesbefore they read is to raise their awareness of the aspects of the wordwhich may lend clues to the meaning so that with further extensive reading,they may start to approximate the inferences skills used by native speakers.

5. Making predictions while reading

This is an important skill to have as it enables a reader to be thinking aboutwhat information is to come in a text, which improves comprehension andretention even if the prediction is wrong. It also keeps the reader moving

forward through the text, which fosters more effective reading. One way toget students to practice this skill is to take a text and mark certain points inthe text where students are to stop and make a prediction of what is goingto come next. What you can do is tell students that when they reach thatpoint in the text, they are to turn the text over and when all students havestopped reading, elicit some ideas about what they think is going to follow.You could also ask them to write down their predictions as soon as they’veturned the text over. After you’ve got the first prediction, they can turn thetext over and continue reading. This activity will also help slower students




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Strategy 6.

Strategy 7.

speed up as they will realize that if other students are waiting for them tofinish, they are reading too slowly.

In order to train students to make predictions while they read, try takingthem through this progression over time. The first time you have them make

predictions from reading, get them to turn the text over at designated pointsand then discuss with a partner what they think will happen next. The nexttime you have students make predictions while reading, get them to stop atdesignated points and write down their predictions. Then elicit their ideas.Then, the next time, get them to think of their prediction in their head at thedesignated points. Again, elicit some ideas. Then the next time just askthem to make their predictions in their head but keep on reading. Now youhave them using the skill exactly how it should be used outside of class

You can also lessen your preparation time by using two different texts.Separate the class into two halves and get each half to prepare one text bymarking the points where they think predictions should be made by the

students in the other half. The added benefit of this is that it really getsstudents focused on what information in the text is important and alsopredictable.

6. Paying attention to grammatical function of words

Sometimes the grammatical function of a word may give the readerimportant information about meaning. For example, the past perfect willindicate that one event happened before another in the past, and this maybe crucial for the reader to distinguish between what is happening at thetime of the story and what is merely background information. It would bedifficult and distracting to ask students to consider the grammatical functionof words while they are reading so the best strategy is to raise theirawareness of how grammatical function may influence meaning and toprepare them to be aware of it when they come across it. This skill practiceshould not be done during a reading for comprehension but could be donebefore or afterwards. Try giving the students a text and having them scan itfor words with specific grammatical function, e.g., indicating modality,conditionality, hypothesis, sequencing, etc. They would highlight orunderline the words as they found them. Then you could do some sort ofranking task where they would look at the words they highlighted anddetermine the meaning they impart. Then they could list them in order ofimportance relative to the text as a whole. This ranking task should be donein pairs or small groups as the idea is that extensive discussion about themeaning and relevance of the words will lead to a heightened awareness of

those sorts of words and their semantic function. Thus, when they read inthe future they will be more likely to notice these words and they should beaware of how they impart meaning.

7. Recognizing function of connectors (but, or, etc.) and referencers(it, this, etc.)

Sometimes these functional words are crucial for readers to comprehendthe meaning of segments of a text. Students often have trouble recognizing




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Strategy 8.

Strategy 9.

Strategy 10.

what referencers such as pronouns are referring to and often they willmisunderstand a segment because they missed the semantic function of aconnector. A good way to raise awareness of these words is to get studentsto highlight or underline them in the text after they have read it forcomprehension. It’s probably best, especially for lower level learners, tolimit the items they are to look for, say, just pronouns, or just contrastingconjunctions, etc. Once students have highlighted a number of items, youcan ask them to discuss in pairs or small groups what function they have inthe text. You could also have them working in pairs or small groups to writesome questions for other students about the function of the words. Firsthave them number the lines in the text, if they’re not numbered already, andthen they can prepare questions like, “What does ‘it’ in line 6 refer to?” or“What does the information after “however” in line 8 contrast to?”. While thisis actually a post-reading task, the goal of it is to develop students’ while-reading skill.

8. Re-reading to repair comprehension

This skill is used by native speakers when they a segment seems unclearbecause they have not made a connection to something that wasmentioned earlier. One way to draw students’ attention to this strategy is tohave them read with a highlighter and the instruction that they are to use itonly when they get confused and have to re-read part of the text. At thatpoint they should highlight the part of the text that clarified whatever it wasthat they were confused about.

