Stephen van Vlack
Sookmyung Women`s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Teaching Reading
Week 9 - Answers
Nuttall (1996), Chapters 4 and 5
1. What are the three main components of efficient reading skills? How do they work?
The three main components of efficient reading are; knowing what you want from reading, choosing the right material, and using the text effectively. Knowing what you want from the reading you are doing is an essential part being able to read efficiently. All too often, teachers simply assign a text to their students without explaining why they are reading it or what they are supposed to get out of it. This is often because the teachers themselves have no idea why the students are reading the text aside from some structural concerns or goals in vocabulary learning.
As we've said before, people in the real world read in order to glean meaning and this means that they always know why they are doing so. That is, recent cognitive activity on a the same topic which is used to activate the brain. Nobody is going to engage in the activity of reading (or any activity for that matter) for no reason. Therefore, it must be clear why students are going to engage in the reading. One way of dealing with this is by letting the students take their own text to class to read. This of course would require library facilities, which unfortunately most schools don't have. The alternative is for the teacher to pick the test herself carefully and to make sure that she explains why the students are engaging in that reading. It should be made clear to the students with the goals are and what the reading is really all about.
The second component of efficient reading is choosing the right material. This of course follows the first criterion. You can only choose the right material in relation to what you want to get out of the reading; what your goals are. Again, it might be useful to let students pick their own material based on this, but pending teacher approval of course. One problem however is the students are often terribly bad gauges of other own level. The perceived social role of English in Koran society often puts too much pressure on students to be excellent and as a result they often wind up assessing their English in a rather reactive way. Many Koreans tend to rate themselves always against others who they know little about and as a result have a strong tendency to either over evaluate their skills or under evaluate them. Based on this, in Korea at least, the teacher may be the best cage for deciding what material is good (useful) or not so useful for the students at least until she can get her students to stop comparing and competing against each other so viciously. To choose texts for students teachers need to base your decision on lots of different things which we will discus at some length later.
The final component of efficient reading skills is the ability to be able to use the text effectively. This means that the reader needs to get out of the text what it is that they want to or need to get out of the text. Often this does not mean reading the entire text carefully. And this is a very important point to remember. Developing reading skills does not simply mean developing the ability to read/analyze texts carefully and in their entirety. In reality, very few readers read entire texts, and they certainly don't read an entire text following the same strategies all the time. Therefore, readers need to know what to read more carefully and what to read less carefully in addition to what they can simply ignore or glance over quickly. It follows from this discussion that it would seem to be very important then to get the students used to dealing with more extensive types of reading. Here we are not talking about simply reading short paragraphs, but substantially longer texts.
2. What are some of the non-linear aspects of texts that we need to use to read effectively?
There are many different nonlinear aspects of texts which we must try to encourage our students to use when they're reading. Again, there seems to be a certain mismatch between how Nuttall expects us to carry our reading lessons and how lessons are generally carried out in Korea. She expects us to be doing extensive reading with much longer texts and certainly with more authentic texts. There are very strong theoretical reasons for doing this, however in Korea the texts that students usually deal with are short and contrived. On a rather sad note, due to curriculum constraints it might not even be possible for you to develop a more extensive reading curriculum for your students. All the same, is very important to know this because little changes can make a very big difference and how things work in your classroom. The nonlinear aspects of texts are really only useful or identifiable in certain types of texts. In endeavoring to try to use such things as titles and headings, blurbs, and other aspects you need to try to find texts that actually contain these elements. Most of the texts contained in standard textbooks produced in Korea simply do not contain such elements. As a result we are really not preparing our students for the outside world, which is a problem. This means that you probably need to supplement what are doing in the class by bringing in books at least to show students how they are structured. Better yet would be to have the students actually try to work their way through them, at least to minimal extent.
