Chapter 4 talks about the manners in which students can develop their reading abilities through: exposure, practice, frequency of repetitions and development of automaticity.
Given that implicit learning triggers the development of these behaviours, we can’t forget the importance that instruction plays in developing good reading habits. This refers to us and our role as teachers.
One common theme in many of the readings we’ve done is the inherent need for extensive input exposure for many types of texts and the continual practice of skills. This means that it’s our job to provide an environment for consistent long-term reading practice and make sure that this becomes a part of our curriculum.
To put this into practice, we must try to incorporate the following into our curriculum: (refer to p.81) 1. massive exposure to print 2. continual building of vocabulary knowledge and automatic word-recognition skills 3. consistent practice in meaningful reading tasks that extend basic cognitive skills (inferencing, goal setting, comprehension monitoring, etc)
With regards to number 3- ‘meaningful reading tasks’, let us remember that texts that are too difficult for our students have no hope of being meaningful, regardless of what our bosses may insist.
Pages 81 & 82 also list 4 prereading and post-reading activities that are a useful guide for teachers who want to put these theories into practice.
Chapter 7 talks about the how L1 reading effects L2 reading, especially with regards to the different orthographic systems we are exposed to in L1 and L2. One thing to note is that the more shallow the orthography, the easier it is to transfer their L1 reading skills to their L2, especially if their L1 is similarly shallow.
In our case however, we are dealing with English (deep orthography and thus extremely difficult to pick up quickly) and Chinese (based on a morphosyllabic system and thus has no alphabet) and so they are not only extremely different but it is also unlikely that many of our students’ L1 reading skills can easily transfer to their L2.
However, this book doesn’t consider that students in Taiwan also learn ‘bo po mo fo’, which is essentially an alphabet, similar to that of any other alphabet. ‘Bo po mo fo’ also seems to be quite shallow, in that the orthography (bo po mo fo symbols) are closely related to it’s phonology (sounds). For example, English is a deep orthography and therefore the letters used don’t always represent the sounds used to pronounce. ‘head, bread, read, lead, heart, steak’ are all words with an ‘ea’ spelling but the pronunciation varies. Bo po mo fo, on the other hand is pronounced the same way it is written.
My question then, becomes is it possible that Taiwanese students who have learned bo po mo fo, can actually transfer some of their L1 reading skills to their L2?
In bottom-up models, word encoding and lexical access play a central role while in top-down models, the use of context clues and prior knowledge to comprehend reading materials are highly emphasized, which are so called “higher cognitive processes.” These higher cognitive processes have been less used by good readers while poor readers make more use of contextual clues to compensate for their slow word encoding. If poor readers spend more time guessing from contextual clues, will they be able to appreciate the beauty of the reading? Will poor readers just stop reading because they have to spend a lot of time entering the world of writers? “i minus 1” reading could be a good solution to the problem; however, in real teaching situations, how can poor readers survive when there are required books which are far more difficult than their ability to comprehend?
From Wilson: 1. Since my exposure to the reading passages written by William Grabe, I thoroughly understand the importance of word recognition in term of either L1 or L2 reading comprehension. In the process of teaching reading in my university over the past 20 years, some of my students, who I would call "slower readers", tend to stick to the fossilized idea, "one English word, one Chinese equivalence", which causes them a lot of trouble in reading comprehension. And what's worse, due to the lack of comprehension, they incrementally lose their interest in reading. Some even give up learning English or close their door to the world of English. How can we help those slower readers improve their idea toward word learning? 2. After reading these chapters, it reminds me of the theories I learn from the book. Sometimes, we ourselves apply certain reading strategies to our reading passages. For example, under certain situation, we employ explicit learning style and use our conscious knowledge while reading difficult passages; and on the other occasion, we read subconsciously without resorting to our conscious awareness of language learning strategies, which is called implicit learning. This makes me understand the importance of knowing our students, their learning attitude, their language proficiency, their learning environment. Without understanding of their situations mentioned above, few teaching strategies can be applied. If we realize what our students are, we may apply strategies which meet the need of our students. Of course, being a teacher, we should enrich ourselves with related knowledge about language instruction, and subconsciously apply them in the due course.
