“In L2 contexts, syntactic awareness has a strong relationship with reading comprehension” (p. 200)
I interpret this to mean that our students must have already achieved a level of grammatical proficiency in order to achieve reading comprehension. If they don’t have this minimal level of grammatical ability, can we expect that they will succeed at the reading comprehension activities and assignments that we ask of them?
Question 1: If it is futile to use materials that are too difficult for students, what do we do about students at the university level who should be grammatically prepared for university level English, but aren’t?
P. 207 offers some valid, specific ideas about how to teach main-idea comprehension through discussions of a text, specifically, how to engage in conversations to help students understand texts as they are reading it. For example, the table on p. 209 which lists effective reading comprehension strategies are all examples of strategies teachers can use and teach students with the goal that students will eventually be able to use these strategies autonomously, or for the ‘strategies’ to be so automatized that they become ‘skills’. P.260 also provides a useful table of 12 activities that teachers can engage in to increase discourse awareness.
Question 2:
Can we have a mock activity to show us how we can use these strategies where we play the role of our students? At the same time can we include how to directly teach text structure to students so that it will lead to increased comprehension?
Question 3:
Chapter 10 and 11 discuss the research on multiple strategy instruction, but most of it is in an L1 context. How, if at all, can this research relate to an L2 context?
1.Reading comprehension is a goal in terms of reading instruction. When learners reach certain language level, will they encounter some linguistic problems which they cannot solve by themselves without resorting to grammar knowledge? Is there any case in which a learner, especially an ESL or EFL learner, who learns the target language in a natural way, namely a communicative approach? He or she can listen and speak communicatively. Also, he can read comprehensively. However, he/she cannot write accurately. In other words, some of his or her writing is lack of syntactic maturity. Under this case, should we as teachers teach them grammar explicitly and in what ways? 2.Becoming a strategic reader is also an important goal of a second language reading class. What should the percentage of our instruction time be allotted in a reading class, where most students, because of the lack of linguistic competence, still in the process of struggling with their understanding of the texts? 3.Building awareness of discourse structure is also another important skill which helps students not only facilitate their reading process but also understand reading passages quickly and strategically if applied appropriately. Do we instruct students this skill within the text we use or do we find a separate text to teach students? Which one is better?
Graphic organizers (Barron, 1969) are hierarchically arranged tree diagrams of a text’s key terms and concepts. Grabe marks graphic organizer as helping learners develop reading comprehension abilities (Ch12, p.258-264). Not only “tree” diagrams, in fact, there are “fishbone”, “star”, “web”, “chain”, cycle”, “KWHL” and so on. Those graphic organizers enhance reading comprehension and the learning of new information from texts (p.258). I think they are very organized and helpful for students to establish the concept or structure of a text, rather than memorization of facts. I’ve used some of them, such as flowchart to guide junior high students the orders of events in a story. Students obtained a clearer idea from the chart. In college, I utilize graphic organizers to identify relationships among ideas when they are writing a composition.
However, students may need strong verbal skills for the graphic organizer to be effective as a pre-reading strategy. In addition, students in Taiwan may need more time to be trained by some skills to complete an organized chart of a new text. Therefore, instructors need to provide students with a great deal of direct instruction, practice, and feedback initially and instruction needs to be scaffolded as students grapple with more lengthy texts. However, we seem like that we don't use graphic organizers often to build students’ reading comprehension. We need the training as well. I hope we may have opportunities to share the skills of teaching by graphic organizer.
Some websites just FYI: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/graphicorganizers/ http://www.educationplace.biz/kids/hme/k_5/graphorg/ http://edhelper.com/teachers/graphic_organizers.htm
Strategic reading is also elaborated in the book of Keiko Koda, “Insights into second language reading: a cross-linguistic approach.” In her book, Ms. Koda presented many studies to support the importance of reading strategies. Based on the study about the strategies used by Taiwanese students, they were quite confused by unfamiliar words regardless of their English proficiency. High English proficiency learners used more global strategies in Chinese reading while they used more local ones in English reading. Koda (2005) claimed that when readers perceived two languages were similar, they tended to use similar strategies in both Chinese and English reading. Moreover, she also added that a person good at both languages viewed L1 & L2 in the say way; therefore, the same strategies were applied to both L1 & L2 reading. My first question is “how can teachers make Taiwanese learners of English transfer their strategy in Chinese reading to English reading?”