9. Identifying topic sentences that contain main ideas

Students need to realize that often the first sentence or two of a paragraphis important because it contains ideas that will be expanded on in the rest of

the paragraph. A good way to emphasize this importance is to have thestudents read only the first sentence or two of a paragraph and then topredict what the rest of the paragraph will be about. This will not onlyemphasize the importance of the topic sentences but it will give thempractice with an important reading skill which improves comprehension -that of making predictions while you read.

10. Recognizing key words

Learners often make the mistake of giving every word equal attention whenthey read. One way to combat this is to get them to recognize that onlycertain words carry the most essential information. Try giving them a list of

comprehension questions which cover the essential information in the text.Then after they have correctly answered the questions, get them to go backthrough the text and highlight/underline only the words which helped themanswer the questions. You will need to establish what sorts of words theyare, i.e., parts of speech, and the relative importance of each sort.Generally nouns are the most important followed by verbs, adjectives andadverbs, usually in that order. What you can ask students to do, after theyhave highlighted the key words, is to determine the part of speech of eachone and then count up how many of each type there are. Once students




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Strategy 11.

Strategy 12.

Strategy 13.

have done this, in order to raise awareness of the types of words theyshould be watching for, give them a text and ask them to highlight wordsthat they think will be important BEFORE they read it for comprehension.Then get them to read the text focusing mainly on the words theyhighlighted

11. Making conclusions and inferences

Native speaker readers do this all the time when reading. They areconstantly “staying on top of ” the text by making conclusions and inferenceswhile they read and even if they are wrong, the act of doing that improvescomprehension of what they read after they do it. The way to handle thiswith learners is to prepare questions designed to force them to makeconclusions or inferences at certain points in the text. Number thequestions and write the numbers of each question at the point in the textwhere it is to be utilized. Then give students the text and have them read tothe first number. They are to stop reading at that point (ask them to turn thetext over) and then you can ask the class as a whole the question, e.g.,

“What do you think the main character is feeling?” Students discuss theanswers in pairs or small groups and then after you’ve elicited some of theirideas, they continue to read until the next number.

This is, of course, an artificial task which would never occur in the realworld, but it does provide students with valuable practice in makingconclusions and inferences as well as emphasizing the importance of doingso.

12. Paraphrasing while reading

This is a difficult task even for native speaker to do as it require

simultaneous comprehension and rephrasing. This skill is probably bestpracticed with higher level learners, if at all. A good way to have studentspractice this skill is to ask them to imagine that they would have to explainsections of the text to a friend orally just after reading them. The transfer ofthe written form into the more informal oral one would naturally require aparaphrase. You could have the students stop after each section and givean oral paraphrase to a partner and then gradually get them to just imaginethey are doing it while reading.

13. Distinguishing between fact and opinion

Implementing this skill requires that students have some prior knowledge of

linguistic techniques that writers use to let readers know that something isfact or opinion. At lower levels you may want to deal with simple phraseslike “I think…”, etc., while at higher levels you can focus more on linguistictools such as adverbs of opinion and other discourse markers as well asuses of passive constructions such as “it is said that…”. What you can doto have students practice distinguishing between fact and opinion is to havethem underline/highlight words or phrases in the text which suggest thatsomething may be a fact or an opinion. This is an aware raising task whichwill draw students’ attention to these linguistic tools whenever they come




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Strategy 14.

Strategy 15.

Strategy 16.

across them while reading.

14. Indentifying writer’s opinion or attitude

This is often a tricky thing to do and may be best suited to higher levels.Students should work with texts in pairs or small groups and discuss whatopinion or attitude they think the writer has and what words in the text theythink gave clues about it. By eliciting their ideas and getting those wordsand/or phrases on the board, you’ll be raising awareness of the types oflinguistic clues that will let readers know where the writer stands.

15. Timed reading

Typically learners have enormous difficulty reading at a speed which is bestfor overall comprehension. They tend to focus too much on individual wordsand their meanings and end up not being able to see the forest for thetrees. Traditionally, the way teachers dealt with this was to have studentsread from a text on an overhead transparency and the teacher would use acard with a slot cut out of it. The teacher would move the slot over the textso only one line was visible at a time and students would be forced to readat the speed determined by how quickly the teacher moved the card. This, Ithink, is a questionable practice not only because it’s difficult to know whatthe optimal reading speed is of the students but also because it blocks ourperipheral information which often helps readers with comprehension.