According to chapter 6 (p.127), the author addressed some points for implications for teaching. The first one is that teachers should have some idea about the linguistic and literacy background of their students. That’s why we have to study linguistic and other relevant courses to know better of English— the target language. Base on the professional knowledge we learnt from colleges, we are qualified to teach English. In Taiwan, people want English major teachers to teach a second language.
I am working for TCSL (teaching Chinese as a second language) of MCU now. My students are trained to be Chinese teachers for foreigners after they graduate. They have to learn linguistic both Chinese and English, and they need to be good at both Chinese and English.
On the contrary, however, it seems like we don’t have any strict law or regulations for foreign teachers who is going to teach foreign languages. They are welcomed in Taiwan because they are native speakers. Many parents even believe that as long as their children are taught by foreign teachers, their English will be better than others. My question is, if foreign teachers need to be trained or taught professional knowledge before they teach? Is it dangerous that a foreign teacher teaches students English without knowing even a little Chinese? Will that be a problem if a foreign teacher doesn’t know the linguistic and literacy background differences between Chinese and English? Will that factor be a barrier if a foreign teacher doesn’t have the professional knowledge? Should we only hire foreign teachers who have TESOL background?
As the author suggests, component reading skills (discourse awareness, inference, fluency, etc) are extremely important and a major theme in most of the models discussed. As a university instructor of required English courses, it would be fair to say that many of my students are at the end of their formal English education. In theory, after the required 8-10 years of English study prior to attending my courses, my students should have been taught all, or most, of the component reading skills discussed in the book. Can anyone tell us specifically how these skills are being addressed and/or taught in the Taiwanese education system prior to the university system?
One case I recently confronted: A senior high, 3 graded, male student, has difficulties doing reading comprehension tests in college entrance exams. (oral reading poor, syllable by syllable)
I found it of use the part of Grabe (2007, p123) about Universal aspects of cognitive and linguistic processing: 1. carry out phonological processing while reading *2. use syntactic information to determine text meaning and text comprehension 3. set goals, engage in reading strategies 4. apply some level of metacognitive awareness to text comprehension *5. engage a capacity-limited working-memory system. *6. draw on a long-term memory (background knowledge) to interpret text meaning *7. carry out very rapid pattern recognition and automatic processing skills.
Plus previous dual-coding theory, and foreign language anxiety.
He has difficulties reading sentences out (pause for several times), revealing PATIALLY his slow processing skills. Chances are high that he confronts difficulties in word recognition, rapid pattern recognition and syntactic information. The slow processing may cause high load for working-memory system, which lead to low comprehension, and to some extent, foreign language anxiety.
Q1: Do I read/ diagnose his situation correctly? Q2: What should he do, while he has only 3 months to go before his entrance exams?
It is true that people learn both implicitly and explicitly. Often times we use our background knowledge and experiences to make inferences toward the texts we are reading. With this kind of background knowledge (schema), humans are able to recall their previous experiences and try to negotiate the meanings based on the context they are in. As long as the text caught our attention, people are capable of associating meanings in their mind. Grabe (2009) divided our background knowledge into the following four categories. 1. general knowledge of the world 2. cultural knowledge 3. topical knowledge 4. specialist expertise knowledge As cited in Grabe’s (2009) Reading in a second language, Floyd and Carrell (1987) stated that “for students who lacked appropriate cultural background knowledge for particular texts, the explicit teaching of appropriate background information could facilitate second-language reading” (p. 74). I cannot agree with them more. Instead of teaching students the differences between the East and the West, and suggesting them to watch western movies, I was wondering what other types of materials can teachers provide for our students to strengthen their cultural knowledge?
