Intensive Reading
Intensive study of reading texts can be a means of increasing learners’ knowledge of language
features and their control of reading strategies.
It can also improve their comprehension skill.
It fits into the language focused
learning strand of a course.
It can have a positive impact
It can have a negative impact
It helps to determine what language features will get attention in the course
The language features are set in the communicative context of a text.
The text can be used to show how the language features contribute to the communicative purpose of the text and this can be good preparation for subsequent writing activities.
Choosing features in this way is likely to avoid the interference between vocabulary items or grammatical features that can occur when topic-centred syllabus design is used.
The features given attention to may be an uncontrolled mixture of useful and not very useful items.
The topic of the text determines the salience of the items and the teaching gets distracted towards this text rather than what will be useful in a range of texts.
The major principle determining the focus of the teaching should be that the focus is on items that will occur in a wide range of texts
There are four ways of putting this principle into practice
Focus on strategies that can be used with most texts
Quickly deal with or ignore infrequent items
Focus on items that occur with high frequency in the language as a whole, such items will occur often in many different texts.
Make sure that the same items and strategies get attention in several different texts
Vocabulary
Grammar and cohesion
Sound-spelling
Information content
Comprehension
Genre
Items such as
Question types
Question forms
Strategies such as
Predicting
Standardized reading procedures
Items such as
Regular sound-spelling correspondences
Strategies such as
Spelling rules
Free/checked words
Items such as
High frequency vocabulary
Strategies such as
Underlying meanings of words
Noting and learning on cards
Word parts
Guessing
Dictionary use
Items such as
High frequency grammatical features
Strategies such as
Dealing with sources of difficulty (clause insertion, what does what, coordination, cohesion...)
Items such as
Topic type constituents
Strategies such as
Topic type
Items such as
Features that typify this type of text
Strategies such as
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Intensive work on a reading text can focus on the following aspects
Grammar
Vocabulary
Cohesion
Information structure
Regular and irregular sound-spelling relations
Genre features
Comprehension
Strategies
Intensive reading can aim at understanding a particular text
This can be done through the teaching of phonics, through teaching spelling rules, and through reading aloud.
Learners' attention can be drawn to useful words, and the underlying meaning and use of these words can be explained. Words from the text could be assigned for later study
Difficult grammatical features can be explained and analyzed
Learners can practice interpreting what pronouns refer to in the text, what the conjunction relationships between sentences are, and how different words are used to refer to the same idea
Certain texts contain certain kinds of information. Newspaper reports, for example, can describe what happened, what led to the happening, what the likely effects will be, who was involve... Learners can be helped to identify these different kinds of information.
The vocabulary, grammatical features, cohesive features and information all contribute to the communicative effect of a text. Intensive reading can focus on how the text achieves its communicative purpose through these features and what this communicative purpose is.
Intensive reading can be used to help learners develop useful reading strategies. By working intensively on a text, learners can practice the steps in guessing from context, using a dictionary, simplifying difficult sentences and taking notes. They can also receive training in integrated packages of strategies.
Features of a good intensive reading exercise
Directs the learners' attention to the reading text, the students need to read the text in order to do the exercise
Provides the teacher and the learner with useful information about the learners' performance on the exercise.
Directs the learners' attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies for dealing with any text, with the aim "to develop in the language learner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to comprehension of a text"
Is easy to make, teachers have to choose texts suited to the particular needs of their learners, and if these texts do not have satisfactory exercises, the teachers must make their own.
Are comprehension questions good reading exercise?
Questions are the most frequent technique used to train learners in reading
However, although questions may have a role in practicing reading, the various forms of reading comprehension questions are not so effective for teaching learners to read, due to the fact that a simple question form can do so many things, check vocabulary, sentence structure, inference...
Disadvantages of comprehension questions
They direct learners' attention to the reading text, although occasionally some questions are answerable from the learners' own experience without having to refer to the text.
As they can do so many jobs, it is not always clear which job they are doing and thus it is difficult to get useful feedback.
They can be local rather than general and focus the attention on the message of a particular text, the teacher should help the learners to develop knowledge of the language and is conventions of use, so they can deal with any text that they met.
It is difficult to make good comprehension questions. It takes considerable skill, time and effort. Thus, most teachers who wish to use such exercises will be forced to rely on often unsuitable published material.
Despite the disadvantages, comprehension questions are useful of practicing reading and of motivating learners to read.
Comprehension of the text
Comprehension questions are used as the major means of focusing on comprehension of the text
These questions can take multiple forms
Multiple-choice sentences
Sentence completion
True/False sentences
Information Transfer
Yes/No questions
Translation
Pronominal questions
Précis
The focus of comprehension questions
There are several schemes to describe the possible focus of comprehension questions and they typically cover:
Drawing interferences from the text
Using the text for other purposes in addition to understanding
Literal comprehension of the text
Responding critically to the text
Involves understanding what the text explicitly says
Involves taking messages from the text that are not explicitly stated but could be justified by reference to the text.
Involves applying ideas from the text to solve problems, applying the ideas to personal experience, comparing ideas in the text with other ideas from outside the text.
Involves considering the quality of the evidence in the text, evaluating the adequacy of the content of the text, of expression and clarity of language, among others.
Learners can also get involved in question making
Guessing the questions
Group questions
Predicting the passage
Class questions
Learners see a determined number of topic related words taken from the text they're going to read and try to predict what sort of text is
The learners are told the words that will be part of questions and/or answers, and they will try to guess the question will be and find the answer
Learners are divided into small groups, they create questions based on the passage, and exchange them with other groups to answer them
If the passage is long, it is divided into parts, the students get divided into groups and make some questions for their designed part
Standardized Reading Procedures
There are several examples of a range of techniques and strategies which are put together in an an approach that is given its own name.
