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Materials for Developing Reading Skills

Presentation · December 2019

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36188.72326

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Hitomi Masuhara Zahra Farajnezhad

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 11 December 2019
Materials for Developing
Reading Skills
Hitomi Masuhara

Present by Zahra Farajnezhad

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• Research results show that reading is a slow and laborious decoding process which causes poor
comprehension and low self esteem.
• Fluent Reader (Pang,2008):
- Vocabulary size of 10000to 100000
- Awareness of text type and discourse organization
- Prior knowledge in L1 skills
- Good at monitoring the comprehension process and making conscious use of strategies effectively

• Pang (2008) investigates the studies on L2 fluent and less fluent reader characteristics in,
focusing on 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability, cognitive ability and
metacognitive strategic competence.
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• Grabe (2009) identified four components of L2 reading fluency: 1) automaticity, 2)
accuracy, 3) reading rate and 4) prosodic structuring.
• fluent reading should not only mean rapid and automatic processing
but also accurate
and appropriate assignment of meaning performed at an optimal reading rate.

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1. The reading comprehension-based approaches
2. The language-based approaches
3. The skill/strategy-based approaches
4. The schema-based approaches

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• Rereading passages include vocabulary and comprehension test
• Vallace(2011):
Comprehension is in the form of presentation of text followed by post reading questions on the
text. E.g.. Headway series
Tests: true/false, gap filling, matching, question and answer
Williams and Moran (1989) identified three possible aims:
a. Check comprehension
b. Facilitate comprehension
c. Ensure that the learner reads the text

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 Criticisms
• 1. If the learners fail to respond appropriately then it shows there is a problem . But
what is the nature of the problem?
• 2. Comprehension questions come after learners have read the text.
*underlying assumption of the Comprehension-Based Approach :
• Text has only one meaning – one intended by the writer
Widdowson(1979):
• Text has potential for meaning which will vary from reader to reader depending upon
a multitudes of factors.

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 Urquhart(1987):
✓ It is impossible even for L1 proficient readers to agree completely on the meaning of
a text due to individuals’ experiences
✓ Reader achieves interpretation rather than comprehension
✓ His findings accord with the finding of Mental Representational cognitive
psychology and neuroscience
 Mental Representation:
• Corresponds to the meaning of the text constructed in the reader’s mind
• Depends on connecting the information gained through decoded linguistic data with
the knowledge already exists in the reader’s mind
• Each individual's knowledge is the result of conceptual reformulation through
experiences. E.g., Dog

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3. Reading comprehension Questions immediately follow a text to signal to the
learner that they should be able to achieve accurate comprehension straight away.
4. The real issue: when/why we might need to approximate our meaning closely
to that intended by the writer.

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 Recent literature on reading: vital importance of nurturing learners’
automatic language processing ability to facilitate successful reading.
• Vocabulary + grammar exercises
 pre-reading vocabulary activities
• reading sections start with vocabulary activities related to the texts
• short texts for mainly teaching grammar

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❑ 1950s-60s:
 once learners acquired the habit of language use through learning grammar
and lexis, the learner become a fluent reader
• Reading being treated as a means of language practice through the use of
simplified texts and graded readers
❑ Readability studies in 1960s:
• word difficulty + sentence length= plausible indices for predicting text
accessibility
 Simple English is written in short easy sentences with not too many long
words.
❑ 1980s- present

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 Criticisms
1. Understanding the linguistic meaning of a text doesn’t equal understanding the textual
meaning.
2. Active role of reader important in reading process (use of prior knowledge and
metacognitive strategies)

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 Supports

❑ Eye movement studies

• It negates the claim that skillful readers use contextual guidance to preselect
the meanings of the words.
• ( meaning is selected while the language is being processed.
❑ Regained support in the claim that the learners need general language ability
and automatic word recognition.
❑ Verbal protocol: vocabulary knowledge is of primary importance in
reading.

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❑Read fluently: the learners need general language ability and automatic word recognition.

❑Vocabulary studies indicate that fluent reading requires:

a) fast and automatic word identification;
b) extensive knowledge of the lexicon;
c) the ability to attribute the most appropriate meanings to lexical items in relation to their
context and co-text.

