Lecture 7 teaching reading

1. Reading as a communicative skill and its characteristics. Aims of teaching reading at school.

2. Reading strategies. Types of reading.

3. Stages of teaching reading and types of activities used at them.

1. Reading as a communicative skill and its characteristics. Aims of teaching reading at school.

Reading functions in the sphere of written communication, it is receptive and reactive and takes place mainly in a silent form (reading aloud is a phonetic activity). Reading results in comprehension, in decoding the author’s ideas. Readers may react verbally or non-verbally, or remember the information till they need it.

Competence in reading is similar to that in listening: it includes skills, sub-skills, knowledge and communicative abilities. Among skills we can single out those to:

• Find out the main information

• Predict the content

• Differentiate main facts and supportive ideas

• Find the necessary information in the texts of pragmatic character

• Ignore unfamiliar language material which is not important for understanding the content

• Understand explicitly stated information

• Understand information when not explicitly stated

• Understand the communicative value of sentences and utterances ( their function)

• Understand relations between parts of the text through cohesion devices

• Understand basic reference skills (e.g. what pronouns stand for)

• Interpret a text by going outside it (what is in the lines, what is between the lines and what is beyond the lines).

Besides, reading involves technical skills, grammatical and lexical receptive skills.

Among psychological and physiological mechanisms of reading scholars include visual perception, inner speech, division of text into chunks, anticipation (prediction), memory, analysis and synthesis. Practically all of them work simultaneously. And all of them should be gradually developed with special exercises.

Reading comprehension, as well as listening comprehension, can be described at several levels:

• Comprehension of fragments ( is not the aim of teaching)

• Global understanding

• Understanding details

• Critical understanding

According to the school curriculum, at the end of primary school children should have competence in reading at A1 Level, that is, should be able to read both silently and aloud short texts which contain familiar language material and read and understand easy texts (about 300 printed characters long) where they can guess the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Basic school leavers should have their competence in reading developed up to A2 Level: read and understand texts about 800 characters long that contain unfamiliar words, guess their meaning using context, pictures, comments, analogy with their native language, scan texts to find the necessary information.

Senior schoolchildren are supposed to have their reading competence developed up to B1 Level. Texts are to contain at least 1900 characters, should be on current topics about modern life of teenagers here and abroad, about current events etc. Texts differ in their format and genre: fiction, articles, letters, brochures etc. But all the text should be interesting for learners of a certain age, should correspond to their intellectual level, should contain information from different spheres of our life, information of intercultural character, scientifically sound and from reliable sources, be in different forms (narration, description, dialogue, monologue, letter etc).