The significance of strategic reading has been highly emphasized in numerous studies; however, strategic reading cannot stand alone without readers’ desire or intention to do so (Koda, 2005). My second question is “how can teachers do to arouse learners’ desire to use strategies assisting in reading comprehension?”
This week’s reading talked a lot about methodologies and strategies. Earlier in the semester, several classmates stated that they are reading teachers here in Taiwan. I am curious which of these methodologies or strategies are commonly used here in Taiwan by NNET teaching ESL/EFL? I’m also curious which of these methodologies or strategies are commonly used here in Taiwan to teach L1 reading?
In Grabe’s speech at ETA, I heard him mention discourse structure graphic organizer, and I could not understand it very well at that time. However, when I read Chapter 12—Building awareness of discourse structure, I have a better understand of the term. From page 255 to page 259, Grabe explains in detail discourse-structure awareness and graphic organizers. He gives some examples like semantic maps, anticipation guides, concept maps, outline grids, tree diagrams, hierarchical summaries, and discourse-based graphic organizers. Then on page 258, he gives other examples such as comparison-contrast and problem-solution. These examples really help me understand the term.
It’s an interesting finding that a spatial graphic representation is helpful for reading comprehension. However, going back the structure of English sentences, I find this finding reasonable. It is useful when doing reading instruction, particularly on meaning instruction and analyzing the structure of the text. Meanwhile, Rosalie’s third website quite practical. Thanks for the sharing, Rosalie!
In chapter 11, Grabe pointed our current research on multiple-strategy instruction, I would like to share my opinions about collaborative strategic reading. I believe it has been commonly employed in L2 classrooms because this instruction involves consistent cooperating, and scaffolding. Group work and collaboration among students and with the teacher are strongly encouraged. I will use this approach in teaching reading in the future.
The idea of using graphic organizer forms (p. 213, 238, 257, 261), like Grade provided in the appendix of Chapter 12 (pp. 262-264) functions similarly as one of the eight required journal papers presented by Akio Suzuki et al. (2008, pp. 591-616) and currently being read in an attempt to be skillfully instructed in foreign language reading contexts. Sometimes, using such method via Word-formatted handouts previously posted onto e-Campus online learning system interests the learners in my classes. Adopting such helpful visual aids may to some extent facilitate our novice learners’ motivation also via group work, collaboration, and extended reading (pp. 238, 261). The idea of explicitly, intentionally and consciously using the strategy (pp. 220-221, 224, 229, 239, 240) of “thinking aloud” (pp. 234-235) while reading aloud (p.235) to the students on the basis of activating their prior or background knowledge (p. 210, 214, 231-233, 235, 237-239, 241, 248), forming questions (p. 209, 237-238, 239, 241), and clarifying information, and others are really supportive to help them read skillfully (pp. 220, 221, 229, 240). In the process of doing that, monitoring comprehension (pp. 211-212, 228-232, 234, 236, 238-241), inferencing (p, 209, 213, 224, 228, 236, 241), questioning the author (p. 171, 231, 235), even distinguishing the discourse-level genres (pp. 248-249, 255) for functional, differentiated, social and communicative purposes, and others, push our poor (p.247) and less-skilled (pp. 246-247) readers to be more active (pp. 221-222, 228-229, 234, 237). My first question, to be honest, goes to I’m always wondering what if the required English course were not required but closely connected to us foreign/ second learners’ real life. With extensive exposure and practice (p, 216) and recognition and awareness of structure (p. 217), or simply putting grammar instruction only part of the reading course, we reading teachers may facilitate our readers what they know (metacognitive awareness) (p. 220, 222-223, 225, 239, 240) what they can do (metacognitive control) (pp. 222-223, 225-226). The idea of routinizing (p. 226, 230, 240) strategic processes in reading seems to be supportive our readers to be engaged. Aside from several incompletely explored topics on pages 196, 199, 209, 210, 212, 214, and 215 in Chapter 10, pages 232, 234, 236, and 239, my personal attention or second question goes to whether we reading teachers may make more efforts on L2 reading strategy instruction (p. 239) so as to help our poor and less proficient readers a better understanding in text reading.
