TEACHING READING SKILLS

READING COMPREHENSION TECHNIQUES AND STRATEGIES

Techniques for beginner to intermediate students

By Erika Narez

Reading comprehension is associated with a developing in the overall language proficiency, as learners learn and acquire new vocabulary, language structures, paragraphs’ features and culture. This skill should be linked with others in an interactive set of activities carried to increase language awareness.

Learners always benefit with the use of strategies when they read, to be more effective readers, teachers are responsible to teach such strategies and use the correct techniques according to their level, age and background knowledge and culture.

Most of my students are in a beginning level, just some of them have reach a low intermediate level; mainly because the time in front of the group is not enough, the curriculum is heavy in content-based and there is always loss of time because of other activities of the institution. Classes take place in big and bright classrooms with an average of thirty students between fourteen and nineteen years old. I teach each group three hours per week. They are in the school eight hours with a break of thirty minutes; so they are really tired in the last hours; in these cases I must be very careful with the kind of activities I assign to them. Interesting and motivating activities are recommended.

The following techniques and strategies have been collected from some of my colleagues and classmates that have been used them as well as the ones I have been using according to my teaching situation. I have divided these techniques in terms of before, during and after reading with the techniques I consider more appropriate for my students.

As we discussed in the previous forum it is important to use techniques such as previewing, skimming and scanning; these allow the learner to get familiar with the text. (Richards 2001). By predicting, the learners get an idea of what they are going to read, their schemata is activated and therefore they can use their background knowledge to understand the text. (Nutall 2000). By skimming the reader do a quick search to prove if the prediction was correct.

We also agreed that one of the main difficulties our students present is the lack of vocabulary; for this is very useful to present vocabulary games, this way learners are able to acquire indispensable vocabulary first and the rest will be tried to infer from context. Besides, the fact that they can understand longer texts does not mean that they will understand every little item of vocabulary. ‘’The ability of inferring meaning from the context is required to not be dependent of the meaning of words’’. (Gretel 1996).

During reading, students will be asked comprehension questions to check understanding. They also will be assigned to read a different part of the text to later report what they read. I have chosen the technique of comparing their personalities with the character as I have seen that this increases their motivation and also they work on the top down processes; finally by classifying different kinds of words or structures, they work with the bottom up processes. Richard (2001) pp.314 stated that in our craze for communicative, authentic language activity in the classroom, we sometimes forget that learners can indeed benefit from studying the fundamentals.

The best techniques to do after reading for me are to write or answer questions from the reading, write the title and describe the characters. With these techniques, students process writing, skim, scan, depending on the questions, they infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge and distinguish between literal and implied meaning.

TECHNIQUE	PROCEDURE	STRATEGIES
Before reading
Predict	Teaches ask students to look at the front page and guess what the book is about. As well as checking the chapter’s titles.	Previewing, predicting.
Skim	Students skim the first chapter to see what the main idea is. To facilitate it teacher can give three options.	Skim the text for main ideas.
Look for the word	In a competition game grouping in teams of three or pairs, students need to find the word given by the teacher, as quickly as possible, who find it first gets a point. At the end the team with more points wins.	Scan the text for specific information.
Vocabulary games	Teacher selects important words to teach before reading, present them to the students with pictures and do choral drills. Students play a guessing game, one student describe one of the words to see who can guess it. Another option is to mimic the word to guess what it is.	Create an image to relate it to the word. Choral drills.
During reading
Read and report	Students report to the class what they read with their own words. This can be done with a short piece of writing or with a complete book for extensive reading.	Use efficient silent reading techniques for comprehension.
Ask comprehension questions	Students are asked comprehension questions by the teacher at the end of each page of chapter if they are short.	Retrieve information read and report it.
Compare student’s personalities with the characteres	Students do an analysis of the character’s personalities and compare with their own personalities. Answer questions as: What characters are you most like? What characteristics of this character do you feel more identified with?	Top down processing
Classify things	Students classify words such as: verbs, adjectives and nouns. They will extract ideas expressed in present, past or future tense. Another option is to classify functions such as: apologizing, complaining, giving advice, offering help, asking for information. Students draw or complete a chart to classify.	Bottom up processing Distinguish between language functions
After reading
Write and answer questions from the reading	Students answer a comprehensive questionnaire in written form. Students elaborate their own questions in teams and give their questions to other team to answer.	Process information of the written code.
Write a title	Students write the title they think is the most appropriate for the reading.	Process written information. Summarize important information. Distinguish main ideas.
Write a description of the characteres	Students write a description of the main characteres, physically and personality.	Top down processing.

Chart 1. Techniques and strategies to use with beginning students.

The techniques and activities describe above are just an example of many variations we can make to each one. It will depend also of the students’ mood at the moment if we decide to assign the activity just as we planned or maybe smooth it a little bit or by the contrary raising the dynamisms of the same.

We as teachers may surmise what to do in the moment based on our previous experiences. We need to be careful not to surpass the learner’s abilities with our activities; they can feel frustrated and lose motivation. However, the level should not be low or very easy. Many learners are able to surmount difficulties if they have a clear purpose to do it.

REFERENCES:

· H. Douglas Brown. Teaching by Principles. An interactive approach to Language Pedagogy. 2^nd Edition. Longman. 2001. pgs. 298-316.

· Christine Nutall. Teaching Reading skills in a Foreign Language. 2000. Heinle & Heinle Pgs. 1-19.

· Franҫoise Grellet. Developing Reading Skills. Cambridge Language Teaching Library. 1996. pgs. 3-12.

· Wallace. Language Teaching. A scheme for teacher education. Oxford. 1992. pgs. 3-6, 14-18.

· Farrel, Thomas. Teaching Reading to English Language Learners. A reflective guide. Corwin. 2009. pgs. 13-33.

· Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Retrieved: September 24th, 2010. http://www.sdkrashen.com/Principles_and_Practice/index.html

· http://www.seduca2.uaemex.mx/sistemas/Foro/arbol_foro2.php?iCveForo=58379&iForPdr=58379&iCveAct=23783&iTpoAct=4&sNav=Exp&sesComunidad=4584&equip=0