READING SKILL

                                 

Until now, our experience as English students in primary school has not been very successful. That includes our experience improving reading skills. Generally speaking, our reading classes followed a similar structure, starting with an aloud text lecture (embedded in a weak context provided by the textbook) and a battery of questions, about content and/or questions with linguistic purposes (find verbs, synonyms…).

This approach is focused just on an intensive reading, and not on extensive reading, which fits more with the idea of reading a text with a communicative purpose, as we do it in real life, to get information from a text. To do so, we read guessing what’s next (jumping from word to word) and we do not concentrate in every single word on the text (we forget small words like in, and, so…), it is a lexical process.

The problem is that, for language learning we also need to focus on language, not only in text meaning. Therefore, we have to plan our lessons in a way that both kinds of reading are included, first with extensive reading, to get familiarized with the text (Top down questions), and then with an intensive reading focusing on language (Bottom-up questions).

Reading activities will have to be divided in three different stages:

-       Activities to do before reading the text, Pre-reading

-       Activities to do while reading the text, While-reading

-       Activities to do after reading the text, Post-reading

To begin with a question is always a good start, as it gives students a reason for reading. Questionnaires and debates are good options, in pre-reading and post-reading, always depending on how the teacher wants to lead the class.  Guessing games are a good example of while reading activities, like guessing the order of isolated sentences from text, or reading the first paragraph and guess what’s next…

It is essential that teachers become aware of the importance from the questions they prepare, as they should achieve higher cognitive levels to promote critical thinking (Bloom’s taxonomy).