I appreciate all of your reflections on the two texts we covered thus far. Collectively they showed a genuine effort to understand and a keen insight into the issues raised by both authors--I couldn't think of a better group to enlighten me with the many classroom realities many of you are facing at different levels of instruction and settings. Still, I hope you'll want to try out some of the ideas suggested by the books and integrate ER in your future classroom.
Beginning this week, we will move on to our next reading on Grabe's book on reading in L2: from theory to practice. As this is a theory-oriented text with heavy references to research and existing literature, we will focus our discussion on questions you have of each assigned reading to form the -talking points- of our weekly session. Again post your questions/inquiries under the designated heading.
After reading the first three chapters of Grabe (2009), I started to think more about the processes of comprehension. Comprehension is not an easy task. It is the task a reader should spend some time working on it. In the third chapter, two reading models have been mentioned and emphasized: the text model and the situation model. The situation model quickly drew my attention, making me read it again and again. However, I’m wondering whether “age” has something to do with “reading comprehension” or not. In most situations, young learners have less sufficient background knowledge compared with adult learners. What can an English teacher do with young learners’ reading comprehension? Can an English teacher help them build up their background knowledge by using books written in Chinese? How can an English teacher do in the environment where Chinese language is banned?
ReplyDeleteGrabe (2009) said that “phonological processing is a key aspect of word recognition” (p. 25). If this is true, here comes the question:
ReplyDeleteIf a reader doesn’t know how to pronounce some words in the target language while they are reading, can we assume that it is just a “pronunciation” problem or we can say that they don’t even know what they are reading?
In Grabe’s book (2009), he gave eight clear definitions of reading for us (p.14). “Reading is a strategic process, that is, readers anticipate text information, select key information, organize and mentally summarize information, monitor comprehension, repair comprehension breakdown, and match comprehension output to reader goals.” Before reading this chapter, it never occurred to me that reading (input) operates and internalizes many and complex meaningful stages. It raised two questions on my mind: if our learners have some problems in reading, that is to say, they do not follow these series of movement from above? Or the problem is materials?
ReplyDeleteQuestions from Wilson:
ReplyDelete1. Since the recognition of vocabulary plays an important role in reading comprehension, how do we help students improve their word power?
2. Can we help students and ourselves to avoid the fear of encountering certain words which we misunderstand, mispronounce, or misuse over and over again?
3. Can we have an example to elaborate on “The Dual Route model” for English word recognition?
4. When students are exposed to an English article or passage, most of them jump into the text directly without first of all referring the assigned text to their prior knowledge. Lack of attention knowledge, students tend to find reading difficult to them. Without sufficient exposure to reading materials, students can not build a large vocabulary which a fluent reader needs. How can we help facilitate students’ reading process?
Aaron’s 7th reflection
ReplyDeleteThe first three chapters of Grabe’s book have provided a pretty well-rounded perspective of some of the primary issues surrounding reading. I think chapter one’s description of a reading curriculum, including learning goals and student proficiency levels, is especially useful for our class because we have initiated several in-class discussions regarding these issues and what the teacher’s responsibility is, or should be.
Possible areas we may want to discuss as a class are word recognition, working memory, and long-term memory, in terms of the traditional way of teaching and studying vocabulary here in Taiwan.
The three chapters have described some basic explanations for understanding how reading works: for example, vocabulary and fluency work, including reading comprehension emerges from the specific cognitive skills applied to a written text. However, some questions remain to be answered. For example, the language teaching community would benefit from knowing in detail which aspects of skilled reading can be taught explicitly and which are most efficiently learnt through extensive exposure to L2 texts. Also, more details of solutions for the impact of L1 interference should be introduced for EFL learners.
ReplyDelete1. Models on p91 very useful:
ReplyDeleteconstruction-integration model
structure building framework
the landscape view of reading
capacity constrained READER model
interactive compensatory model
verbal efficiency model
compensatory-encoding model
simple view of reading
rauding
dual-coding theory
word-recognition model
The first time reading all these is difficult, but a clear understanding of them will be useful for sure.
2. implicit learning & explicit learning, automaticity, fluency, etc. They are intriguing.
It is not surprising when W. Grabe constantly reminded us that “we only learn to read by reading” (p. xv), especially when I’m the one who also does the same thing. As one of the intrepid (p. xv) collegiate English language teachers tending to explore the core ideas (p. xv) of dexterously developing our L2 learners’ reading abilities (p. 58) and sharpening our own pedagogical reading instructions, such informative, relevant, and readable (p. xi) materials in terms of (1) sharing the insights of differences between L1 and L2 reading, (2) the transferring role in L2 reading, and (3) the interaction of L1 and L2 reading resources in L2 reading (p. xi) further provide us as well as students in PhD graduation programs with instructional and united implications (p. xiii), complete with unconventional and effective teaching practices. After having spent tons of trivial time and under intense time pressure and constraints (p. 8, 10) on reading the scheduled chapters, several small questions interest me for further exploration.
ReplyDeleteFirst, speaking of reading speed of word per minute (wpm) (p. 8, 13, 23), the process of automatically (p.10, 13) and rarely consciously (p. 10) becoming a successful (p. 11), skilled (p. 21), fluent (p. 14, 23) reader seems achievable but somehow controversial when reading for study purposes (p. 12) rather than doing so for fun. Being equipped with extensive background knowledge (p. 47, 49) to interpret a situation model of reading; better readers may easily induce and find the knack in connecting inferences and paraphrasing information (p. 12). For those weaker readers, the alternative strategies of fine-tuning their reading progressions in the integration of “activated orthographic, phonological, and semantic and syntactic processes” (p. 23, see also Perfetti, 2007) must be pretty challenging in preparation of exams, let alone shifting their short-term or working memory (p. 35, 39) into longer or crystallized memory afterward.
Second, I’m simply wondering if there are any relevant connections among verbal think-alouds (p. 12), sight reading (p.24) and reading words aloud (p. 26) in the lower-level processes (p. 22 ) of building fundamental linguistic knowledge.
Third, I’m also interested in understanding whether there’s any cause-effect relationship between the term “proceduralization” or the integration of subskills (p.17, 20, 23) and subroutines (p. 17) and the process of constructing our background knowledge (p. 44, 49) in text reading comprehension.
Last but not least, when so many of the theoretical bases in reading are put into practice in our reading classes, it might not be easy to continually succeed the attentional processes (p. 50), one of higher-order processing components as Grabe argued in a cognitive manner. Suffice it to say that building a ideally situation model (p. 43) for our novice readers in reading classes has got to be one of the most inevitable musts that we teachers have to tackle with.