Reciprocal teaching
Concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI)
Standard reading exercise
The learners are taught a series of questions to ask that can be used with any text
Training and use of four strategies that could be applied paragraph by paragraph to the text
Prediction of the content of the paragraph before reading it
Making questions focusing on the main idea of the paragraph
Summarizing what has just been read
Seeking clarification on difficult points in the paragraph
Systematic explicit instructions in the six strategies
Summarizing
Organizing graphically
Searching for Information
Structuring stories
Questioning
Activating background knowledge
Vocabulary
Makes up only a small portion of the vocabulary development program, but it can be used with intensive reading following three main principles
Low frequency words are best ignored or dealt with quickly
Vocabulary learning strategies of guessing from context, analyzing words using word parts and dictionary use deserve repeated attention over a long period of time, they can be used in both high frequency and low frequency words
High frequency words deserve sustained attention
Pre-teach a small amount of vocabulary from the passage before reading it
Put the word in an exercise after the text
Spend time on a word during the reading looking at several aspects of its form, meaning and use
Make a glossary before the learners read the text
Quickly give the meaning of the word by using a translation, picture, demonstration or L2 definition
Replace the word in the text with a more useful high frequency word
Ignore the word
Make a glossary beforehand so they know their meaning and spend less time on them
Help learners use context clues to guess the meaning of the word
Help learners use a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word and gather extra information about it
Help learners break a word into parts and relate the meaning of its part to the meaning of the word
Grammar features in the text
Grammar is expected in a language course, focusing in grammar features during intensive reading provides good opportunity to satisfy this expectation. The following principles should guide attention to grammar in intensive reading
Low frequency grammatical features are best given attention as part of strategies dealing with complicated grammatical features
Strategies based on grammar
High frequency grammar items deserve sustained attention
They tend to be formally simple, the shorter a grammatical feature is, the more frequent it is likely to be
Subordinate clauses, coordination and complicated noun groups are examples of such features
What does what?
Coordination
Part of speech
Simplifying noun groups
The teaches chooses words from the passage and writes them with their line numbers on a blackboard, the learners find each word in the passage and say their function
Knowing their function has three values
It makes searching the word in a dictionary easier
If a sentence is difficult to understand, the learners might be applying the wrong meaning or function to one or more words
When guessing the meaning of the word, knowing its function will make sure that the meaning guessed is has the same function
Makes the learner look for the noun-verb relationship that are often not clearly seen because of the word order of a passage, this can often be a good substitute for comprehension questions
Involves simplifying sentences
When there is and/or in a sentence, there are two parts of it that are similar that can be related to some common part of the sentence.
Similar to the coordination, it involves looking for the essence of a sentence
Noun groups containing items following the headword of the group add considerably to the difficulty of a sentence
Sentence Simplification Strategy
By combining reference words, coordination, simplifying noun groups and what does what, learners can simplify sentences that seem too complicated to understand, this strategy has four steps
Step 2- Rewrite the sentence as two or more sentences by removing and, but or or
Step 3- Find the nouns and remove the items following the nouns which are part of each noun group
Step 1- Find the reference words and find what they refer to
Step 4- Do the What does what? exercise with the verbs to make sure their subjects and objects are known
Cohesive devices
They occur in every test, so learning from one text should readily transfer the message of the text at a level beyond the sentence level, cohesion involves the devices of the following concepts
Comparison
Conjunction Relationships
Ellipsis
Lexical Cohesion
Reference words and Substitutes
Reference words includes "he, she, his, her, this, that, these, those, it, its, which" and substitutes consists of "so, one(s), the same, not", this allows the learner to substitute a word and crosschecking with the reference words, the substitution word should make sense in the phrase, allowing them to avoid repetition of a word
Occurs when something which is structurally necessary is left unsaid, but is usually recoverable from a previous part of the passage, it helps learners to make sense of sentence by giving them practice in recovering the missing parts of a text
Words used in comparison includes "same, similar, identical, equal, different, other, additional, else, likewise, so, more, fewer, less", adjectives or adverbs + er. Comparison helps learners understand the passage by helping them to see what is being compared
Relate sentences or parts of sentences to each other, the words used includes "and, namely, but, in spite of this", knowing about conjunction relationships has five useful effects
It helps in finding the meaning of words in context
It is important in finding the main idea in a paragraph
Helps the learners to see how ideas in a passage are related to each other and to discover the effect of a statement on other parts of the text
It helps in learning new connectives
It helps in predicting what will come in a passage
Distinguish repetition, synonyms, near synonyms, superordinates and general words, these are all used to refer exactly the same item in the passage
It is important for the reader to realize that a change in the noun used does not necessarily mean a change in the person being referred to
Genre features
Intensive reading is a good opportunity for making learners aware of how the various vocabulary, grammatical, cohesive, formatting, and ideas content aspects of a text work together to achieve the communicative purpose of the text
A useful introduction activity to this is where the learners use the topic and first sentence to predict what a text will be about.
Handling the Exercise
The role of teaching exercises
The exercises described in this map do not require an specially constructed or adapted text, they can be applied to any text that the teacher has or texts that the learners use in their study of other subjects, and they do not require a large amount of preparation.
The focus of the activities described in this map it's that they are language-focused learning activities that teach rather than just provide practice, which are used in the belief that through such teaching, learning will be faster and more sure.
Ricardo Alejandro Salinas Moya
1839661
Procesos de Lectura y Redacción en lenguas extranjeras
Mtra. Adriana Elizabeth Rodríguez Althon
10/31/2021