Overall, after having thoroughly finished reading the scheduled chapters, W. Grabe, similar to Stephen Krashen, also agrees the postulation of “reading an ‘extensive’ amount of material over a period of time” (p. 57) so that many processing skills, together with the construction of considerable linguistic knowledge to reach the mastery of the required skills for reading comprehension (p. 61-62, 80, 105, 128). Such a view of cognitive learning foundations is also in line with the theory of Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) (p. 17, 80). Among so many theoretical assumptions and empirical learning models, the postulations of building a text model of reader comprehension (p. 40, 42, 46-49, 54-59, 69-71, 75, 79, 88) and building a situation model of reader interpretation (p. 43-49, 54-56, 69-71, 75, 77, 79, 88, 90) really help me with taking advantage of working memory, bridging inferences (p. 40, 68-70, 80, 89, 90) in text reading, and expecting what the text is conveying (p. 43). Based on our prior or background knowledge (p. 43, 73, 84, 90), including general, cultural, topical, and specialist expertise knowledge (p. 84), and schema or prototypes knowledge (p. 76), we readers manage to reconstruct (p. 78), reread to gain a great variety of knowledge via interactive models of reading (p. 89), rather than simply top-down or bottom-up ones (p. 89). Implicitly using associative learning knowledge (p. 59, 60, 64-66) combined with explicit instructions (p. 59, 60, 128) to practically meet our low-level L2 learners’ needs in orthography (p. 111, 128) tending to reaching regularity and consistency (pp. 114-117), phonological awareness, morphology (pp. 111-112, 128), and other fundamental linguistic knowledge. Humbly speaking, alternatively adopting rauding method (reading plus listening) (p. 90), Duo-Coding Theory (verbal plus visual processing) (pp. 100-101), phonotactics from my personal teaching experiences, in class instructions might be an eclectic pedagogy to help our L2 learners learn more efficiently.
I have difficulties understanding all the models on chapter 5. On page 91, Grabe talks about 11 specific models of reading comprehension that deserve attention. 1. Construction-Integration Model 2. Structure Building Framework 3. The Landscape View of Reading. 4. Capacity Constrained READER (CC READER) Model 5. Interactive Compensatory Model 6. Verbal Efficiency Model 7. Compensatory-Encoding Model 8. Simple View of Reading 9. Rauding 10. Dual-Coding Theory 11. Word-recognition models. What are the significant concepts of these models? Are there any illustrations that are easier to understand? Because it is easy for us to get confused with all these models.
Chapter 4 talks about the manners in which students can develop their reading abilities through: exposure, practice, frequency of repetitions and development of automaticity.
ReplyDeleteGiven that implicit learning triggers the development of these behaviours, we can’t forget the importance that instruction plays in developing good reading habits. This refers to us and our role as teachers.
One common theme in many of the readings we’ve done is the inherent need for extensive input exposure for many types of texts and the continual practice of skills. This means that it’s our job to provide an environment for consistent long-term reading practice and make sure that this becomes a part of our curriculum.
To put this into practice, we must try to incorporate the following into our curriculum: (refer to p.81)
1. massive exposure to print
2. continual building of vocabulary knowledge and automatic word-recognition skills
3. consistent practice in meaningful reading tasks that extend basic cognitive skills (inferencing, goal setting, comprehension monitoring, etc)
With regards to number 3- ‘meaningful reading tasks’, let us remember that texts that are too difficult for our students have no hope of being meaningful, regardless of what our bosses may insist.
Pages 81 & 82 also list 4 prereading and post-reading activities that are a useful guide for teachers who want to put these theories into practice.
Chapter 7 talks about the how L1 reading effects L2 reading, especially with regards to the different orthographic systems we are exposed to in L1 and L2. One thing to note is that the more shallow the orthography, the easier it is to transfer their L1 reading skills to their L2, especially if their L1 is similarly shallow.
In our case however, we are dealing with English (deep orthography and thus extremely difficult to pick up quickly) and Chinese (based on a morphosyllabic system and thus has no alphabet) and so they are not only extremely different but it is also unlikely that many of our students’ L1 reading skills can easily transfer to their L2.
However, this book doesn’t consider that students in Taiwan also learn ‘bo po mo fo’, which is essentially an alphabet, similar to that of any other alphabet. ‘Bo po mo fo’ also seems to be quite shallow, in that the orthography (bo po mo fo symbols) are closely related to it’s phonology (sounds). For example, English is a deep orthography and therefore the letters used don’t always represent the sounds used to pronounce. ‘head, bread, read, lead, heart, steak’ are all words with an ‘ea’ spelling but the pronunciation varies. Bo po mo fo, on the other hand is pronounced the same way it is written.
