The importance of Reading. Difficulties in teaching Reading.

Reading is one of the practical aims of teaching language at schools. Reading is of great educational importance, because pupils get information they need from books and newspapers. Reading develops pupil’s intelligence, memory, imagination. Reading isn’t only the aim but also a means of learning a foreign language. When reading a text, pupils review sounds, letters, and vocabulary, memorize the spelling and meaning of the words, review grammar. Reading in English is very difficult, because 26 letters represent 46 phonemes. When learning English pupils should assimilate the following rules of reading: - How to read vowels in open and closed syllables and before letter “r”; - How to read consonants: c, s, n, g, -letter combinations, digraphs, tion, sion, sh, wh, gh, th, ng. To make the process of reading easier, new words and sentence patterns should be learned orally, so when pupils start reading they are familiar with the new words, and their meaning.

The Lexical Approach

1970's (and still under development), multi-word chunks or units of language form most of the speech in everyday English. This approach uses collocation and computer-based corpus to aid language study. The 700-most common words account for 70% of all text. Inputs-Intake via noticing similarities, differences, restrictions and examples, probably not via formal description of rules. Learners make provisional generalizations on the above, which becomes acquisition. Production is based on these examples, not formal rules. Basic exercise types: identifying chunks, matching, completing, Allegorizing, sequencing, deleting.

The major types of speaking activities.

The major types of speaking activities that can be implemented are: discussions, speeches, role-plays, dialogues, conversation, audiotaped oral dialogue journals . Discussions: students are introduced to a topic via a reading, a listening passage, a video tape. Then they are asked to get into pairs or groups to discuss a related topic to come up with the solution, a response. Another common activity is the prepared speech. The teacher should provide the structure for the speech,its rhetorical genre (narration, description, dialogue, monologue, etc). This activity gives the students more actual practice with speaking the language. Students must be taught a speaking strategy, the use of hesit ation markers (for example, kind of, um, eh, well, sort of, like…). Example of an activity: give a one - minute unprepared response on some topic . Role -play . Role -play is suitable for practicing the sociocultural variations in speech acts, such as complimenting, complaining and the like. Depen ding on the students ’ level, role play can be performed from prepared scripts , using the knowledge gained from instruction or discussion of the speech act. In teaching dialogue there are several stages:at the receptive stage, the teacher explains new language material, at the reproductive stage, the pupils reproduce what they have learnt, at the constructive stahe, the pupils construct a similar dialogue using the new patterns. Conversation – is the speaking activity, which is the most fundamental form of oral communication. For example, the students can find a native speaker and arrange to tape-record a 20-30 minute interaction with this person.Students are warned not to correct grammar or pronunciation mistakes, to include all hesitation markers, false starts and pauses. Students are to find instances of “communications difficulties”. Variation of the task – “to take an interview” from a native speaker. Audiotaped Oral Dialogue Journals. Oral Dialogue. Journals are one format where practice with fluency and attention to accuracy can be accomplished at the same time. First, the teacher starts the dialogue journal on the tape by giving directions and the topic. He reminds the students to speak extemporaneously. The tape is returned to the student, who reacts to the teacher promptly and returns to the teacher. Other accuracy- based activities. In the past, speaking activities invariably involved drills , which have fallen out of favor in teaching.