 Many course books use the Presentation, Practice, Production Approach (PPP) to
teaching grammar and vocabulary and to make use of reading texts for language teaching
(Tomlinson and Masuhara, 2013). The current PPP Approach combines the teaching of formal grammar
with communication activities. Grammar structures or rules are first presented. Then they are
practised in a controlled manner. Finally, freer communicative activities (involving reading)
follow.

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 The reasons why we learn to read in L1 may be attributed to obtaining nonlinguistic
outcomes:
o We read for getting information to suit our different purposes,
o for gaining pleasure and stimuli,
o for attaining social advancement, etc.

 L1 adults do not read a text so as to acquire extensive knowledge of hyponyms or synonyms,

to practice some syntactical structure such as reduced relative clauses or to analyze the discourse
structure of a text.

 In L2, however, reading is often taught as a means of learning language.

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 Tomlinson (2000) recommends:
➢ delaying reading at the initial stage of language learning because the learners do not yet have
enough language to read experientially.

When formal reading instruction begins at school, L1 children have more or less
established:
o Flexible and extensive aural/oral vocabularies
o Intuitive knowledge of English syntax
 preschoolers may have had opportunities for relaxed, proto-reading experiences, such as
listening to bedtime stories in which most of the vocabulary in the text is likely to be known
and the unknown can be inferred, explained either visually or verbally in interaction with a
parent or just ignored until the preschoolers’ needs and wants arise.
 In L2 reading, instruction begins simultaneously with L2 language learning. No reading
instruction per se is given but the learners are expected to read texts on the assumption that
once we learn a language system we should be able to read well.

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 The importance of automatic accessing of vocabulary has led many course books to present
pre-reading vocabulary exercises:
❑ explicit pre-teaching of vocabulary can help learners acquire or recall language knowledge;
❑ doing vocabulary work before reading can help learners to comprehend the text better.

 for L1 readers, syntax only becomes a problem when it interacts with other factors’. Such as,
to vocabulary overload or lack of background knowledge.

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❑ Skill learning Vs. Knowledge learning
 Skill learning : learner acquire the sensor, motor, and cognitive abilities necessary
for using a language in an accurate, fluent and appropriate manner.
 Knowledge learning: learn words in TL consciously and verbally
 Skill: acquired ability which has been automatized and operates largely
subconsciously.
 Strategy: conscious procedure carried out in order to solve a problem.

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 Teaching skills/strategies:
Explicit teaching of a specific skill/strategy, then some practice follows

 Successful reader:
A. Who is aware of the kinds of texts and kinds of suitable strategies
B. Who is able to monitor and control his own strategy use according to a particular purpose
of reading

 Reading is a complex operation which involves many potential strategies. Each strategy has
sub skills and sub strategies. E.g.
 Strategies for vocab:
✓ Identifyingpart of speech, analyzing morphological components, make use of any related
phrases or relative clauses in the context….
 Strategies for grammar:
✓ Discourse, related strategies, strategies solving ambiguity by inferring….
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❖ The efficacy of skills/strategy approach depends on that the conscious training will eventually
transfer to become a subconscious skill.
✓ If a person learns consciously how to platy tennis well, will he become a good tennis player?
 Perhaps if only he has enough practice!
‘strategy’ emerged in the materials  mid-1980s.
❖Readers are considered to be active agents who direct their own cognitive resources in reading.
Readers’ cognitive resources: knowledge of the reading process; use of a variety of reading
strategies (e.g. scanning for specific information).
 What the Skill/Strategy-Based Reading Approaches share in common are:
❑ In order to read effectively, readers need a range of skills and strategies;
❑ Different readers may have different reading problems;
❑ The guided practice will help learners learn necessary skills and strategies.

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❑ A theory about knowledge in the mind
✓ Ithypothesizes how knowledge is organized in the mind and how it is used in processing
new information
✓ Comprehension happens when a new experience is understood in comparison with a
stereotypical version of a similar experience held in memory.
❖ The reading process can not be explained without acknowledging the vital importance of
knowledge systems in readers’ mind.
 Pre-reading Activities:
✓ Asking learners to discuss, in pairs or in groups, the personal experience related to the theme
or the topic of the lesson
✓ Asking learners to consider statements, text titles, illustrations,…

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 Activation content information: recalling information
 Comprehension, according to schematists, happens when a new experience is understood in
comparison with a stereotypical version of a similar experience held in memory.