The way to handle this in class, I believe, is to assume that the fastestreaders in the class are reading at a pace that is appropriate for their leveland then try to get the slower readers to approach that speed. A simpletrick is to have the students stand up as soon as they’ve finished a readingpassage. This indicates who the slower readers are and it emphasizes tothem that they need to pick up the pace. What you can do is to establishthe reading speed of your faster readers. Estimate the number of words in atext by finding out the line average and multiplying it by the number of linesand then determine the length of time it took them to read those lines anduse that to figure out their speed per minute in terms of number of wordsread. Then when you have students read, use a digital clock and as soonas students finish, they write down their finishing time and figure out theirown reading speed. The next time they are to read, they try to beat theirprevious record. This method, while more complicated to use, has theadvantage of not pitting students against others.

16. Scanning or skimming sections of text

These reading skills are often incorporated as pre-reading tasks to givestudents a general idea of what the text contains. However, if they are to beused as “while reading” tasks, they should be used with text types (orsections of texts) that will not require a comprehension stage after scanningor skimming. For example, texts such as menus often do not require acomprehension stage after they have been scanned. Likewise, certaintexts, for example some academic sources, may have sections which arenot relevant to whatever information a reader is trying to glean from the text




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Strategy 17.

Strategy 18.

as a whole. For example, a student may be reading an academic source forinformation that supports ideas that he/she is going to write about in anessay and it may appear that certain segments of the text are not going tohave that specific information but it may be important to skim it for overallcomprehension and to get an idea how sections of the text connect to eachother. To get students to practice this, you can give them a text and tellthem what sort of information you want them to get from it and while theyare reading it, if they suspect that that a part of the text does not have thatinformation, they quickly skim over it until the receive a clue that the nextsegment may be important. You can ask them to highlight words whichindicated that information following was important and therefore needed tobe read carefully. For example, give students film reviews and ask them toonly read carefully those sections that concerned the acting.

17. Recognizing function of discourse markers (for example, inconclusion, etc.)

Discourse markers are signposts in writing that inform the reader about

what kinds of information comes next. Students need to recognize theseitems when they come across them and then be aware of what shouldfollow them. Once students have some awareness of them, you can getthem to use this activity to accomplish this. Split the class in two and giveeach half a different text. Students are in pairs and they each have twocopies of the same text. They work together and find and black out all thediscourse markers that they find in one copy of the text. Then eachindividual student gets together with one student from the other half theclass. They give each other the blacked-out copy of their text. After theyhave each read the text, they quiz each other regarding the use ofdiscourse markers by choosing a discourse marker from the untouched textand their partner has to locate the sentence that it goes with. For example,

if the discourse marker was “however”, the student would look for asentence that had contrasting information to a sentence that came before it.

18. Composing Comprehension Questions

Comprehension questions are designed primarily to promote understandingof essential content. These questions are main poin t questions and shoulddominate the list of comprehension questions. However, other questions toget students to notice specific information in the text should also be used.These are, of course, detail questions. In addition, and particularly athigher levels, one or two questions designed to get students to makeinferences based on information in the text are used as we are often

required in real life to read b etween th e l ines . Normally a student text willhave between 5 and 8 comprehension questions and a mix of at least mainpoint and detail, if not all three. The questions should be in the same orderas the answers appear in the text with the possible exception of theinference questions. To really function as comprehension questions, theyshould be impossible to answer using general knowledge. You shouldalways make students aware of the type of comprehension questions theyare answering (even though many coursebooks don’t) as it’s important thatthey understand what skill they are practicing. If your students are quite




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familiar with the three main types of questions, you can have them write thequestions themselves. This requires the use of two different texts andstudents work in pairs or small groups to compose the questions for theother group to answer with the text that they will also give them. Writingcomprehension questions is actually a great way to promotecomprehension of the text.

Getting students to write their own comprehension questions is a great wayto get them to focus on the most important points in a text and it improvescomprehension because, as they read they will be constantly evaluatingwhat they read in terms of its overall importance. As writing comprehensionquestions is an artificial task which native speakers do not do whenreading, try using this sort of procedure over time to convert this“classroom” skill to a real-world one.

Students have two different texts and each student reads their text andwrites main point questions to hand to the other student along with the text.

The next time students read, they have two different texts and they read

their text and write brief notes on main points. They hand their texts toanother student and after the other student reads the text, they use theirnotes to compose oral questions to their partner about the main points.

Then the next time, all students have the same text. They read the text andcompose comprehension questions in their heads as they read. You canthen have them alternate asking comprehension questions to a partner.You should have now trained students to focus on and remember the mostimportant points when they read!

