Teaching Reading

Reading is an important speech skill and one of the means of communication, a skill which enables people to get written messages. Reading is a part of daily life for people who live in literate communities. Urban technological societies, as C. Wallace states, operate on the premise that their members can read. So, reading is a very important skill, both the aim and the means of teaching. As a useful technique reading is the means of vocabulary and grammar acquisition; the source of information; the basis offurther development of speech habits and skills.

Reading and learning to read is a social, interactive process as much as a personal and private activity.

Features

According to its role in the process of communication listening is reactive (+ listening), not initiative (as speaking and writing).

Reading is a receptive skill, a developed or acquired ability to recept and percept some written information.

The product of reading is deduction; the result - comprehension, understanding of the information read; the subject of reading is someone else’s thought, expressed in a written form.

Major requirements for school leavers’ listening skills (B1 level of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages):

The learners can understand texts that consist mainly of high frequency everyday or job sentences, related language, can understand the description of events, feelings and wishes in personal letters.

In real life people read because they have a desire to do so and a purpose to achieve. Besides they usually have some expectations about the content of the text/message they are going to read. The concepts of desire, purpose and expectations, J. Harmer says, have important implications for language learning.

Activities for developing reading skills should exploit these natural desires and impulses, preferably by supplying something which cannot be readily obtained in the

native language: something which is interesting, amusing, exciting, useful, or leads to pleasurable activity. "If the teacher exploits all the concepts in their language classroom, they will succeed in motivating their students to read and, therefore, to learn English," believes J. Harmer.

People normally read because they want information for some purpose (to know what is happening or has happened; to know when or where something will take place or what is available, etc) or because they are curious about some topics, need instructions in order to perform a task for their work or daily life. When people seek enjoyment or excitement, want to keep in touch with friends by correspondence or understand business letters, they also want to receive information from written sources.

Whatever the reasons for reading may be, we read because we want to get something from the writing, this something can be called the message, it might be facts, ideas, feelings, enjoyment, etc. Summarising up different reasons mentioned, four general ideas or four blocks of reasons can be mentioned: reading for having general information about the text (skimming), careful reading to obtain detailed understanding of the text (intensive reading), reading for some specific information from the text (scanning), and reading for pleasure or interest (extensive reading).

Reading is a difficult psycholinguistic process. Ukrainian scolars (O. B. Bihych, S. Yu. Nikolaeva) distinguish two levels of understanding a written text. The stages of reading development are closely connected with these two levels. The first one is an import comprehension level (ревень значения). It is connected with graphemic-phonemic and structural reception/perception of a written text. Actually, the first constituent part of reading as a process is reader's ability to associate the graphic system of the language with the phonic system of that language, to find the logical subject/predicate of the sentences, and be aware of semantic constraints related to knowledge of the meaning of words and their distribution. Readers, according to Kenneth Goodman make use of three cue systems, represented by three levels of language within the text: graphophonic, syntactic and semantic.

According to M. Rivers and W. Temperley this level of text understanding is characteristic of three initial stages of reading development:

1.Introduction to reading or learning to read, where the major emphasis is laid on the identification of sound-symbol correspondences, reading habit formation.

2.Familiarization, where students read rearrangements and recombinations of the material they have been learning orally.

3.Acquiring reading techniques.

If all these abilities are well-developed, learners can focus their attention on meaning rather than form and are able to understand a message.

The second level of understanding a written text is connected with extraction of information from a text - a content comprehension level (ревень 3MÍcmy). This is the level of the development of reading skills when learners are supposed to get information from a written text. In this connection we can present three more stages of reading development outlined by M. Rivers and W. Temperley:

4.Practice. There are two kinds of practice: intensive and extensive. Intensive - linked with further study of grammar and vocabulary. Extensive - students are on their own reading for their own purposes or pleasure. A wide range of language is read.

5.Expansion. Students can read a wide variety of materials in their original form without being discouraged.

6.Autonomy. Students who have reached this stage should be encouraged to develop an independent reading programme tailored to their special interests.

A successful, well-equipped, experienced reader focuses his/her attention on the text itself, its meaning and information it contains not on the form (letters, words, grammar) and treats the text as a familiar form of discourse and not as a task for deciphering. Coming from the first level of understanding a written text to the second one, from an import comprehension level to a content comprehension level is a logical reader’s development.

There are two different views of reading, which influence teaching the skill, - product view and process view. In a product view of reading, reader's role is passive; all the work has been done by writer and reader has only to open his / her mind and let the meaning pour in. On the other hand, reading is viewed as an interactive process - as conversation is - because both reader and writer depend on one another (Ch. Nuttal). Texts do not "contain" meaning; rather they "have potential for" meaning. This potential is realized only in the interaction between the text and the reader. The interaction between reader and writer will be fruitful if both of them share the same language, a common/similar command of it and certain assumptions about the world. The problems in understanding of a written text arise when there is a mismatch between the presuppositions of writer and those of reader.

Дата добавления: 2017-01-13