Hey everyone,
This week I've been reading a lot about reading. I've been reminded of all of the subskills involved and what "good readers" do while negotiating a text. They definitely are not circling words and translating. Reading to answer questions kills the writer's original purpose.
Reading our L1 is so easy that we sometimes forget the complex processing skills are involved and what strategies we use to comprehend a text. All of you are good readers, but do you ever consider how to pass along your skills to your students? I'm guilty of not taking the time to teach my students how to actually process a text using these strategies (inferring, questioning, predicting, personalizing, visualizing, summarizing, etc). Sometimes our students mistakenly consider L2 reading as "finding answers" or "filling out workbooks." That is in direct conflict with the reasons people write. People write to convey ideas, not to be a measure of grammar skill or a source of comprehension questions.
Here are a few articles to help give you some alternative ideas about teaching reading.
The first is an overview of several frameworks for instruction. I like this article because it is easy to read, full of examples, and hits a lot of popular reading tactics.
Comprehension Frameworks
This next one lays out the START framework in detail. I like START because it is user-friendly, and it seems pretty easy to implement in any class that allows time reading instruction.
START
This last one is a bit more unconventional. This is based on Reader Transaction Theory, which assumes that readers interact with the text to construct their own meaning. This may be somewhat more difficult to implement because the focus shifts from accuracy to meaning-making. It more closely mimics actual reading, but good luck telling that to your boss or students' parents. Sigh...in a perfect world...
A Transaction Approach
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