Reading comprehension

while-reading activities to the purpose for reading

In while-reading activities, students check their comprehension as they read. The purpose for reading determines the appropriate type and level of comprehension.

• When reading for specific information, students need to ask themselves, have I obtained the information I was looking for?

• When reading for pleasure, students need to ask themselves, Do I understand the story line/sequence of ideas well enough to enjoy reading this?

• When reading for thorough understanding (intensive reading), students need to ask themselves, Do I understand each main idea and how the author supports it? Does what I'm reading agree with my predictions, and, if not, how does it differ? To check comprehension in this situation, students may

• Stop at the end of each section to review and check their predictions, restate the main idea and summarize the section

• Use the comprehension questions as guides to the text, stopping to answer them as they read

Using Textbook Reading Activities

Many language textbooks emphasize product (answers to comprehension questions) over process (using reading skills and strategies to understand the text), providing little or no contextual information about the reading selections or their authors, and few if any pre-reading activities. Newer textbooks may provide pre-reading activities and reading strategy guidance, but their one-size-fits-all approach may or may not be appropriate for your students.

You can use the guidelines for developing reading activities given here as starting points for evaluating and adapting textbook reading activities. Use existing, or add your own, pre-reading activities and reading strategy practice as appropriate for your students. Don't make students do exercises simply because they are in the book; this destroys motivation.

Another problem with textbook reading selections is that they have been adapted to a predetermined reading level through adjustment of vocabulary, grammar, and sentence length. This makes them more immediately approachable, but it also means that they are less authentic and do not encourage students to apply the reading strategies they will need to use outside of>

Assessing Reading Proficiency

Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.

Reading Aloud

A student's performance when reading aloud is not a reliable indicator of that student's reading ability. A student who is perfectly capable of understanding a given text when reading it silently may stumble when asked to combine comprehension with word recognition and speaking ability in the way that reading aloud requires.

In addition, reading aloud is a task that students will rarely, if ever, need to do outside of the classroom. As a method of assessment, therefore, it is not authentic: It does not test a student's ability to use reading to accomplish a purpose or goal.

However, reading aloud can help a teacher assess whether a student is «seeing» word endings and other grammatical features when reading. To use reading aloud for this purpose, adopt the «read and look up» approach: Ask the student to read a sentence silently one or more times, until comfortable with the content, then look up and tell you what it says. This procedure allows the student to process the text, and lets you see the results of that processing and know what elements, if any, the student is missing.

Comprehension Questions

Instructors often use comprehension questions to test whether students have understood what they have read. In order to test comprehension appropriately, these questions need to be coordinated with the purpose for reading. If the purpose is to find specific information, comprehension questions should focus on that information. If the purpose is to understand an opinion and the arguments that support it, comprehension questions should ask about those points.

In everyday reading situations, readers have a purpose for reading before they start. That is, they know what comprehension questions they are going to need to answer before they begin reading. To make reading assessment in the language classroom more like reading outside of the>

Finally, when the purpose for reading is enjoyment, comprehension questions are beside the point. As a more authentic form of assessment, have students talk or write about why they found the text enjoyable and interesting (or not).

Authentic Assessment

In order to provide authentic assessment of students' reading proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through reading.

• It must have a purpose other than assessment

• It must require students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing some task

To develop authentic assessment activities, consider the type of response that reading a particular selection would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set of instructions, one might repeat them to someone else; after reading a short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.

Use this response type as a base for selecting appropriate post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts of the text. See Assessing Learning for more on checklists and rubrics.

Developing>

students’ comprehension may increase if they are trained to use strategies such as activation of background knowledge and guessing;

students need pre-reading activities that prepare them for the comprehension tasks;

text appropriateness should be judged on the basis of text quality, interest level, and learners’ needs;

authentic materials provide an effective means for presenting real language integrating culture, and heightening comprehension;

vocabulary must be connected to text structure, student interest, and background knowledge in order to aid retention and recall;

comprehension assessment should engage the learner in a hierarchy of procedures through which he or she interacts with the text.

Conclusion

Reading is an activity with a purpose. A person may read in order to gain information or verify existing knowledge, or in order to critique a writer's ideas or writing style. The purpose for reading also determines the appropriate approach to reading comprehension. Reading is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension. The reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to determine what that meaning is.

Reading comprehension is thus much more than decoding. Reading comprehension results when the reader knows which skills and strategies are appropriate for the type of text, and understands how to apply them to accomplish the reading purpose.

By raising students' awareness of reading as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching reading strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the>

Reading comprehension teaching aims at-

1. To let better grasping of the context, sequence and the characters narrated in text.

2. Certain parts of the text can confuse readers. Reading comprehension skills works on this aspect to get the clear idea of the meaning of the text.

3. Helps to create the questionnaire based on the text about its theme or idea. It often helps in better understanding of the said paragraph.

4. It helps to link the event of narration with our previous experiences and predict the next probable event in the course based on the information given in the narration.

Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. However, there are a number of factors which may interfere with an individual's ability to comprehend text material.

The most common single obstacle to text comprehension is decoding insufficiency. Simply put, if the student cannot decode accurately and automatically, comprehension will be compromised.

– When the student cannot «apprehend» or decode the word, meaning cannot be extracted.

– When the student cannot decode fluently and automatically, reading is slow and laborious and memory for read material is poor.

– When the student cannot decode and is taught to rely on «context cues» or to «guess» at words, comprehension is compromised.

Developing>

students’ comprehension may increase if they are trained to use strategies such as activation of background knowledge and guessing;

students need pre-reading activities that prepare them for the comprehension tasks;

text appropriateness should be judged on the basis of text quality, interest level, and learners’ needs;

authentic materials provide an effective means for presenting real language integrating culture, and heightening comprehension;

vocabulary must be connected to text structure, student interest, and background knowledge in order to aid retention and recall;

comprehension assessment should engage the learner in a hierarchy of procedures through which he or she interacts with the text.

Bibliography

1. Adams, Marilyn Jager. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print, MIT Press, 1990, p. 27.

2. Alderson J.C. & Urquhart A.H. (eds.). Reading in a foreign language. London: Longman, 1984.

3. Alderson J.C. Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language problem? // Alderson J.C. & Urquhart A.H. (eds.). Reading in a foreign language. London: Longman, 1984. P. 1–24.

4. Aldridge, M. (1989). Student questioning: A case for freshman academic empowerment. RTDE, 5 (2), 17–24.

5. Anisfeld, M. (1987). A course to develop competence in critical reading of empirical research in psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 14, 224–227.

6. Baker, L. & Brown, A. (1984). Cognitive monitoring in reading. In J. Flood (Ed.), Understanding Reading Comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

7. Collins, N. & Smith, C. (1990). Role of metacognition in reading to learn. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 333 386)

8. Carrell P.L., Devine J. & Eskey D.E. (eds.). Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

9. Chamberlain, K. & Burrough, S. (1985). Techniques for teaching critical reading. Teaching of Psychology, 12, 213–215.

10. Clarke M.A. The short circuit hypothesis of ESL reading – or when language competence interferes with reading performance // Carrell P.L., Devine J. & Eskey D.E. (eds.). Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. P. 114–124.

Размещено на