My question then, becomes is it possible that Taiwanese students who have learned bo po mo fo, can actually transfer some of their L1 reading skills to their L2?
In bottom-up models, word encoding and lexical access play a central role while in top-down models, the use of context clues and prior knowledge to comprehend reading materials are highly emphasized, which are so called “higher cognitive processes.” These higher cognitive processes have been less used by good readers while poor readers make more use of contextual clues to compensate for their slow word encoding. If poor readers spend more time guessing from contextual clues, will they be able to appreciate the beauty of the reading? Will poor readers just stop reading because they have to spend a lot of time entering the world of writers? “i minus 1” reading could be a good solution to the problem; however, in real teaching situations, how can poor readers survive when there are required books which are far more difficult than their ability to comprehend?
ReplyDeleteFrom Wilson:
ReplyDelete1. Since my exposure to the reading passages written by William Grabe, I thoroughly understand the importance of word recognition in term of either L1 or L2 reading comprehension. In the process of teaching reading in my university over the past 20 years, some of my students, who I would call "slower readers", tend to stick to the fossilized idea, "one English word, one Chinese equivalence", which causes them a lot of trouble in reading comprehension. And what's worse, due to the lack of comprehension, they incrementally lose their interest in reading. Some even give up learning English or close their door to the world of English. How can we help those slower readers improve their idea toward word learning?
2. After reading these chapters, it reminds me of the theories I learn from the book. Sometimes, we ourselves apply certain reading strategies to our reading passages. For example, under certain situation, we employ explicit learning style and use our conscious knowledge while reading difficult passages; and on the other occasion, we read subconsciously without resorting to our conscious awareness of language learning strategies, which is called implicit learning. This makes me understand the importance of knowing our students, their learning attitude, their language proficiency, their learning environment. Without understanding of their situations mentioned above, few teaching strategies can be applied. If we realize what our students are, we may apply strategies which meet the need of our students. Of course, being a teacher, we should enrich ourselves with related knowledge about language instruction, and subconsciously apply them in the due course.
According to chapter 6 (p.127), the author addressed some points for implications for teaching. The first one is
ReplyDeletethat teachers should have some idea about the linguistic and literacy background of their students. That’s why
we have to study linguistic and other relevant courses to know better of English— the target language. Base on
the professional knowledge we learnt from colleges, we are qualified to teach English. In Taiwan, people want
English major teachers to teach a second language.
I am working for TCSL (teaching Chinese as a second language) of MCU now. My students are trained to be
Chinese teachers for foreigners after they graduate. They have to learn linguistic both Chinese and English, and
they need to be good at both Chinese and English.
On the contrary, however, it seems like we don’t have any strict law or regulations for foreign teachers who
is going to teach foreign languages. They are welcomed in Taiwan because they are native speakers. Many
parents even believe that as long as their children are taught by foreign teachers, their English will be better
than others. My question is, if foreign teachers need to be trained or taught professional knowledge before they
teach? Is it dangerous that a foreign teacher teaches students English without knowing even a little Chinese?
Will that be a problem if a foreign teacher doesn’t know the linguistic and literacy background differences
between Chinese and English? Will that factor be a barrier if a foreign teacher doesn’t have the professional
knowledge? Should we only hire foreign teachers who have TESOL background?
As the author suggests, component reading skills (discourse awareness, inference, fluency, etc) are extremely important and a major theme in most of the models discussed. As a university instructor of required English courses, it would be fair to say that many of my students are at the end of their formal English education. In theory, after the required 8-10 years of English study prior to attending my courses, my students should have been taught all, or most, of the component reading skills discussed in the book. Can anyone tell us specifically how these skills are being addressed and/or taught in the Taiwanese education system prior to the university system?
ReplyDeleteOne case I recently confronted:
ReplyDeleteA senior high, 3 graded, male student, has difficulties doing reading comprehension tests in college entrance exams. (oral reading poor, syllable by syllable)
I found it of use the part of Grabe (2007, p123) about Universal aspects of cognitive and linguistic processing:
1. carry out phonological processing while reading
*2. use syntactic information to determine text meaning and text comprehension
3. set goals, engage in reading strategies
4. apply some level of metacognitive awareness to text comprehension
*5. engage a capacity-limited working-memory system.
