Last Wednesday I delivered my first input session, which was on teaching reading. I think it went well. 😊
- Great timing.
- A range of interaction modes. Chatbox, turn on your mic, breakout rooms. Chatbox and breakout rooms worked great; turn on your mic, not so much. Only 2 candidates volunteered to talk/share.
- The structure was : 1)Eliciting beliefs about reading. I used the photo below from Gabriel Diaz Maggioli’s brilliant IATEFL 2022 plenary. 2)Interactive lecture with tasks, questions and breakout rooms (analysis, issues, suggestions). 3) Reflecting on any changes of beliefs at the end. It was interesting to hear transitions at this stage. 4)Takeaways and Q&A.
These pictures from Nuttall’s book are my favourite metaphor for top-down and bottom-up processing:
And these are some quotes I found interesting and wanted to share with you:
Goodman has described reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (1967) in
Carrell and Eisterhold (1983)
which the “reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display” (1971:135).
More information is contributed by the reader than by the print on the page.
Carrell and Eisterhold (1983)
..any text, either spoken or written, does not by itself carry meaning. Rather, according to schema theory, a text only provides directions for listeners or readers as to how they should retrieve or construct meaning from their own, previously acquired knowledge.
Carrell and Eisterhold (1983)
.. a text does not contain a meaning which is waiting to be discovered by a reader. Meaning is only realized in the interaction between the text and the reader, the text has “meaning potential” (Halliday, 1979; Widdowson, 1979).
Liu (2010)
What about you?
Do you like teaching reading? Why/why not? How do you teach it? What books, quotes and metaphors have you found useful? Let me know in the comments!
You can also read Tiago Bueno’s blogpost on teaching reading and download his DELTA background essay here.
References
Carrell, P.L. and Eisterhold, J.C. (1988) “Schema theory and ESL reading pedagogy,” Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading, pp. 73–92. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139524513.010
Diaz Maggioli, G. (2022) IATEFL Belfast Plenary: Reading the world and the word.
Liu, F. (2010) “A short analysis of the nature of reading,” English Language Teaching, 3(3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v3n3p152.
Wasilewski, J. (2009) “Contemporary Understanding of the Reading Process and Reading Strategies Used by ESOL Learners While Reading a Written Discourse ,” Humanising Language Teaching.
The TEFL Zone 
Even as an experienced teacher, I think many of my reading lessons are often ineffective.
I do feel that, most times, I’m testing learners, even if I’m teaching them strategies on how to develop certain subskills and perform tasks, mostly because performing a certain task means basically helping them find the answers I expect them to find. So, at the end of the day, I’m testing if they can spot the answer to a given (type of) question.
Whenever I’m able to, I try to devise tasks that really emulate reading we do in our lives (mainly reading for pleasure): reading a given text and reporting what it is about to some kind of depth, depending on their level, without specific and limited comprehension questions.
As a teacher, I still wanna be able to really balance testing and teaching in receptive skills! I believe there’s a looooong way to go (and I do feel that I am not the only one facing this issue).
Btw: very happy for you and your new position! 😍
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Thank you so much, Bruno! 😍 I hope you’re doing well too!
I don’t think your lessons are ineffective. I think this balance that you mention is very important. Depending on the context, students have a range of expectations. Yours probably expect this comprehension-test approach, so if you’re adopting it, you’re meeting these expectations. If you’re also slowly trying to raise awareness of different reading approaches, even better! One step at a time!
Btw, I think I do the same thing. I go for the 50-50 approach! 😁
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This is brilliant!
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Thank you so much, Katy! It took me three weeks to plan this session, but I think it went well 😅
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Do you like teaching Reading? Why/Why not?
I don’t believe I have any love or hate relationship 🤔 with teaching reading though it is something I need to improve a lot on. The reason being most of my ESP learners are young working adults who weren’t raised on reading for pleasure; you could partially blame social media. Given the increasing influence of short-form videos, my primary struggle is to be able to generate curiosity and affinity towards long-form reading content. To be honest, now that I am reflecting and writing this response, I realise I ought to design a lesson to showcase the joy of reading.
How do you teach it?
As far as I am concerned, reading and writing have a strong inter-dependency. I often tell my IELTS learners, ‘To be an effective reader, you should get into the shoes of the writer.’ I indulge them in a meta-analysis of a text. We usually unpack a text through a series of questions;
– How do you think the writer decided on the number of paragraphs?
– How is each paragraph divided?
– How did the writer decide the order of the paragraphs?
– Is the writer stating facts or personal views or common views or a mix of all?
– Why did the writer choose ‘feel’ over ‘think’ or ‘intuition’ over ‘gut feeling’, etc.?
– What do you think the writer intends to achieve?
– What are your take-aways from the text? (to bring home the Carrell & Eisterhold quote) 😎
– Does the platform influence the way we write?
– If you were to write on the same topic, how different would your text be?
For beginner and elementary stage learners, one of the primary activities I indulge them in is listening and reading simultaneously. It is important for them to know how words sound (grapheme and phoneme links) in order to be able to read the words in their head.
Gianfranco Conti’s narrow reading (two or three similar texts with minor variations) is another highly effective way to improve reading speed and comprehension for (basic user) learners . I am not sure if it was Sandy Millin or someone else I had read, it is important we extract as much juice as we can from one single text through varied activities. In my opinion, this eventually leads learners to become better writers too.
However, Rachel, the challenge I am currently facing is to find reading material which has a perfect balance of relevance and comprehensibility (level of linguistic difficulty) for young working professionals to whom reading long-form texts is something their ancestors did. 😅
What books, quotes and metaphors have you found useful?
1. Reading is an individual activity.
2. For a text to be truly readable (i.e. without starting to become laborious), students must understand 98 words in a text with 100 different ones, 49 words in a text with 50, and pretty much every word in a text of 25 (Hsueh-Chao & Nation, 2000).
Thank you, Rachel.
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Thanks for this, Girish. You ask some good questions. And I totally agree about finding reading material. I can’t access the slideshare, unfortunately 😦
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