ELTWeekly Vol. 4 Issue#42 | October 15, 2012 | ISSN 0975-3036
This paper is submitted by Shakeela Noorbasha, M.A(Litt),M.Phil (Ph.d), of Department of English, A.N.U College of Architecture & Planning, Acharya Nagarjuna University, Nagarjuna Nagar, India.
Abstract
Francis Bacon rightly said “Reading maketh a full man; conference ready man; and writing an exact man.” It is a rich resource for the learners to acquire all basic skills of communications. Reading is perhaps the most important tool in all academic advancements. Reading is one of the four language skills: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. It is a receptive skill like listening.. It always has been an important part of the learning process in college classrooms. In the modern age of information, reading is a fundamental survival skill. Learners, who acquire skills in the target language, will be able to delineate their ideas through a creative, emotive use of language. We derive much pleasure from reading novels and poetry. Our vocabulary is broadened as we read newspapers, magazines, journals and other literary works. When we open the books, we open the doors that swing wide to unlimited horizons of knowledge, wisdom and inspiration that will enlarge the dimension of our life. Reading skills enable the readers to turn writing into meaning and achieve the goals of independence, comprehension and fluency.
Both professionals and students need excellent reading skills to be successful in their pursuits. Reading has new dimensions in industrial and technical organizations. The object of this paper is to explore how teachers can improve the reading comprehension ability of the students.
Reading Process
Reading is an interactive process which is carried on between the reader and the text that results in comprehension is reading. However, this comprehension depends on perception and thought. The reader also employs some skills for the better comprehension of the text. Moreover, there are diverse facets of reading that are vital in the preparation of teaching and its materials and which need to be taken care of.
Reading is concerned with four factors: decoding, comprehending, text analysis and response. In the first process the reader reads letters and focuses on them in order to change the coded message into information. In the second process the reader interprets the message and understands its literal meaning. In the third process the reader critically examines and evaluates the message. Finally the reader responds to the message.
According to the National Reading Panel (NRP), “ The ability to read requires proficiency in a number of domains such as ‘phonemic awareness’, ‘phonecis’, ‘fluency’, ‘vocabulary’ and ‘comprehension or reading comprehension’”. It indicates connectivity of many things during reading and also all the concepts mentioned will help for effective reading.
Purpose of Reading
Reading is an activity with a purpose. One may read so as to acquire information or authenticate existing knowledge, or in order to assess critically a writer’s ideas or writing style. One may also read for gratification, or to augment the understanding of the language being read. The purpose(s) for reading steer the reader’s choice of texts. One who is reading poetry for pleasure needs to identify the words the poet uses and the ways they are woven together, but does not need to recognize the core idea and sustaining details. Nevertheless, a person using a scientific article to buttress estimation needs to know the vocabulary that is used, comprehend the facts and cause-effect sequences that are portrayed, and spot ideas that are presented as the premise. The basic purpose of reading is to extract information from various sources, it may primarily be to:
- Get an idea of introduction of a text
- Understanding of the subject matter
- Obtain specific information
- Understand new changes and developments in a particular field
- Discover the author’s views
The purpose(s) for reading and the sort of text ascertain the specific knowledge, skills, and strategies that readers need to put into operation to attain comprehension.
Teacher’s role in motivating the students
- To realize this purpose, the teachers need to focus on the process of reading prior to its outcome.
- They should develop students’ perception of the reading process and reading strategies by asking them to contemplate and talk about how they read in their native language.
- They should permit students to practice all the reading strategies by using genuine reading tasks.
- They should motivate students to peruse to learn and also to have an authentic objective for reading by providing students some choice of reading material.
- While handling the reading tasks in class, they should show students the strategies that will work best for the reading purpose and the kind of text. They should clarify how and why students should use the strategies.
- They should have students rehearse reading strategies in class and ask them to practice outside the class in their reading assignments.
- They should promote the development of reading skills and the use of reading strategies by using the target language to communicate instructions and course related information in written form: office hours, homework tasks, and assessment material.
Cognitive and Metacognitive strategies
The two strategies which have a significant impact on reading the texts are cognitive and Meta cognitive strategies.
Reading is a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text; as individuals read, they use their prior knowledge along with clues from the text to construct meaning. It is an interactive process that carries on between the reader and the text, ensuing in comprehension. The text offers letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that encode meaning. The reader uses knowledge, skills, and strategies to decode the same. These include the following:
- Linguistic skill
The faculty has to identify the constituents of the writing system; know-how of vocabulary; awareness of how words are structured into sentences.