Introduction.

Post-reading.

These strategies are not really drawn directly from strategies used bynative-speaker readers but were created as a means of enhancing alearners involvement with the text, recognizing that the experience a learnerhas with a text is not exactly the same as a native-speaker’s. However,since studies of effective native-speaker readers demonstrated thatinvolvement with the text led to increased comprehension, these post-reading tasks are meant to simulate the questioning and other means ofworking with ideas or content that would take place in the mind of a native-speaker reader while reading the text. Because it’s often too much toexpect that a learner trying for comprehension might be effectively able towork with the text while reading, placing these tasks after the text was seenas the next best thing – although in many cases native speaker do not useany post-reading strategies.

These activities are not meant to be confused with while-reading tasks thatare delayed to after reading (see previous section) but are tasks that havebeen added on to increase student interaction with the text. The mostcommon post-reading tasks - and those that dominate books – are thosethat involve answering questions about the text that were assigned prior toreading.




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Post-reading Tasks

1 Answering comprehension questions about content

2 Students give and discuss opinions about text 3 Locating lexical and grammatical items in the text

4 Locating and categorizing cohesive devices ( connectors, referencers and discourse markers

5 Summarizing the text in writing or speaking

6 Paraphrasing the text or sections of the text in writing or speaking

7 Identifying features of genre

Strategy 1.

Strategy 2.

Post-reading Tasks.

1. Answering comprehension questions about content

This is by far the most common post-reading task used by teachers. Itsfunction is merely to assess the students’ comprehension of the text. Manystudents will write down the answers to compre-hension questions as theyread but it’s probably best, in order to encourage fluid native-like reading, ifthey answer the questions after they have read the entire text. It’s a goodidea to have students discuss the answers and to refer back to the text tocheck to see if their answers are correct. This will help raise theirawareness of important parts of the text that they may have missed ormisinterpreted. This is perhaps the only “real-world” value of post-readingcompre-hension questions, as it might work towards getting students to paycloser attention to important parts of texts when they read outside theclassroom. You may even want to engage in a discussion as to why aparticular comprehension question needed to be answered, in other words,what was it about that part of the text that was so important that studentsneeded to be tested on it?

2. Students give and discuss opinions about text

This is a common classroom task as it gives the students some valuablespeaking practice and allows them to share ideas about what they’ve read.

As it is a task that is rarely done in the outside world, it’s important to makethe link between their ideas and what it was in the text that led them to form

them. While students are discussing their opinions about the text, get themto refer to the aspects of the text that influenced them. To give a very basicexample of this, if students were discussing a short narrative and onestudent felt the characters displayed a certain emotion, he or she may drawother students attention to words (e.g., adjectives, adverbs) which suggestthat emotion. This will heighten the students’ awareness of how aspects ofthe text can help readers form ideas or opinions about it and in the futurewhen they read, they will be more likely to get more out texts.




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Strategy 3. 3. Locating lexical and grammatical items in the text

This is a classroom task that is sadly neglected by many teachers andcoursebooks. It’s rare, especially for lower level students, that they get anopportunity to deal with vocabulary and/or grammar in a realistic context.Coursebooks provide realistic graded texts for students yet they rarely askstudents to focus much on the language they contain, other than givingthem matching exercises featuring a handful of unknown words. Analyzingtexts for the grammar and lexis they contain is a great way to look atlanguage in use. One way to handle this task is to prepare a list ofdescriptions of items you want the students to find in the text and they worktogether in pairs (or threes) to find items that match the descriptions. Youcan even have the descriptions on strips of paper and use them to makethe search competitive. Put the students in pairs and after they’ve read thetext for comprehension, put the strips on your desk and tell each pair theyare to come up and take one. They search through the text to find the itemdescribed. When they think they’ve found it, they tell you and if they are

correct, they underline the item or write it in their notebooks with thecorresponding question number. Then they take another strip and do thesame. The first pair to find all the items wins. Below is an example of howthis could be done to focus on lexical chunks contained in a shortbiography.