Here is a list of some of the non-linear aspects of texts that Nuttall mentions
Titles and headings
The blurb
Biographical information about the author
The summary, Running titles, Table of contents, Lists of figures
Index
Bibliography
3. How does flexibility work as a reading skill?
Varying reading speed and approaches is the key to flexibility. In turn, flexibility is the key to any kind of endeavor, whether active or passive. One of the main problems that we find is that reading is generally seen as a passive type of activity (Some language teaching methodology books actually mention this directly), which of course is not. Efficient readers actively engage the text. They do this by being flexible. Flexibility is a main part of the necessary or commonsense approach to tasks and is something that we engage in constantly during our waking hours. We can understand flexibility by looking at how the system of attention works in the human mind. Consciousness can be defined as a state of potential attention-giving. So, when we are conscious we are able to focus attention when necessary. The keywords in the previous sentence are when necessary. It is simply not always necessary to focus our attention on everything that we perceive. In fact it would be impossible to do so. Our brains would simply burnout and we would be completely inundated with what is called mental noise. We need to think of attention as being something valuable and this is because attention actually does cost a tremendous amount of energy to focus. Reading is simply an extension of basic perception abilities. This means that the attention system that we use to analyze the world outside a text on a constant basis also applies to how we analyze the world inside a text and on an equally constant basis. Just like in the real world readers need to know when to focus attention and when not to. Attention focus is based on emotional value. There is a strong integration between the processes of emotion and many of the other systems in the brain including attention and memory retention. Simply put, people focus attention on things they think are worthy of their attention. This is achieved through a careful assessment of the correlation between what is new and what is known. All concepts, all entities in our mind, have an emotional value which is achieved through a process called emotional tagging (valorization), conducted in the amygdala, a part of our midbrain. The same kind of thing relates to reading. We will focus attention on things that we think our worthy of focusing our attention on and will simply ignore the things which are not worthy of our attention. Now, in order to do this we must first know why we are reading and we need to be reading a text which actually suits are reading needs. So in analyzing this question we come right back to our first question which is hopefully not very surprising.
4. What is reading speed based on and how can it be improved?
Reading speed is based on comprehension. We cannot calculate reading speed by simply counting the number of words that people are able to flash their eyes on. Reading speed can only be calculated based on how much the reader has understood as a result of reading a certain number of words in a 10 second interval.
A specific type of eye movement involves reading for sense groups (reading chunks instead of individual words). Research has shown that in order to get people to raise their reading speed while keeping comprehension high, actually even enhancing comprehension, is to get them to read in what are termed sense groups. Studies done on L-1 language readers shows that these readers do not analyze the text word for word. Their eyes jump from chunk to chunk. Following linguistic terminology these different chunks can be referred to as constituents or phrases. In any case they have a structural reality which is based on the target language. This means that there is limited flexibility in deciding what is a sense group and what isn't. One of the most magic traits of linguistic competence is the ability to come up with constituents without any real structural knowledge. Constituency is based on the idea of structural dependency, a central principle of Universal Grammar, which is present in every language. A certain necessary degree of familiarity with the language will allow people to be able to come up with sense groups quickly and easily. Being able to identify sense groups seems to be an extremely important part of reading skill. Simply put, a sense group is a group of words which are bonded together and often behave as one solid chunk. Our eyes don't move like a fluid line across a page. The eyes of good readers bounce from sense group to sense group taking in the entire sense group in one fell swoop. Every one our students in order to become efficient readers need to be trained in reading for sense groups and not for reading simply words.
Reading cards, projected texts, just about anything that will allow the students to only see one sense group or so at a time is the best way to try to train them to get a feel for how sense groups work and to try to get them to move their eyes in the correct way when reading.
5. What are some faulty reading strategies?
According to Nuttall, and I concur, there are essentially three faulty reading strategies which we need to very strongly discourage our students from doing. They are:
Vocalizing
Studies have shown conclusively that in reading vocalizing is a debilitating strategy. We have studied at great length the idea that written text is an abstraction of the spoken word. It is different, simply put. By trying to vocalizing the words in a written text on the page we're diverting attention from the meaning. It doesn't usually help, in fact it hurts.
Finger pointing
Based on what we've read above about eye movement we can now realize that finger-pointing causes our eyes to move in a way which is detrimental for efficient reading. Finger pointing will undo all we did when we tried to encourage our students to read in sense groups and tried to get them to stop reading word by word. The search and destroy type reading that I seem to mention fairly often in class is simply not efficient. Moving your finger along the page will not only get you to read word by word, it will also get you to focus your attention on your finger and not on the actual words on the page.
Regressive eye movements
Regressive eye movements are problematic because they cause trouble for the short-term memory. If our eyes are constantly moving back to see what we have already read then we can no longer keep in our mind what we actually have moved up to in the text. In order to keep our short-term memory working properly our eyes need to move forward more or less steadily. Of course it is okay every once in a while to go back and doublecheck a little bit of what we've read, but it is not something that we should or can do on a regular basis, at least not if we want to understand what is that were are reading.
6. What is one of the biggest problems Korean students face in relation to vocabulary and reading?
Korean students have terrible problems in dealing with reading on almost all levels but in relation to vocabulary the biggest problem is simply their inability to deal with unknown words. Because Korean students are so used this search and destroy type of reading they tend to simply clam up when confronted with a word that they do not know. Korean students often feel the need to know every single word in the text. This practice pretty much ruins their reading proficiency. In relation to this, Koreans tend to overuse the dictionary to look up words much too often. Also, they are too inflexible in word meanings. They believe that words have a tendency to have one fixed meaning and extensions of that meaning are quickly rejected.