“In L2 contexts, syntactic awareness has a strong relationship with reading comprehension” (p. 200)
ReplyDeleteI interpret this to mean that our students must have already achieved a level of grammatical proficiency in order to achieve reading comprehension. If they don’t have this minimal level of grammatical ability, can we expect that they will succeed at the reading comprehension activities and assignments that we ask of them?
Question 1: If it is futile to use materials that are too difficult for students, what do we do about students at the university level who should be grammatically prepared for university level English, but aren’t?
P. 207 offers some valid, specific ideas about how to teach main-idea comprehension through discussions of a text, specifically, how to engage in conversations to help students understand texts as they are reading it. For example, the table on p. 209 which lists effective reading comprehension strategies are all examples of strategies teachers can use and teach students with the goal that students will eventually be able to use these strategies autonomously, or for the ‘strategies’ to be so automatized that they become ‘skills’. P.260 also provides a useful table of 12 activities that teachers can engage in to increase discourse awareness.
Question 2:
Can we have a mock activity to show us how we can use these strategies where we play the role of our students? At the same time can we include how to directly teach text structure to students so that it will lead to increased comprehension?
Question 3:
Chapter 10 and 11 discuss the research on multiple strategy instruction, but most of it is in an L1 context. How, if at all, can this research relate to an L2 context?
Emily
1.Reading comprehension is a goal in terms of reading instruction. When learners reach certain language level, will they encounter some linguistic problems which they cannot solve by themselves without resorting to grammar knowledge? Is there any case in which a learner, especially an ESL or EFL learner, who learns the target language in a natural way, namely a communicative approach? He or she can listen and speak communicatively. Also, he can read comprehensively. However, he/she cannot write accurately. In other words, some of his or her writing is lack of syntactic maturity. Under this case, should we as teachers teach them grammar explicitly and in what ways?
ReplyDelete2.Becoming a strategic reader is also an important goal of a second language reading class. What should the percentage of our instruction time be allotted in a reading class, where most students, because of the lack of linguistic competence, still in the process of struggling with their understanding of the texts?
3.Building awareness of discourse structure is also another important skill which helps students not only facilitate their reading process but also understand reading passages quickly and strategically if applied appropriately. Do we instruct students this skill within the text we use or do we find a separate text to teach students? Which one is better?
Graphic organizers (Barron, 1969) are hierarchically arranged tree diagrams of a text’s key terms and concepts. Grabe marks graphic organizer as helping learners develop reading comprehension abilities (Ch12, p.258-264). Not only “tree” diagrams, in fact, there are “fishbone”, “star”, “web”, “chain”, cycle”, “KWHL” and so on. Those graphic organizers enhance reading comprehension and the learning of new information from texts (p.258). I think they are very organized and helpful for students to establish the concept or structure of a text, rather than memorization of facts. I’ve used some of them, such as flowchart to guide junior high students the orders of events in a story. Students obtained a clearer idea from the chart. In college, I utilize graphic organizers to identify relationships among ideas when they are writing a composition.
ReplyDeleteHowever, students may need strong verbal skills for the graphic organizer to be effective as a pre-reading strategy. In addition, students in Taiwan may need more time to be trained by some skills to complete an organized chart of a new text. Therefore, instructors need to provide students with a great deal of direct instruction, practice, and feedback initially and instruction needs to be scaffolded as students grapple with more lengthy texts. However, we seem like that we don't use graphic organizers often to build students’ reading comprehension. We need the training as well. I hope we may have opportunities to share the skills of teaching by graphic organizer.
Some websites just FYI:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/graphicorganizers/
http://www.educationplace.biz/kids/hme/k_5/graphorg/
http://edhelper.com/teachers/graphic_organizers.htm
Strategic reading is also elaborated in the book of Keiko Koda, “Insights into second language reading: a cross-linguistic approach.” In her book, Ms. Koda presented many studies to support the importance of reading strategies. Based on the study about the strategies used by Taiwanese students, they were quite confused by unfamiliar words regardless of their English proficiency. High English proficiency learners used more global strategies in Chinese reading while they used more local ones in English reading. Koda (2005) claimed that when readers perceived two languages were similar, they tended to use similar strategies in both Chinese and English reading. Moreover, she also added that a person good at both languages viewed L1 & L2 in the say way; therefore, the same strategies were applied to both L1 & L2 reading. My first question is “how can teachers make Taiwanese learners of English transfer their strategy in Chinese reading to English reading?”
