Blog Assingment 8- Reading

Reading- Yuni & Katie

Types of Classroom Reading Performance p.371-373

1. Oral and silent reading- For Beginning and Intermediate levels this type of classroom reading performance can serve as a evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills, help with pronunciation check and it can serve to add extra student participation. For advanced levels the only advantage can be gained by reading orally. A few disadvantages include other students not paying attention when one is speaking, oral reading is not authentic language, and it is actually just recitation instead of participation.

2. Intensive and extensive reading- Intensive reading is a classroom-oriented activity focused on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. This type of reading includes grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships, and the like. Extensive reading is mostly outside the classroom and includes pleasure reading. An advantage of this is students don't overanalyze.

Principles for Teaching Reading Skills p.373-376

1. In an integrated course, don't overlook a specific focus on reading skills
- Focus on student's reading skills and check if students have been spending enough time to extensively read some books, long articles, and essays without looking up all the unknown words every time.

2. Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating
-Select the topics or material relevant to student's interests or goals to increase the level of intrinsic motivation. It is sometimes helpful to have students create their own material for reading and assess themselves

3. Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts
-Simplify texts by adjusting lexical and structural difficulties depending on the proficiency level of students but be cautious not to lose the natural redundancy, humor, wit, and other captivating features of the original material.

4. Encourage the development of reading strategies
-Get your students to use some reading strategies introduced in the textbook, but also encourage them to develop their own reading strategies rather than sticking into one of strategies.

5. Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques
-A combination of top-down and bottom-up processing is important by having students to predict overall meaning and then moving to each level of language itself.

6. Follow the SQ3R sequence
-Guide students to follow five steps for approaching a reading text: 1) skim through the text for main ideas, 2) make questions about the text, 3) read again the text to find answers to questions, 4) reprocess the main points of text, 5) assess the important points of the text and incorporate it into long-term associations.

7. Plan on prereading during reading, and after-reading phases
-Keep in mind to spend some time introducing a topic to students before they start reading to give them a sense of purpose for reading while they are reading, and to ask some comprehensive questions as a follow-up writing exercise after they read.

8. Build an assessment aspect into your techniques
- Try to carefully assess student's comprehension using external cues such as doing, choosing, transferring, answering, condensing, extending, duplicating, modeling, and conversing.

Assessment p.385-386

For assessing reading there are three things you should look at:

1. Be specific about micro- or macroskills
2. Pay close attention to what strategies for reading are being examined
3. Differentiate between bottom-up and top-down tasks, as well as form versus meaning

These are some possibilities we can use:

1. Perceptive Reading- basically a recognition of symbols, letters, or words.
2. Selective Reading- where you focus more on morphology, grammar, and lexicon.
3. Interactive Reading- this includes responding to questions but also things like re-ordering sequences of sentences.
4. Extensive Reading- which includes summarizing, note taking, or outlining.

Critical Thinking Questions:

1. What are some disadvantages of Extensive Reading and why?

2. How can you increase the affective power of reading?

3. How can we help students to distinguish between literal and implied meanings?