Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of writing.

Proficient reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read.

Many educators in the USA believe that children need to learn to analyze text (comprehend it) even before they can read it on their own, and comprehension instruction generally begins in pre-Kindergarten or Kindergarten. But other US educators consider this reading approach to be completely backward for very young children, arguing that the children must learn how to decode the words in a story through phonics before they can analyze the story itself.

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What is Reading? Some Definitions

Chastain (1988) defines reading as "a receptive skill in that the reader is receiving a message from a writer.”

Ur (1996) defines reading as “reading and understanding”

Urquhart & Weir (1998) define it as “the process of receiving and interpreting information encoded in language form via the medium of print”.

Eskey (1988) defines it as “a constant interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing.”

Top 10 Ways to Improve Reading Skills

Nothing is more important to academic achievement than being a good reader. Parents know their children best and can provide the one-on-one time and attention that will lead them to success in reading. Here is a list of ways to help your children become more effective readers.

1. Set aside a regular time to read to your children every day.
Studies show that regularly reading out loud to children will produce significant gains in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and the decoding of words. Whether your children are preschoolers or preteens, it will increase their desire to read independently.

2. Surround your children with reading material.
Children with a large array of reading materials in their homes score higher on standardized tests. Tempt your kids to read by having a large supply of appealing books and magazines at their reading level. Put the reading materials in cars, bathrooms, bedrooms, family rooms, and even by the TV.

3. Have a family reading time.
Establish a daily 15 to 30 minute time when everyone in the family reads together silently. Seeing you read will inspire your children to read. Just 15 minutes of daily practice is sufficient to increase their reading fluency.

4. Encourage a wide variety of reading activities.
Make reading an integral part of your children's lives. Have them read menus, roadside signs, game directions, weather reports, movie time listings, and other practical everyday information. Also, make sure they always have something to read in their spare time when they could be waiting for appointments or riding in a car.

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Link: family education

Link: advantage canada

 

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Teaching reading comprehension

The U.S. National Reading Panel conducted a comprehensive literature search on teaching reading comprehension. They concluded that (1) vocabulary knowledge, (2) reading comprehension instruction based on reading strategies, and (3) practices were critical to effective reading comprehension teaching.

A strategy for reading comprehension is the technique called SQ3R. This stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. In order to get an understanding of the text, you should survey the chapters. This is a quick look at the title, headings and any subheadings. Look at any end of chapter questions as well. While surveying, you ask questions about the topics you have scanned. Questions like, "What did my teacher say about this chapter.

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Book

                                                                                         

 

 

 

 

 

 

Select Readings

by Linda Lee and Erik Gundersen

Description:

"Select Readings offers three levels of high-interest reading passages from authentic sources. These passages act as springboards into reading comprehension activities, reading skills development, vocabulary building, grammatical analysis practice, and thought-provoking discussion and writing.

 

book

Techniques for Effective Reading

By: Hossein Farhady

Description:

A step by step instruction to efficient reading. Ample opportunities to learn and practice reading techniques and skills. Graded practice tests . samples and reading tests .

 

Methods of teaching reading

1.   Phonics

2.   Look and say

3.   Language experience

4.   Context support

Methods of teaching reading: Phonics

• It relies on children being taught the alphabet first
• Once they have learnt the letter sounds they will begin to blend two letters together to make simple words then three letters, then four and so forth
• Learning the sounds and their blends may be disinteresting for young children so you should keep it short and entertaining
• You can introduce one letter a day or one letter a week but the one letter a day method works quite well and it does not become boring for your child
• Using the phonics method, most children will learn to read basic words and sentences within three to six months

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Link: http://www.tampareads.com

Link: http://www.hookedonphonics.com

Link: http://www.zoo-phonics.com

Link: http://www.riggsinst.org/index.shtml

Methods of teaching reading: Look and say

• Children learn to recognize whole words or sentences rather than individual sounds
• child will look at a word which you sound and in turn will repeat the sound (the word)
• Flashcards with individual words written on them are used for this method often accompanied with a related picture
• It is also recommended with this method to use whole short sentences rather than individual words
• By making word cards you can create different sentences again and again
• This is not a good method if you don't include pictures