*6. draw on a long-term memory (background knowledge) to interpret text meaning
*7. carry out very rapid pattern recognition and automatic processing skills.
Plus previous dual-coding theory, and foreign language anxiety.
He has difficulties reading sentences out (pause for several times), revealing PATIALLY his slow processing skills. Chances are high that he confronts difficulties in word recognition, rapid pattern recognition and syntactic information. The slow processing may cause high load for working-memory system, which lead to low comprehension, and to some extent, foreign language anxiety.
Q1: Do I read/ diagnose his situation correctly?
Q2: What should he do, while he has only 3 months to go before his entrance exams?
It is true that people learn both implicitly and explicitly. Often times we use our background knowledge and experiences to make inferences toward the texts we are reading. With this kind of background knowledge (schema), humans are able to recall their previous experiences and try to negotiate the meanings based on the context they are in. As long as the text caught our attention, people are capable of associating meanings in their mind. Grabe (2009) divided our background knowledge into the following four categories.
ReplyDelete1. general knowledge of the world
2. cultural knowledge
3. topical knowledge
4. specialist expertise knowledge
As cited in Grabe’s (2009) Reading in a second language, Floyd and Carrell (1987) stated that “for students who lacked appropriate cultural background knowledge for particular texts, the explicit teaching of appropriate background information could facilitate second-language reading” (p. 74). I cannot agree with them more.
Instead of teaching students the differences between the East and the West, and suggesting them to watch western movies, I was wondering what other types of materials can teachers provide for our students to strengthen their cultural knowledge?
Overall, after having thoroughly finished reading the scheduled chapters, W. Grabe, similar to Stephen Krashen, also agrees the postulation of “reading an ‘extensive’ amount of material over a period of time” (p. 57) so that many processing skills, together with the construction of considerable linguistic knowledge to reach the mastery of the required skills for reading comprehension (p. 61-62, 80, 105, 128). Such a view of cognitive learning foundations is also in line with the theory of Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) (p. 17, 80). Among so many theoretical assumptions and empirical learning models, the postulations of building a text model of reader comprehension (p. 40, 42, 46-49, 54-59, 69-71, 75, 79, 88) and building a situation model of reader interpretation (p. 43-49, 54-56, 69-71, 75, 77, 79, 88, 90) really help me with taking advantage of working memory, bridging inferences (p. 40, 68-70, 80, 89, 90) in text reading, and expecting what the text is conveying (p. 43). Based on our prior or background knowledge (p. 43, 73, 84, 90), including general, cultural, topical, and specialist expertise knowledge (p. 84), and schema or prototypes knowledge (p. 76), we readers manage to reconstruct (p. 78), reread to gain a great variety of knowledge via interactive models of reading (p. 89), rather than simply top-down or bottom-up ones (p. 89).
ReplyDeleteImplicitly using associative learning knowledge (p. 59, 60, 64-66) combined with explicit instructions (p. 59, 60, 128) to practically meet our low-level L2 learners’ needs in orthography (p. 111, 128) tending to reaching regularity and consistency (pp. 114-117), phonological awareness, morphology (pp. 111-112, 128), and other fundamental linguistic knowledge.
Humbly speaking, alternatively adopting rauding method (reading plus listening) (p. 90), Duo-Coding Theory (verbal plus visual processing) (pp. 100-101), phonotactics from my personal teaching experiences, in class instructions might be an eclectic pedagogy to help our L2 learners learn more efficiently.
I have difficulties understanding all the models on chapter 5. On page 91, Grabe talks about 11 specific models of reading comprehension that deserve attention. 1. Construction-Integration Model 2. Structure Building Framework 3. The Landscape View of Reading. 4. Capacity Constrained READER (CC READER) Model 5. Interactive Compensatory Model 6. Verbal Efficiency Model 7. Compensatory-Encoding Model 8. Simple View of Reading 9. Rauding 10. Dual-Coding Theory 11. Word-recognition models. What are the significant concepts of these models? Are there any illustrations that are easier to understand? Because it is easy for us to get confused with all these models.
ReplyDelete