Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Week 13 - Answers

Nuttall (1996), Chapters 9 and 10

1. What are some of the things teachers need to think about before planning reading lessons?

One of the most important things is to remember that you are not just planing a self-contained reading lesson. Your reading lesson must somehow link with the other skills. When you begin to plan your reading lesson you need to think beyond the scope of the reading focus itself and se how the lesson might attach or be integrated with other skills and other topics that you have been working on or will soon be working on. Integrate!! Reading is one of he best areas that you can use as a major point of integration because, as e have said previously in this course, it provides students time to think about and process more deeply certain aspects of the texts do are having them work with.

 Before actually planning a reading lesson the teacher needs to think about several things. The first of these is the question on how reading is going to be integrated into the classroom as a whole. It is important to know whether the reading lessons are going to be separate or integrated into everything that is done in the classroom. The teacher needs to think about her/his role in the reading lesson. It also needs to be remembered that in raising literacy the teacher will have to have the student do many different things with many different texts and types of texts, so the teacher should go in to the lesson planning stage with a concept of overall flexibility. Following this idea, the teacher will need to decide which specific lessons should be skills based and which ones will be text-based. Such decisions need to be made, of course, based on the students (all aspects), the texts, and the goals of the class.

As was mentioned in the two previous weeks, this approach to teaching reading is reliant on the idea of flexibility. This is flexibility in the texts we choose to use, what the students are expected to do with the texts, as well as our own role as a teacher.

2. What are some of the most important considerations in planning a text-based lesson?

In a text-based lesson, obviously the text itself is going to be the most important aspect in forming the lesson plan. Teachers need to decide what it is they can possibly do with the text. This means they need to form ideas on the types of activities that are possible with the text and from those possibilities which ones would be better to do than others. Teachers need to decide which aspects of the text to focus on and how much detail they can put into that focus. In addition, they need to decide how much time they expect to devote to the text.

Once some of the basic preliminaries have been decided, the teacher needs to think about the specific types of activities they will have the students engage in with the texts. The different types of activities encompass three different groups. These are reading efficiency or skills based activities (both bottom-up and top-down), activities that encourage them to deal with the text in a non-linear way, and production-based activities that are reliant on interpretations of the text.

3. What are some of the things the teacher should do to help the students before they read?

It is important to remember that classrooms are not natural environments and even for reading we need to create an environment as natural as possible when our students deal with texts. This type of preparation means preparing the students communicatively for the text as well as pedagogically. There are six main things a teacher should do to help the students with a text before they try to read it.

Provide a reason for reading

The idea here is certainly one we have mentioned before. Basically, we need to let the students know why they might be reading such a text. Knowing the purpose of a reading will help the students in knowing how to best deal with the text. Purpose is positively correlated to the strategies readers employ. Readers attack and process texts differently according to the purpose/what she/he wants to get out of the text. It is, therefore, imperative, that the reader is clued in from the beginning why they might be reading the text and what they might be expected to get out of it.

Introducing the text

This basically involves activating schema. We need to let the students awaken their background knowledge of the topic area or the genre or any of the other areas related to schema. It is important to note that introducing the text is not simply summarizing. Summarizing is often a highly ineffective way to introduce shorter texts and even for longer texts the teacher is better summarizing only parts as a means of awakening interest and schema in the introduction. As we said about writing a good introduction should not contain any of the same introduction that can be found in the body of the text. Its main job tis to activate schema and the get the readers interested in reading the text.

Setting a top-down task

Rather than just introducing the text itself or certain elements of the text the idea is to give the students something to do (a task) which will guide them to their own background knowledge by using the text itself. Such a task characteristically involves skimming and doing something like filling out charts or incomplete outlines. It may also involve exactly what our classmates presented today, mapping out a text.

Asking signpost questions

`Signpost questions` is another name for `guiding questions`. Really both are the same in that both serve to help guide the students through the reading by asking general, easily answered questions which focus on main points in the text, or in a longer text main episodes or movements in the text. Such questions are often formulated as a general yes/no questions or certainly close-ended questions and should never focus on specific details or supporting points.

Breaking up the text

When a text is longer, or in a specific genre text, such as narrative, it is often necessary for the teacher to break up the text into groups. This might be especially useful if you are using a longer text in a class reader as part of an extensive reading project. Students will be able to better digest and predict with smaller chunks of interrelated text. It also allows the teacher to be able to determine who might be lost before they get really lost.