Picasso, Pablo 1881 - 1973

He was born in Málaga, Spain. He studied at Barcelona and Madrid, and in1901 he set up a studio in Montmartre, Paris. His "blue period' (1902--4),was a series of paintings of the poor which showed attitudes of despair andgloom. Following that was his much happier "pink period' (1904--6), full

of harlequins, acrobats, and other elements of circus life. He then startedworking in brown, and he also began to work in sculpture. His break withtradition came with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1906--7, New York),which is considered to be the first Cubist painting. He developed the Cubistmovement with another artist, Georges Braque (1909--14). From 1917 he

worked with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, designing costumes and sets. Hismajor creation was "Guernica' (1937), expressing in Cubist style his horrorof the bombing of this Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. During

World War II he was mostly in Paris, and after the liberation he joined thecommunists. A great innovator, he also illustrated classical texts, and

experimented in sculpture, ceramics, and lithography.




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answers for teacher

1 Verb + Noun collocation which means to create a place to do art set up a studio

2 Noun + Noun collocation to describe a group of pictures that werecreated by an artist

series of paintings

3 5-word expression to say that someone began a new type of work He then startedworking in

4 Noun + Noun collocation to say that someone did something originaland unusual in their work

break withtradition

5 5-word expression which means that people think something wasdone for the first time

is considered tobe the first

Strategy 4.

Strategy 5.

Strategy 6.

Tasks such as the one above not only help students learn vocabularyand/or grammar in the text but they also give students practice indetermining meaning from context. The other value that this has in terms ofdeveloping reading skills is that it raises students’ awareness of languagethat would be likely to come up in another text of the same genre. Using theexample above, expressions such as “considered to be the first” or “he/she(then) started + ---ing” will come up again in other biographies, either inexactly the same form or in some variation of it.

4. Locating and categorizing cohesive devices (connectors, referencers& discourse markers)

The skill of recognizing these items while reading was covered in theprevious section with some ideas for post-reading tasks. Another simplepost-reading task which can be done is to have students highlight one ormore of the three categories (connectors, referencers and discoursemarkers) and discuss in pairs/groups what the function of each one is. Forexample, in the previous sentence the words “each one” are used in ordernot to repeat “three categories”. This type of awareness-raising task shouldhelp students notice and process these items when they read in the future.

5. Summarizing the text in writing or speaking

This is a useful task for determining whether the students have understood

important points in the text and the text as a whole. However, the only wayit can promote better reading skills is if the students know before they readthat they will have to summarize the text afterwards. Then it should ensuregreater comprehension and the use of re-reading to repair comprehension.

6. Paraphrasing the text or sections of the text in writing or speaking

Paraphrasing is a good way to check that students have understood thetext in detail. However, letting students know they will have to do that




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Strategy 7.

before they read for comprehension may cause them to read at too slow arate, which may actually inhibit their overall understanding of the text.However, as a strictly post-reading task, it may help students processdifficult syntax, which may, in the long run, lead to better comprehension.

7. Identifying features on genre Although genre analysis is normally done with a text to help studentsproduce their own text of the same genre, it’s a valuable skill for providingreaders with the type of information they should expect in another piece ofwriting of the same genre. Once students have read a text forcomprehension, you can give them a list of categories used for genreanalysis and ask them to find features of the text that they think would betypical for all or most examples of the genre. These categories are typicallyused in genre analysis:

content (what type of info is in the text/genre, generally speaking)

organization (how is the text organized in terms of layout and

paragraphing) style (informal, neutral, formal or somewhere in between)

register (grammar, vocabulary and expressions might be typical ofthe genre)

effect on the reader (e.g., to influence, inform, entertain, etc.)

By analyzing the features of a text which would be typical of the genre,students will be prepared to expect the same features when they encounteranother text of the same genre. These expectations will helpcomprehension even if the text is missing features or is in some waydifferent from the sample analyzed. For example, knowing that film reviewsfeature certain content (e.g., discussions of acting, direction. plot, etc.) will

help students notice that content when they read other film reviews. Andeven if any of the content they expect is missing (e.g., for a documentaryfilm), that too will tell them something about the text.

Lesson framework for any text. Stage ProcedureWarmer/Activate Schemata and/or other pre-reading task

Students do interactive task to get them thinking andtalking about topic and/or...

Gist task and/or other pre-readingtask

Students do a quick read of the text to get an idea of whatit is about and/or...

Comprehension stage and/or

other while-reading task

Students read comprehension questions and read the text

for the answers and/or... Language Analysis and/or otherpost-reading task

Students go over the text and look for specific usefullanguage and/or...

Controlled practice Students do exercises to practice using language extractedfrom the text.

Free practice Students speak about the topic of the text and (optional) tryto use some of the language they’ve learned.




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Reading Strategies Book 12

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Transcript of Reading Strategies Book 12