ReplyDeleteThe significance of strategic reading has been highly emphasized in numerous studies; however, strategic reading cannot stand alone without readers’ desire or intention to do so (Koda, 2005). My second question is “how can teachers do to arouse learners’ desire to use strategies assisting in reading comprehension?”
This week’s reading talked a lot about methodologies and strategies. Earlier in the semester, several classmates stated that they are reading teachers here in Taiwan. I am curious which of these methodologies or strategies are commonly used here in Taiwan by NNET teaching ESL/EFL? I’m also curious which of these methodologies or strategies are commonly used here in Taiwan to teach L1 reading?
ReplyDeleteIn Grabe’s speech at ETA, I heard him mention discourse structure graphic organizer, and I could not understand it very well at that time. However, when I read Chapter 12—Building awareness of discourse structure, I have a better understand of the term. From page 255 to page 259, Grabe explains in detail discourse-structure awareness and graphic organizers. He gives some examples like semantic maps, anticipation guides, concept maps, outline grids, tree diagrams, hierarchical summaries, and discourse-based graphic organizers. Then on page 258, he gives other examples such as comparison-contrast and problem-solution. These examples really help me understand the term.
ReplyDeleteIt’s an interesting finding that a spatial graphic representation is helpful for reading comprehension. However, going back the structure of English sentences, I find this finding reasonable. It is useful when doing reading instruction, particularly on meaning instruction and analyzing the structure of the text. Meanwhile, Rosalie’s third website quite practical. Thanks for the sharing, Rosalie!
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 11, Grabe pointed our current research on multiple-strategy instruction, I would like to share my opinions about collaborative strategic reading. I believe it has been commonly employed in L2 classrooms because this instruction involves consistent cooperating, and scaffolding. Group work and collaboration among students and with the teacher are strongly encouraged. I will use this approach in teaching reading in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of using graphic organizer forms (p. 213, 238, 257, 261), like Grade provided in the appendix of Chapter 12 (pp. 262-264) functions similarly as one of the eight required journal papers presented by Akio Suzuki et al. (2008, pp. 591-616) and currently being read in an attempt to be skillfully instructed in foreign language reading contexts. Sometimes, using such method via Word-formatted handouts previously posted onto e-Campus online learning system interests the learners in my classes. Adopting such helpful visual aids may to some extent facilitate our novice learners’ motivation also via group work, collaboration, and extended reading (pp. 238, 261).
ReplyDeleteThe idea of explicitly, intentionally and consciously using the strategy (pp. 220-221, 224, 229, 239, 240) of “thinking aloud” (pp. 234-235) while reading aloud (p.235) to the students on the basis of activating their prior or background knowledge (p. 210, 214, 231-233, 235, 237-239, 241, 248), forming questions (p. 209, 237-238, 239, 241), and clarifying information, and others are really supportive to help them read skillfully (pp. 220, 221, 229, 240). In the process of doing that, monitoring comprehension (pp. 211-212, 228-232, 234, 236, 238-241), inferencing (p, 209, 213, 224, 228, 236, 241), questioning the author (p. 171, 231, 235), even distinguishing the discourse-level genres (pp. 248-249, 255) for functional, differentiated, social and communicative purposes, and others, push our poor (p.247) and less-skilled (pp. 246-247) readers to be more active (pp. 221-222, 228-229, 234, 237).
My first question, to be honest, goes to I’m always wondering what if the required English course were not required but closely connected to us foreign/ second learners’ real life. With extensive exposure and practice (p, 216) and recognition and awareness of structure (p. 217), or simply putting grammar instruction only part of the reading course, we reading teachers may facilitate our readers what they know (metacognitive awareness) (p. 220, 222-223, 225, 239, 240) what they can do (metacognitive control) (pp. 222-223, 225-226). The idea of routinizing (p. 226, 230, 240) strategic processes in reading seems to be supportive our readers to be engaged.
Aside from several incompletely explored topics on pages 196, 199, 209, 210, 212, 214, and 215 in Chapter 10, pages 232, 234, 236, and 239, my personal attention or second question goes to whether we reading teachers may make more efforts on L2 reading strategy instruction (p. 239) so as to help our poor and less proficient readers a better understanding in text reading.