- Discourse skill
Acquaintance with discourse markers and see how they link parts of the text to each other.
- Sociolinguistic skill
Knowledge about different types of texts and their standard structure and content
- Strategic skill
To use the top-down and bottom-up strategies.
According to Oral Lingo “Reading depends on efficient word recognition and comprehension, teaching should develop reading skills and strategies, along with developing learners’ knowledge through employing authentic texts.”
Brown (1994) defines cognitive strategies reveal the use of bottom-up and top-down. It assumed that efficient reading requires the readers to make predictions and hypothesis about the text content by relating the new information to their prior knowledge and by using as few language clues as possible. Both bottom-up and top-down theories formed the Models of Reading. Cognitive strategies are useful tools in assisting students with learning problems.
Metacognition basic tenet is that by understanding what the mind is thinking during learning and individual will be able to focus his strengths and improve upon his weaknesses when trying to comprehend a text. The first step to improving reading skills through meta-cognition is to avoid distraction. The mind can be easily distracted away from a piece of writing due to the external environment, but people can re-train their brains to identify the interruption, and then refocus on the task at hand.
To enable the struggling readers we can use other four strategies:
Preview
Before writing the students brainstorm the prior knowledge and predict what will be learned.Click and chuck
Students identify words or word parts that were hard to understand. A sequence of “fix-up strategies” is used to decode the clunk. These strategies are
- Re-reading the sentence for key ides
- Looking for context clues in the sentences before and after
- Looking for prefixes or suffixes
- Breaking the word apart to find smaller words.
Get the gist
Students learn to ask themselves what is the most important person, place, or thing? What is the most prominent idea about the person, place or thing?
Wrap-up
After reading, students construct their own questions to check for understanding of the passage, answer the questions, and summarize what has been learned.
Fluency
The teacher has to motivate the students to read the text. The teacher can select speeches of the celebrities and ask the students to read using right pronunciation and punctuation. Fluency is significant since it is closely linked to comprehension. Fluency in reading means the ability to read text precisely, quickly and with expression. This is possible by the fluent readers because they do not have troubles with word recognition. Consequently, they can concentrate on the import of a text. Recent research demonstrates that fluency also depends on the ability to categorize words suitably during reading. This implies that fluent readers not only recognize words rapidly, but also know where to place stress or pause during reading.
Reading skills also include vocabulary skills, scanning, skimming and intensive reading skills. In order to understand the reading material or text a reader or student need to have a bundle of vocabulary. It also involves recognition and guessing the meaning of unknown words from word structure and context. The reader should be able to guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word/phrase from the text.
The important skills like skimming and scanning can be well taught by using newspapers. Scanning refers to the ability to locate specific information or facts as quickly as possible just like scanning the news paper for T.V.programmes and looking for a number in the telephone directory.
Skimming is more sophisticated skill than scanning. It refers to the process of reading a text or passage in order to get an idea of what the text or passage is all about. It is an essential technique for better understanding of a text.
G.C. Ahuja and Prameela Ahuja said: “There is no greater asset to the reader of today than highly developed skill in skimming. Skimming enables a person to select quickly content which he want to read and discord that in which he is not interested or which is inconsequential to his purpose.” The teacher has to select some tasks to motivate the students to do the skimming and scanning techniques properly.
Conclusion
Reading is a skill that will empower everyone who learns it. It enables one to benefit from the treasury of knowledge and ultimately contribute to it in some way or the other. It rests with the teachers on how they employ different strategies to promote the reading skill among the students. I conducted the number of activities to evaluate level of reading ability of my students. The teacher has not only select the different strategies to suit the needs of the learners but also motivate the students to improve their level reading ability.
References
Alexander, P.A., Jetton, T.L.; Kulikowich, J.M. 1995. Interrelationships of knowledge, interest, and recall: assessing a model of domain learning. Journal of educational psychology (Washington, DC), vol. 87, p. 559–75.
Radhika, Ch.2012. “The Effect of Task-oriented Approach on Language Teaching and Learning for Engineering Graduates” English for Specific Purposes. New Delhi: Prestige
Allington, R.L. 1983. Fluency: the neglected reading goal in reading instruction. The Reading Teacher (Newark, DE), vol. 36, p. 556–61.
Usha. N. 2012. English for Specific Purposes. New Delhi: Prestige
National Reading Panel. 2000. Teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reding Instruction
Snow, C.; Burns, M.; Griffin, P., eds. 1998. Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
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