7. What is a lexical item and how do lexical items differ from the conventional idea of vocabulary?
According to lexical theory a lexical item can be a single word or an entire multitude of words. The bottom line is that language is not exclusively made up of single word units. All words and language connects in sometimes more and sometimes less fundamental ways to other words and other groups of words. In this way, word chunks are extremely important basis of language. Chunking and connections in words, according to some theorists, form the very basis of the lexicon. To be efficient readers people need to know this either consciously or subconsciously. Unlike a dictionary or the traditional sense of vocabulary, lexical units and the lexicon itself is all about connection as well as multiplicity. A lexical item can be a word, or a group of closely-related words. Also, the meaning of lexical items is far from fixed.
8. Nuttall makes a three-way distinction between words: how does this work and is it valid?
Nuttall makes a distinction between active, receptive and throw away vocabulary. Active vocabulary is a way of describing the words that one should not only recognize in a text and know the meaning of but should also know how to use themselves. Receptive vocabulary, or passive vocabulary as it is also commonly known, refers to vocabulary which is recognizable but which the reader is not necessarily able to use themselves in real language situations. Throwaway vocabulary is vocabulary which is neither necessary to really recognize nor know in a text. It is pretty much useless. It can be avoided, ignored, and ultimately throwaway. It is very important for readers to be able to knowingly understand this difference and to be able to use the difference in actual reading situations.
9. Why is ignoring parts of a reading text important?
In relation to our attention system, which we have already talked about above, ignoring parts of a text or ignoring particular words plays a central role in being able to read efficiently and properly. Readers simply do not need to read everything. They need to learn what to avoid to preserve attention skill. This applies both to words and to certain sections or sentences in a text. Ignorance can truly be bliss.
10. What makes some words easier or more difficult to deal with than others?
There are several things which make some words easier or more difficult to deal with others. They are:
Words with several meanings
All words are polysemous. This means that all words have several meetings and sometimes hundreds of different shades of meaning. Readers need to be flexible in order to beware of this. Dictionary meanings rarely apply in real world reading contexts.
Sub-technical vocabulary
Within technical realms words often have specific meetings which apply only within that area. In addition, different technical areas also use different vocabulary. Sometimes this is called a jargon. To be a good reader you to understand jargon, at least in certain technical areas.
Superordinates
Word relationships are arranged in what are called taxonomies. Words that belong to similar areas are arranged hierarchically in these taxonomies and enjoy a relationship which is known as hyponymy. Now, this is important to know because within English writing there is an unwritten rule that you are not supposed to repeat the same words too often. Replacement is a must in being a good writer of English. Often hyponyms will be used to replace words. If readers know nothing about taxonomies and hyponymy that they're going to have tremendous difficulty understanding the text.
Transfer of meaning
What transfer of meaning is really about is metaphorical extension. Language, in a fundamental way, is based on metaphorical extension. This means that we take things from a strictly literate, physical realm and extend them figuratively in order to create new, but related meanings. This is the basis of language. Without metaphorical extension human language would cease to exist. Readers need to understand this. Most language can not be taken literally. Meaning is extended and transferred from certain physical elements into metaphysical elements.
Irony
Another aspect of meaning which readers have difficulty with is irony. The only way to figure out whether a writer is being ironic or not is to be able to understand words within the context. Obviously irony should be and probably will be restricted to certain genres. For example, irony in textbooks is extremely annoying and generally unacceptable, but irony is a normal thing in informal letters as well as literature.
Synonyms and antonyms
Last but not least is also extremely important that readers understand synonyms and antonyms. Again these types of words are used in replacement.
11. What are some of the means students can employ to attack texts and words in particular?
Structural clues-grammatical function
Structural clues-morphology
Inference from context
I think these are pretty much self explanatory.
12. How can we get our students to use inference to interpret texts?
Use nonsense words
Have them fill in blanks - come up with effective replacements
There are several things we can do to try to get our students to use inference to interpret texts. The first of these is to insert nonsense words into our text so that running into the dictionary is not go to help. Students are forced to use these words or ignore them as the case may be. In order to use the words they're going to need to analyze the context because the words themselves are not going to help at all, unless they have certain morphological endings which they may or may not. Another thing that teachers can do is to simply insert blanks into a text. This, of course, can be a standard type of cloze activity. Alternatively, teachers could ask students to come up with effective replacements for either certain words or a certain number of words in a text. Another thing that should help students develop their skills in inferencing.
13. According to Nuttall, how should teachers deal with dictionaries, do you agree?
Discourage students from using them and try to show them how they can cope without them. Also, show them how to use a dictionary well. Also, depending on their level, try to get them to use a thesaurus as a possible alternative to a dictionary.