Step 1 provides students with an opportunity ‘to verbalise what they know about the topics, thereby leading them to integrate their prior knowledge with the new knowledge that they will be encounter later on in their reading’ (Dole et.al., 1991: pp.144). In addition, the teacher can check whether students have the related cultural knowledge about the topic. Then, teacher generally explains the background information about the most important parts of the text that students need for comprehending the upcoming reading in step 2. Apparently, step 3 could be an excellent measure for students to recognise the macrostructure of the text independently. According to Aebersold and Field Model (1997), student practise building the background knowledge of the text by using ‘top-down and bottom-up strategies’ at this point. Reading will, in fact, be easier because students know the direction of the reading and what concepts are important and should be especially attended to.
Next, Aebersold and Field (1997) stated that during-reading activity is important in facilitating whole-text comprehension. Although this stage is also mainly concerned with students’ immediate understanding of the text, long term objectives can also be considered. Students will practise on methods of ‘building’ and ‘monitoring comprehension’ as well as ‘adjusting strategies’ (Aebersold and Field, 1997: pp.96) that will aid in long term development as readers.
The authentic questions in Step 4 help in focussing students’ attention on relevant schemata so that they are motivated to read the text. Then, the purpose of doing Step 5 is to encourage students to engage with and process the new words by themselves. As Hedge (2000) claimed, research has shown that students will be more likely to retain new lexical items if more processing occurs. Both the steps are designed to build up students’ comprehension.
Then, students will need the second reading to process information at the sentence level. After that, selective underlining that will be utilised in step 6 can help students ‘to actively interact with the text, to monitor comprehension and to create a record for future review’ (Shih, 1992: pp.302). Furthermore, students can learn strategies for identifying key words (e.g., words in the title, section headings and topic sentences). In fact, the teacher’s reminder will encourage students employing strategies consciously and this could also help to achieve long term goal when students can use strategies automatically ultimately. Later, step 7 will be carried out because most of the paragraphs in the text are rather short and they do not exactly convey the main ideas on their own. And, self-questioning is also a constructive strategy that students have to learn to make sure they can think about the relationship consciously by making connections between the ideas (Shih, 1992). Also, recognising transition words makes students consciously evaluate the importance of different pieces of information and they can actively monitor their own comprehension. They will learn how to identify the ways sentences fit and contribute to the larger meaning of the text in step 7.
During step 8, attention will be focused on discussion of how students got their answer if they have got their predictions correct. In a way, this step will assist students to monitor their own comprehension and to adjust the strategies if their expectations are not being met. In contrary, the focus will be put on reading strategies of determining the main ideas. At the end, monitor comprehension will be converted to building comprehension if students discover their hypotheses are right (Aebersold and Field, 1997).
Lastly, the discussion in post-reading phase helps students to remember newly learned information as it allows students to rehearse and provides them a framework for organising what they already know and the information they are asked to learn. Effective cognitive thinking skill will also be developed and this leads to long term development of readers. Moreover, constructing mind map helps to promote students’ comprehension, retention and retrieval of ideas (Sinatra et.al.,1986; cited in Shih, 1992) .
In conclusion, Aebersold and Field’s model provide the basis for literacy teaching which combines long and short-term goals. By adopting the procedure suggested by these authors, students are exposed to multiple activities which enable them to practise reading strategies.
Bibliography
Aebersold, J. (1997). Reading the text. In: From reader to reading teacher:
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Dole, J.A., Valencia, S.W., Greer, E.A., Wardrop, J.L.. (1991). Effects of Two
Types of Prereading Instruction on the Comprehension of Narrative and
Expository Text. Reading Research Quarterly. 26 (2), p.142-159.
Hedge, T (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Shih, M. (1992). Beyond Comprehension Exercises in the ESL Academic
Reading Class. TESOL Quarterly. 26 (2), p.289-318.