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Link: http://www.sntp.net/education/look-see.htm

Link: http://www.teachingtoread.com/pages/MethodBenefits

Methods of teaching reading: Language experience

• This particular method actually uses your child's own words to help him/her read
• This way your child will remember much better what is written
• Write underneath the drawing a description your child gives for the drawing
• Students are involved in planning, experiencing, responding to, and recording the experience
• Some parents use this method as a first approach to reading in order to help their child understand that what they've drawn and what the parent has written is a form of communication between the child and parent.

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Link: http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/ela/e_literacy/language.html

Link: http://www.cal.org/NCLE/DIGESTS/LANG_EXPER.HTML  

 

 

Methods of teaching reading: Context support

• When your child is just learning to read it is important to choose books that really interest them
• Some books are especially written to support this method of learning.
• You may like to try this method of long and short text or maybe combine it with one of the other methods above.

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Link: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/isbe/isbecon.htm

Link: http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr029.shtml

Article (2002): Extensive Reading in an Asian Context -- An Alternative View_Thomas Robb-Kyoto Sangy

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl

Reading in a Foreign Language

Volume 14, No. 2, October 2002

ISSN 1539-0578

 

Day and Bamford present "ten top principles" for extensive reading. The use of the word principle implies that these assertions should be valid for all settings where extensive reading is practiced. I would like to argue, however, that in Japan and probably in many other countries, adherence to some of these "principles" might undermine the primary intent of ER, which is to have our students read more in order to increase their exposure to syntax, lexis and perhaps culture of the target language.

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Extensive reading

Extensive reading is an approach to language learning, including foreign language learning. The idea behind extensive reading is that a lot of reading of interesting material that is slightly below, at, or barely above the full comprehension level of the reader will foster improved language skills. Graded readers are often used. For foreign-language learners, some researchers have found that the use of glosses for "difficult" words is advantageous to vocabulary acquisition (but at least one study finds it has no effect). A number of studies report significant incidental vocabulary gain in extensive reading in a foreign language (e.g., Huckin and Coady ). Advocates claim it can enhance skill in speaking as well as in reading.

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What is Extensive Reading? a Definition

According to Carrel and Carson (1997), “extensive reading…generally involves rapid reading of large quantities of material or longer readings (e.g., whole books ) for general understanding, with the focus on the meaning of what is being read than on the language.”

Different names for Extensive Reading-Elley & Mangubhai, 1983

1.   Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading (USSR )

2.    Drop Everything and Read (DEAR )

3.    Silent Uninterrupted Reading for Fun ( SURF )

4.    Book Flood Approach ( BFA )

Characteristics of successful ER programs

1.    Students should read large amounts of materials.

2.    Students usually choose what they want to read.

3.    Reading materials vary in terms of topic and genre.

4.    The material is within their level of comprehension.

5.    Students usually take part in post-reading activities

6.    Teachers read with their students, thus modeling enthusiasm for reading.

7.    Teachers and students keep track of student progress.

How extensive reading is different from Intensive Reading?

In intensive reading:

1) Students normally work with short texts with close guidance from the teacher.

2) The aim of IR is to help students:         

       a) obtain detailed meaning from the text  

       b) develop reading skills

       c) enhance vocabulary and grammar knowledge.

Note: It is important to note that ER & IR should not be seen as being in opposition, as both serve different but complementary purposes.

The benefits of Extensive Reading

ER is seen as offering many advantages, some of which are as follows:

1.    enhanced language learning in such areas as spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and text structure

2.    increased knowledge of the world

3.    improved reading and writing skill

4.    greater enjoyment of reading

5.    more positive attitude toward reading

6.    highly possibility of developing a reading habit.

Why aren’t we all doing ER?