Dealing with new language

This is a controversial issue in that studies have shown that preteaching structures and vocabulary immediately before students read a text has limited efficacy but teachers (particularly foreign language teachers) continue to do so. In reality, if a teacher feels that there is much for her to preteach in a text, then the text is probably too difficult for the students (at least for extensive reading). In intensive reading again preteaching is not a very effective way to introduce students to structural points and vocabulary contained in a text. Dealing with it during the reading or post reading is probably much more effective.

4. What are some of the things the teacher should do to help the students as they read?

There are three basic modes for reading in the classroom (individual, teacher-centered, and groupwork) and these will, to a large extent determine what is to be, or can be, done while reading. It is also important to realize that these modes are not mutually exclusive. In the individual mode the teacher can try to supply the students with support or parallel readings which will help them with the main text and these might be handled in a teacher-centered or groupwork mode. In the teacher-centered mode the class is kept on the same pace and this approach often involves asking the class questions about the text, so there is often a certain amount of oral practice involved. In the groupwork mode the teacher`s main job is select or create tasks and to monitor with feedback and help the students as they work through these tasks.

The thing to remember is that although these are three different modes the techniques associated with these modes are not limited to the mode they are linked with. For example, Nuttall (1996) links using support material (handouts) as well as self-access with the individual mode, but such things can also and maybe should also be used in the other modes, particularly the group mode. In reading this I was struck by the lackluster way she presented the teacher-centered mode. It seemed like in this mode all the teacher might be able to do is lead the class in discussion or ask and answer questions as a whole class. There are many more things a teacher can do in the whole class mode.

5. What are some of the things the teacher should do to help the students after they read?

After the students have finished reading a text it is important for the teacher to set up some sort of post text activity or activities. These generally involve getting the students to develop some sort of interpretation of the text. Students often need to be guided about the meaning or the purpose of a text after they have read it to try to interpret it and integrate it into their cognitive system. They need to be encourage d to go back and find what was meaningful for them in the text. Nuttall presents a whole list of possible suggestions for post work on page 167 which works quite well.

6. Why do teachers need to assess texts?

Obviously teachers need to assess texts. If a teacher does not assess a text she or he will not know how to use the text for maximum effect. It`s that simple. Neither will she know how to choose suitable texts for classroom/homework use. In a program where the teacher is able to choose her or his own texts for teaching then this will be an important skill in that will need to use this to decide which texts to use from a mind-numbing array of possible texts out there. One thing that we really cannot complain too much about in Korea is the availability of English texts on the market and on the Internet. Virtually any type of text can be bought or otherwise procured in Korea these days.

7. What are some of the main criteria for assessing tests and how do they work?

There are three main assessment for individual texts.

Content

This should be matched to what the students are interested in or what they need to know. Again, reading requires great energy. If the deader`s attention is not engaged then they are simply not going to read the same way. Content is the key way for doing that.

Exploitability

This relates to how many different things the teacher can get the students to do with the text. Obviously we want to get texts that are highly exploitable. A more exploitable text will allow us to be more flexible with our students and we know how important that is.

Readability

This is based generally on vocabulary and structural density and can be predicted by a readability index which is getting the average word length and sentence length per 100 words. In stead of a simple grapheme count as part of the word length count it might actually be better to do a syllable count or a morpheme count or all thee and try to correlate them. These types of counts are necessary for helping us to get a feel for the possible difficulty of the text. Obviously we know that readability cannot be measured merely by getting word and sentence length counts, but such counts are valuable.

In addition there are assessment criteria which are used for textual material for reading in general and these include.

Variety

We have already talked at great length in class about how a literacy program is going to have to expose students to a potentially wide variety of different reading forms. Often these other forms will come in the shape of parallel or supplementary readings which might pursue a similar topic or line of thought but in a whole different form. Bear in mind that variety does not need to come merely in the form of the main texts assigned. Often it may come from other supporting materials.

Authenticity

We have also talked at great length about authenticity in this class. The basic idea is that only authentic texts should not only the types of language forms that are real, but also the language functions that drive those language forms. Unless both the function and form modes are authentic we are not exposing our students to actual language, we are giving them someone else`s idea of how language might work based on what they believe the limitations of our students are, but they don not actually know our students.

Presentation

This is the simple idea that the texts we have our students work with should be eye-catching and interesting. This also feeds into the attention system. The texts a book might contain or that we give our students should be well formatted and well layed out.