• Some materials tried to provide learners with a series of texts designed to achieve a critical
mass (i.e. sufficient background knowledge about a certain theme to enable readers to achieve
successful comprehension).

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 Problems:
1. Authentic texts are too complex to allow readers easily select and apply appropriate
schemata.
2. A schema is a pre-packaged system of stereotypical knowledge and such a fixed structure
may not meet the demands imposed by the ever-changing context we find in authentic
texts.
3. Schema theories do not explain well how the mind creates, destroys, and reorganizes
schemata or how schemata is retrieved from the memory during comprehension.

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 Principles:
1) Engaging affect should be the prime concern of reading materials.
2) Listening to a text before reading it helps decrease linguistic demands
and encourages learners to focus on meaning.
3) Reading comprehension means creating multidimensional mental
representation in the readers’ mind.
4) Materials should help learners experience the text first before they
draw their attention to its language

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➢ Good texts work on learners’ affect, which is vital for deep processing and creates reasons and
motivation to read on. Affect is occasionally mentioned in the literature as a peripheral factor, but
the engagement of affect (e.g. interest, attitude, emotions) should be given prime importance in
reading materials production.
 Neuroscience (i.e. the study of the central nervous systems – the study of the brain) provides evidence that emotion
casts a powerful influence on cognition, learning and memory.
➢ Emotionally charged memory makes an instant and strong impression and it stays in our memory
for a long time. In reading, the same proficient L1 reader may process the same text differently
on separate occasions depending on his/her emotional state and the interest and significance
he/she gives to the text at the time.

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 Tallal (2003): ‘. . . the brain is programmed to process the sensory world, turn that into phonological
representations and turn those into syllables, words, phrases, and ultimately allow us to develop a written
code which is the orthography or letters that go with those sounds’.

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A major difficulty for L2 learners beginning to read:
a) to decode visual stimuli,
b) chunk syntactic and semantic units,
c) extract meaning from the text and
d) integrate it with their relevant memories to create the overall meaning of the text.
A teacher can make it accessible to the learners by:
✓ taking away the cognitive load of processing scripts and sounds at the same time;
✓ chunking a text into meaningful and manageable lengths to help the learners gradually
interpret the meaning;
✓ adding prosodic features such as prominence that mark situationally informative pragmatic
meaning;
✓ achieving impact through reading a text with suitable affect (e.g. humor, anger).

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‘Mental representation’  a series of snapshots or movie-like dynamic images with possibly
sounds and smells as well and What have created in the minds of the readers. Each reader’s
representation is dynamic and unique, depending on the individual’s mental state, mood, experience,
etc.
 Meaning construction in a reader’s/listener’s mind is achieved in a multidimensional way,
deriving from the integrated neural interactions of the various parts of the brain (i.e. the
sensory, motor, cognitive and emotional systems).

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• Reading materials offer activities that help the learners focus on the content of the text and
achieve personal experience of it through multidimensional representation. By
experiencing the text, learners are able to:
❖ activate the sensory, motor, emotional, cognitive areas of their brain;
❖ self-project and self-invest in the activities which lead to deeper processing and to fuller
engagement;
❖ have time to make errors and adjustments in connecting verbal codes with non-verbal
mental representations;
❖ have time to talk to themselves in their L1;
❖ have time to develop inner speech in the L2 before publicly speaking out or writing.

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1) Decide the overall purpose of the reading course within a wider pedagogical framework.

2) Identify the types of texts and tasks that the course requires.

3) Identify the linguistic elements to be covered (grammatical

items/lexis/discourse/specific purpose etc.).

4) Integrate texts and tasks into class-based work units.

5) Link reading to other language skills

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• The development of materials that promote out-of-class academic language and learning
opportunities is likely to increase, given trends in higher education worldwide of

a) massification (making in-class tasks less feasible);

b) online learning (necessitating independent tasks); and
c) increasing numbers of EAL learners (making EAP central to pedagogical
practice across the disciplines).

• Students will experience an increased responsibility for self-directed learning, but at the
same time universities will be expected to scaffold such learning behaviors.

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