Working with a text for listening comprehension.
The work in a linguaphone classroom makes it possible to use different
approaches and individual tasks. The teacher can give different individual tasks based
on the audio text writing them on separate cards. Each task will contain an
instruction, a program of doing it and some props. All the students are divided into
several groups and each group is allotted the same time to do the task.
The whole work with the audio text in the phono classroom will go through three
stages:
The 1-st stage. Pre-listening stage. At this stage the teacher explains the
difficulties of the text (the most difficult sentences, the meaning of separate words),
does drill exercises based on the text, and introduces new words and grammar. The
following activities are done at this stage:
•
Introduction of the new words.
•
Comprehension assessment of the new words in sentences from the text with
visual illustrations.
•
Reading the most difficult sentences.
•
Working with the most difficult grammar structures used in the text, their
recognition, differentiation etc.
•
Thematic arrangement of the words from the text given on the list.
•
Asking all kinds of questions about the most difficult sentences from the text.
•
Lexical test.
•
Dictation.
•
Reading one of the passages of the audio text.
Pre-listening orientation.
Answer the following questions after listening.
Give the text a title, correct the wrong statements etc.
The 2-nd stage. Listening to the text. While listening students can do the
following activities:
•
Make an outline of the text.
•
Reproduce the context in which the key word is used.
•
Paraphrase.
•
Answer the questions.
•
Listen to the text again.
•
Choose the key words or phrases.
After-listening activities:
•
Question-answer exercises.
•
Making an outline of retelling the text.
•
Word by word, compressed etc. retelling.
•
Commentaries on the text.
•
Extension of the text.
•
Making up a story by analogy.
•
Making up a situation based on the text.
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•
Making up a dialogue based on the text.
•
Description of pictures illustrating the contents of the text.
Lecture 9
Teaching reading
1. Reading as a communicative activity. Extensive and intensive reading.
2. What is efficient reading?
3. Teaching efficient reading. The techniques of reading.
1. Reading as a communicative activity. Extensive and intensive reading.
There are many definitions of reading given by researchers. This is the
definition, given by С.К. Фомкина and З.И. Клычникова:
«Чтение – процесс восприятия и активной переработки информации,
закодированной по системе того или иного языка». (З.И. Клычникова.
Психология особенности обучения чтению на иностранном языке. М. 1973)
The nature of reading comprehension. Reading is a process of recognition,
interpretation, and perception of written or printed material. Comprehension is the
understanding of the meaning of the written material and covers the conscious
strategies that lead to understanding.
The process of reading deals with language form, while comprehension, the end
product, deals with language content.
Reading is a process of communication from the writer to the reader. It involves
the recognition of letters, words, phrases, and clauses, and in some respects, it can be
considered a simpler process than comprehension.
Comprehension, on the other hand, is a process of negotiating understanding
between the reader and the writer. It is more complex psychological process and
includes linguistic factors, such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and
semantic elements, in addition to cognitive and emotional factors. The reader receives
information from the author through the words, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth,
and tries to understand the inner feelings of the writer.
What abilities and skills are important in developing reading comprehension?
Researches state six general component skills, and knowledge areas of reading as a
process.
•
Automatic recognition skills.
•
Vocabulary and structural knowledge.
•
Formal discourse structure knowledge.
•
Content/word background knowledge.
•
Synthesis and evaluation skills/strategies.
•
Meta cognitive knowledge and skills
The type of reading approach we take often depends on what we want to get
from what we're reading. The types of reading can be placed into two main
categories: extensive and intensive. Intensive reading is time-consuming needs the
reader’s attention to detail. It involves close reading that aims at the accuracy of
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comprehension. Here, the reader has to understand the meaning of each and every
word. Extensive reading lays more emphasis on fluency and less on accuracy. It
usually involves reading for pleasure and is more of an out-of-classroom activity. It is
highly unlikely for readers to take up the extensive reading of text they do not like.
2. What is efficient EFL reading?
Efficient reading is based on the psycho-linguistic models of reading proposed
by Goodman and Smith. According to Goodman, reading is ‘‘a psycholinguistic
guessing game that involves an interaction between thought and language’’. He says
that reading processes are cycles of sampling (choosing meaningful units), predicting,
testing and confirming. According to Smith, two types of information are necessary in
reading: visual information (which we get from the printed page) and non visual
information (which includes our understanding of the relevant language, our
familiarity with the subject matter, our general ability in reading, and our knowledge
of the word). The more nonvisual information we have when we read, the less visual
information we need, and vice versa.
According to Goodman ‘‘Skill in reading actually depends on using the eyes as
little as possible…, as we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we
already know, on what is behind the eye-balls, and less on the page in front of us’’.
The psycholinguistic models of reading can be summarized as following
process:
- The reader approaches a text with expectation based on his knowledge of the
subject.
- He uses only minimal sampling of the text in deriving meaning by relying on
his knowledge of the language and subject, as well as his background knowledge.
- On the basis of sampling, he makes predictions as to what message he expects
to get from the text.
- As he progresses into the material, he tests his predictions, confirming or
revising them, and makes still more predictions on the basis of what he was been
reading.
- By making use of minimal orthographic, syntactic, and semantic clues in the
material, he integrally re-created a replica of the textual message.
- Once such reconstruction has taken place, he will test its accuracy against
previous information extracted from the text, as well as the store of information in his
long-term memory relevant to the topic.
If the reconstruction is in agreement with his previous knowledge, the cycle of
sampling begins again. If inaccuracy or inconsistency occurs, he will adopt some
compensatory strategy such as re-reading.
According to the psycholinguistic model of reading, efficient reading is possible
because the fluent reader does not read letter by letter nor word by word, but in
meaningful units. By looking at a sample of the text, he can predict the meaning of a
larger part based on what he has sampled and on his prior knowledge of this subject
at hand. He then looks at another part of the text to confirm his prediction. The
efficient reader is one who guesses correctly with minimal text sampling.
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An educated native speaker performs all reading-related tasks in his
environment. These include reading and understanding newspapers and popular
magazines, personal letters, business correspondence, official documents, stories,
academic textbooks, scientific and technical reports. The objective of EFL reading
course is to produce efficient EFL readers who can perform all reading-related tasks
in their environment. Efficient reading includes flexibility in speed and in
comprehension.
Efficient readers generally read at three different speeds, depending on their
purpose, the difficulty of the material and their background knowledge.
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