Teaching reading
Characteristics of Written Language
Orthography
Graphemes!
Complexity
Distance
Vocabulary
Processing Time
Formality
Permanence
Readers has an opportunity to return again and again to a word or phrase or sentence, or even a whole text
Unlike spoken language that vanishes when a speaker speaks, written language is permanent.
physical distance and temporal distance
Reader can get control over their processing time
Read at reader's own rate
Positive side: readers can capitalize on the nature of the printed word and develop very rapid reading rates
Negative side: many people who are slow readers are made to feel inferior
-> fast readers DO NOT ALWAYS have an advantage in practice
task of the reader: interpret language that was written in some other place at some other time with only the written words themselves
-> this sometimes decontextualized nature of writing is one of the things that makes reading difficult.
frequent ambiguity makes readers must do their best to infer, to interpret, and to “read between the lines”
English orthography is highly predictable from its spoken counterpart
BECAUSE.... irregularity in English manifests itself in high-frequency words and once those words are in place, the rest of the system can usually be mastered without special instruction.
writing and speech represent different modes of complexity
"nature of clauses."
writing has longer clauses and more subordination
->readers have to retool their cognitive perceptors to extract meaning from the written code
utilizes a greater variety of lexical items than spoken conversational English
lower frequency words often appear
-> BUT they can be predicted from their context
more formal than speech
formality: forms that certain written messages must adhere to
-> ex) we have rhetoricalm or organizational formality in essay writing that demands a writer’s conformity to conventions
Types of Classroom Reading Performance
Oral Reading
Silent Reading
Advantage
Disadvantage
At the beginning and intermediate levels, oral reading enables...
- evaluative check
- prounciation check
- extra student participation
- highlighting a certain short segment of a reading passage
- not authentic
- can easily lose attention
- mere recitation in reality
Intensive
Extensive
students focus on the linguistic / semantic details
- grammatical forms
- discorse markers
- surface structure details
achieve a general understanding of long text
Advantages
:stimulating reading where all details need not be retained
students gain an appreciation for the affective and cognitive window of reading: an entree into new worlds
Types of Assessment Tasks
Selective Reading
Interactive Reading
Perceptive Reading
Extensive Reading
recognition of symbols, letters, words
<examples>
- reading aloud
- copying
- multiple choice recognition
- picture-cued identification (T/F)
focus on morphology, grammar, lexicon
<examples>
- multiple choice grammar/voca tasks
- contextualized multiple choice
- sentence level cloze tasks
- matching tasks-grammar/voca editing tasks
- picture-cued tasks
- gap-filling tasks
<examples>
- discourse level cloze tasks
- reading + comprehension questions
- short answer responses
- discourse editing tasks
- scanning
- re-ordering sequences of sentences
- responding to charts, maps, graphs, diagrams
<examples>
- skimming
- summarizing
- responding to reading through short essays
- note taking, marginal notes, highlighting
- outlining