The Dynamics in Teaching Reading

By: Rhea Mae T. Bautista

In teaching reading, you must take in to consideration first the kinds of students you
have. You must first learn their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to their levels of
comprehension, vocabulary and reading rate. This is an important step since this will be the
basis for the strategies to be employed in instruction. Consequently, the approaches that you
employ will vary greatly. There will be activities or strategies that will apply to certain types of
learners only. This means, that even though teaching reading is limited to its three phases (pre-
reading, reading and post reading), there are still a lot of different creative and innovative
strategies and activities that the teacher can use.
It is already stated that teaching reading has three phases or stages. First, is pre –
reading. This stage is considered the most important phase of a reading lesson. It is here where
students are guided to reflect on what they already know or think about a topic so that it can
help them understand what they are going to read. There are three main important events to
be employed in this stage: (1) activating prior knowledge and building background information;
(2) developing concept and vocabulary and (3) developing motivation and purpose for reading.
Activating prior knowledge and building background information includes strategies
such as: preview and predict; text previews; story impressions, etc. Developing concept and
vocabulary include: realia; visuals; demonstrations; context clues; semantic mapping, etc.
Lastly, developing motivation and purpose for reading considers factors such as learners’
attitude, interest and self-concept to be able to come up with the motive and motivation
question.
It is important that the teacher must go over all of the three events before proceeding
to the next stage. Most often, they don’t have the luxury of time to have the three. It’s also
impossible to hit these three birds with one stone since they have different purposes.
Therefore, you cannot simply have them all in one strategy or activity. This is when you will
have to think and decide which of the three events are necessary depending upon your types of
learners and the text to be discussed.
For instance, if most of your learners have the earnest interest to go about the lesson
then you can skip with developing motivation and purpose for reading but it is really very rare
to have these type of learners. That is why most of the teachers include questions which
activates schema and also catch the learners’ interest. This is where the learners bring meaning
to the text to be discussed. Like when the teacher asks “What do you think about love?”
It is in fact said that we cannot hit three birds with one stone in this stage but we can
definitely hit at least two. The only event that cannot be joined by the rest is developing
concept and vocabulary since its main liability is with the text and not with the learners. Which
means, learners now gain meaning from the text and this is why it is a very necessary step that
cannot be skipped and taken for granted. In conclusion, you can have at least two activities in
pre-reading if you are concerned with the time. But if you think of it, teaching reading is a
tedious task and would take time whether we like it or not but still, it is not bad trying to be
efficient.
Now, let’s go to the second stage which is reading or during reading. Reading of the text,
which is the most obvious aspect of the reading phase, may be taken to mean that the students
read the text silently in the classroom or at home as part of the assignment but a read – aloud
is the most recommended strategy or activity. The teacher provides some guide questions so
that the learners can focus better while reading. In the early grades the teacher reads aloud as
the students listen. Reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for building
the knowledge required for eventual success in reading (Anderson et.al. 1985). It also
recommended for high school students. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other
strategies that can be employed in this stage. There are still numerous ways or approach to
critique a literary piece and the teacher can use these in reading instruction.
Lastly, we have the post reading stage. It is after reading when readers want to share
and discuss ideas with others. Post reading activities might include the following: discussion,
engagement activities, and reading-writing link. This is not necessarily the evaluation part of the
lesson but still a part of the lesson proper. The teacher can still assess or check the learners’
comprehension of the text in this stage though. The results will tell you whether you have
successfully delivered the text. The catch is, you cannot go back to the previous stages if you
have failed. The teacher can only point out clarifications and correct misconceptions.

Reference: Ofelia Oracion Flojo. Curriculum And Instruction: The Teaching Of English ( Module
6). (http://ditreading.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/module-6-1-english.pdf )