Teaching Reading.

This means that the readers’ prior knowledge, which implies a different culture, customs and understanding for each individual, is more significant than the author’s text. Therefore, in this situation, if the teacher has a multicultural class of students, he has a greater responsibility for the learners. According to Alderson and Urquhart Teaching reading, could involve ‘investigation and an increase of monitoring characteristics’ especially the exploration of the personal process of reading. Therefore we can raise the question, ‘what makes a good teacher?’ According to the comments from other students a good teacher is someone who makes lessons interesting, who loves his job, who has a broad knowledge, who has a good personality, affinity, is honest, and an expert in his area, etc. However, apart from all these skills, there is one more thing that makes a good teacher: while teaching reading skills, he must help his foreign language students to understand the author’s text.

 

 

Similar to the previous idea, the relationship between the text and the reader varies in many situations. In many cases this relationship depends on the chosen text and how satisfactorily embraced the readers’ potential is. Problems can occur for students, when they are faced with unfamiliar language and an uninteresting topic. This could bring a negative transfer to the reader from the text. However, the role of the reader is an attempt to obtain the meaning that the author has endeavoured to communicate. This essentially depends on the individual students’ capacity and willingness to point the finger at their own learning. The problem can be solved, firstly by gaining useful advice from the teacher, and secondly by being active in the learning process. According to Holland, each reader has an active part in constructing his own meaning. This is a result of the experience and cultural background of the individual learner, which has been developed during his lifetime, especially by learning grammar, structure and form.  These factors have an immense impact on the reading of any text. Thus the text does not just have one simple meaning, but potentially several different ones. Here it needs to be stressed that students with similar cultural backgrounds may understand texts in a similar way, but in additional, there may be parallels in the problems encountered. This means that, because learner’s life style, personality and character changes, this could lead to a change of his opinion, and with this to a change of the understanding of the same text. Thus, a different meaning could be derived from a text every time it is read.

 

 The text is a doubtful issue for many researchers. Some Text theories show that a text can only have one meaning. According to Gough the essence of the text is reached when the message successfully is synchronized between the text author and the reader, or “the text of efficient reading is whether the meaning extracted is the same as that the author originally attempt to communicate”. On the other hand, some researches have suggested that text is simply the design plan or model in the technical sense of the word, which has a template rather than contemplates character. This theory confirmed by Bleich suggests that a: ‘text doesn’t have any meaning if separated from the reader’. It can be said that meaning is always relative and influenced by the reader.

Reading as well as listening belongs to the receptive skills. In order to overcome barriers to successful reading, the learner has to be introduced to the four main sub-skills of reading, which are; skimming, scanning, extensive and intensive reading. In the second part of this essay the problems and issues that come up when a L2 learner approaches reading, shall be presented.

Different tasks require different strategies and skills from the learner. For example, reading one’s favourite book or poem is not the same as reading a newspaper or looking for someone’s number in the telephone directory.  The Text (before setting out the four main sub-skills) has to be presented by the teacher in a kind of pre-task. Students need to be engaged, the teacher should help them to ‘reactivate the passive pre-existing knowledge’ and motivate the students by asking questions linked to the text and the topic.

 Reading for general understanding

Skimming involves a quick look at the text to gain a basic understanding of it.  It is the first attempt for the reader to get the gist of the text, a general comprehension. Thus a teacher could advise the L2 learner to skim read without ceasing, and not worry about the details and unknown words. It is not recommended to stop at every word and analyse each detail, but only note the important points. This reading strategy is inevitably linked with scanning and preparation for plunging into detailed tasks.

 

Reading for specific information or scanning is the second main reading task. Thus, students are advised to ignore the majority of information and search for specific detail. This can be used when one briefly goes through a film review in order to quickly find the name of the director.  

 

Extensive reading is the favourite part of the L2 learner’s experience. According to Davis:

“The classroom will be poorer for the lack of the extensive reading programme and will be unable to promote its students ‘language development’ in all aspects as effectively as if such a programme were present”.  

In other words, extensive reading means ‘free reading’, the student is allowed to choose books linked with particular subject interests, topics and issues related to it. Because of this free choice the role of the teacher is not free too, and is not enough just to say ‘read a lot’.  In this case the teacher, firstly, should provide a program that offers a wide selection of books. Secondly, these books should be predicted and coincide with the student’s level of English and ‘easy going’ understandable language, but not struggle with every word and phrase. Thirdly, the teacher has to set up a library or a borrowing system among the students, in order to reduce their expenses and exchange their reading material. Afterwards, the teacher has to promote those books as a valid occupation and convince his readers of their benefits. Finally, after having persuaded the students, he has to consolidate and help with their choice of genre and set up time for reading. The method of feedback has to be explained to the learners by asking them to keep a weekly diary or learner journal that can be used as revision of each book read.  As a result, the class can vote for the most popular book.  The teacher’s role is crucial, as highlighted above. This also applies to the next paragraph where the teacher’s role in intensive reading is slightly different and requires more organisation and responsibility.

 

Intensive reading, in contrast with extensive, is less flexible with a more narrow choice and does not necessarily provide pleasure. This is a teacher chosen and directed device. Hereafter in comparison with the former atmosphere extensive reading provides, it is far tenser. Therefore the tale of the teacher in his lesson plan has to be more precise, clear and timed. In order to develop this plan, we are going to withdraw four main points in the teacher’s role such as: organiser, observer and feedback. Under organising, Harmer suggested that the teacher has to explain the purpose and propose clear interest and instruction how to achieve it. As observer, the teacher has to create a silent atmosphere without interrupting the students in their given task even though, appeal may come to him to up grade students with extra information or instruction.  Feed back - this is the time when the teacher is involved in the essential role to check that students have completed the task successfully. The most common checking procedure is when students, in pairs compare their answers and exchange their opinions.

 

In conclusion, the discussion of Teaching Reading has lead us to examine several crucial theories such as trans-active and in comparison with the interactive theory. Several problems that students encounter have been highlighted, namely, difficulties in understanding texts, the different cultural experience that they bring to their learning and to texts read, and problems with the development of appropriate sub-skills i.e. skimming, scanning etc. The role of the teacher, we have engaged in most of the theories as an advisor and helpful guide in solving the possible problems of L2 student’s acquisition process. An effective teacher assists resolution of problems that students encounter in practical and academic ways.  Examples given include setting up of a library or book borrowing scheme, planning and resourcing appropriate texts for the certain sub-skill and reading level of each student. Thus, from above it can be concluded that teacher’s have tremendous impact on L2 learning process.

Bibliography:

Alderson, J, C & A, H. Urquhart (1984) Reading in the Foreign Language Longman Group Limited, New York  

 Cairney, T.H. (1990 p: 3) Teaching Reading Comprehension   Philadelphia, Open University Press

Cosh, J. (2002/3) Teaching English as a Foreign Language APU School for Languages & Modern Sciences, Cambridge

Davis, C. (1995 p: 335) Extensive Reading an Expensive Extravagance in Harmer, J. (2001 p: 204) The Practice of English Language Teaching Pearson Education Limited, China

Harmer, J. (2001) The Practice of English Language Teaching Pearson Education Limited, China

---