Teaching and Assessing Reading summary

Research on Reading on second language

1. Bottom up and top-down processing

- bottom up (micro skills) = Recognition & interpretation of words, word classes,
patterns, rules, etc.
-top-down (macro skills)
-Recognition of rhetorical forms and communicative functions
-Using background knowledge to make inferences
-Scanning and skimming, guessing meaning of words from context, activating relevant
schemata

2. Schema theory and background knowledge

3. The role of affect and nurture
4. The power of extensive reading
5. Adult literacy training-

Type of written language

- Non-fiction
- Letters
- Labels
- Signs
- Messages
- Theses
- Newspaper and etc.

Characteristics of written language

1. Permanence
2. Processing time
3. Distance
4. Orthography
5. Complexity
6. Vocabulary
7. Formality
Strategies for reading comprehension

1. Identify the purpose in reading

2. Use graphic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (especially for beginning
level learners)
3. Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension (for
intermediate to advanced levels)
4. Skim the text for main ideas-
5. Scan the text for specific information -
6. Use semantic mapping or clustering
7. Guess when you aren’t certain
8. Analyze vocabulary
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship

Types of Classroom reading performance

1. Oral and silent reading

Advantages:
- serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills
- double as a pronunciation check and
- serve to add some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short
segment of a reading passage.

Disadvantages:

- Oral reading is not very authentic language activity.

- While one student is reading, others can easily lose attention (or by silently rehearsing
the next paragraph!)
- It may have the outward appearance oof student participation when in reality it is mere
recitation.

2. Intensive and extensive reading - Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail
with specific learning aims and tasks. It can be compared with extensive reading, which
involves learners reading texts for enjoyment and to develop general reading skills.
Principles for designing interactive reading

1. In an interactive curriculum make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of
specific instruction in reading skills
2. Use techniques that are intrinsically
3. Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts
4. Encourage the development of reading strategies
5. Include both bottom-up and top-down technique
6. Follow-up “SQ3R” sequence (survey, read, recite & review)
7. Subdivide your techniques into pre-reading during-reading and after reading phases.
8. Build in some evaluate aspect to your techniques

Types (Genres) of Reading

1. Academic Reading
General interest articles (in magazines, newspaper, etc.)
Technical reports (e.g., lab reports), professional journal articles
Reference material (dictionaries, etc.)
Textbooks, theses
Essays, papers
Test directions
Editorials and opinion writing

2. Job related reading

Messages (e.g., phone messages)
Letter/emails
Memos (e.g., interoffice)
Reports (e.g., job evaluation, project reports)
Schedules, labels, signs, announcement)
Forms, application, questionnaires
Financial documents (bills, invoices etc.)
Directories (telephone, office, etc.)
Manuals, directions

3. Personal reading
Newspaper and magazines
Letters, emails, greeting cards, invitation
Messages, notes, lists
Schedules (train, bus, plane, etc.)
Recipes, menus, maps, calendars
Advertisements (commercials, want ads)
Novels, short stories, jokes, drama, poetry
Financial documents (e.g., checks, tax forms, loan application)
Forms, questionnaires, medical reports, immigration documents
Comic strips, cartoons

Microskills for Reading Comprehension

1. Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic patterns
of English.
2. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
3. Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.
4. Recognize a core words, and interpret word order patterns and their
significance.
5. Recognize grammatical words classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g.,)
tense agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules and elliptical forms.
6. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
grammatical forms.
7. Recognize cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signaling
the relationship between and among clauses.
Macroskills for Reading Comprehension
8. Recognize the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance
for interpretation.
9. Recognize the communicative functions of written texts, according to form
and purpose
10. Infer context that is not explicit by using background knowledge
11. From describe events, ideas, etc., infer links and connections between
events, deduce cause and effects, and detect such relations as main idea,
supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and
exemplification.
12. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
13. Detect culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the
appropriate cultural schemata.
14. Develop and use a battery of reading strategies, such as scanning and
skimming, detecting discourse makers, guessing the meaning of words
from context, and activating schema for the interpretation of texts.

Principal strategies for reading a text

1. Identify your purpose in reading a text.
2. Apply spelling rules and conventions for bottom-up decoding
 3. Use lexical analysis (prefixes, roots, suffixes, etc.) to determine meaning
4. Guess at meaning (of words, idioms, etc.) when you aren’t certain.
5. Skim the text for the gist and for main ideas.
6. Scan the texts for specific information (names, dates, key words).
7. Use silent reading techniques for rapid processing.
8. Use marginal notes, outlines, charts or semantic maps for understanding
and retaining information.
9. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
10. Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship.

Types of Reading

1. Perceptive – involves attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse:

letters, words, punctuation, and other graphemic symbols.

2. Selective – this category is largely an artifact of assessment formats. Ascertain reader’s

reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of languages within a
very short stretch of language.

3. Interactive – included in this reading types are stretches of language of several

paragraphs of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the reader must, in a
psycholinguistic sense.

4. Extensive – this reading applies to texts of more than a page, up to and including
professional articles, essays, technical reports, short stories, and books. Reading
research also referred as “extensive reading” as longer stretches of discourse, such as
long articles and books that are usually read outside a classroom hour.