1.    overemphasis on intensive reading

2.    ER doesn’t sound teacher-directed

3.    ER doesn’t sound practical in nature

4.    It is not directly assessed.

Reading strategies

Before the 1980s, little comprehension instruction occurred in the United States (National Reading Panel, 2000). Palinscar and Brown (1984) developed a technique called reciprocal teaching that taught students to predict, summarize, clarify, and ask questions for sections of a text. The technique had positive outcomes. Since then, the use of strategies like summarizing after each paragraph have come to be seen as effective strategies for building students' comprehension. The idea is that students will develop stronger reading comprehension skills on their own if the teacher gives them explicit mental tools for unpacking text (Pressley, 2006).

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http://esllanguageschools.suite101.com/article.cfm/

strategies_for_differentiating_instruction

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Reading Strategies

Before	During	After	Reading Strategy	Description
	*	*	Annolighting A Text	This active reading strategy links concept of highlighting key words and phrases in a text and annotating those highlights with marginal notes.
	*	*	Annotating A Text	Annotating a text is an effective strategy to promote active and critical reading skills; this strategy provides a number useful acronyms that students can use to remember different elements of writer's craft when reading and annotating a text.
*			Anticipation Guide	Anticipation guides are typically used as a pre-reading strategy and help to engage students in thought and discussion about ideas and concepts that they will encounter in the text.
*			Checking out the Framework	This strategy provides students with suggestions for previewing texts of different genre in order to read strategically based on their purposes for reading the text.
	*	*	Collaborative Annotation	This strategy engages students in a process of co-constructing their interpretations of a text through a collaborative annotation activity.

 

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Link:http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Reading/Reading%20Strategies/reading%20strategies%20index.htm

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Strategies for Reading Comprehension-Brown

1.   Identify your purpose in reading.

By doing so, you know that what you are looking for and can weed out potential distracting information.

2.   Use graphemic rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (esp. for beginners)

At the beginning levels of learning English, one of the difficulties students encounter in learning to read is making the correspondences between spoken and written English. They may need hints and explanations about certain English orthographic rules and peculiarities.

 

3.   Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension ( for intermediate to advanced learners )

You can help your intermediate-to-advanced level students increase efficiency by teaching a few silent reading rules:

a)   You do not need to "pronounce" each word to yourself.

b)   Try to visually perceive more than one word at a time, preferably phrases.

c)   Unless a word is absolutely crucial to global understanding, skip over it and try to infer its meaning from its context.

4.   Skim the text for main ideas.

Skimming consists of quickly running one's eye across a whole text for its gist. Skimming gives readers the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic, or message.

 

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Strategies to Facilitate Second Language Literacy Development -Celce-Murcia

The following strategies can help ELLs develop their literacy abilities as well as provide practice in some of the areas required by literacy standards.

 

1.     Expose Students to the Many Uses of Print around Them

Label items in the room.

Focus attention on the print around the class-morn, school, or neighborhood.

Manage aspects of classroom business in writing.

Establish a regular plate to post announcements or messages.

Record the discussions on chart paper; keep these posted as long as a theme is being studied.

Create areas in the morn for 'profit- literacy pur­poses.

Display different genres of reading and writing materials or books.

 

2.   Provide Opportunities for Children to Read More Extensively on a Subject

Have students investigate topics of interest related to the content or theme being studied, writing up their findings or presenting them orally to the class. Internet research and projects are excel­lent sources of extensive reading material.

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Principles for designing Interactive Reading technique -Brown

1.   Make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of specific instruction in reading skills.

2.   Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating

Choose a material that is relevant to the students' goals in learning to read English. Approaches that offer a degree of intrinsic motivation are:

a)   Language Experience Approach (LEA): where the students create their own material for reading.

b)   Approaches in which learners are given choices in selecting reading materials

c)   Carefully sequenced readings and instructional strategies that are success-oriented

d)   Offer opportunities for learners to gauge their progress through periodic instructor-initiated and self-assessments.

3.   Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts.

Christine Nuttal (1996) offered three criteria for choosing reading texts for students:

a)   Suitability of content: materials that students will find interesting, enjoyable challenging, and appropriate for their goals in learning English.

b)   Exploitability: a text that facilitates the achievement of certain language and content goals, that is exploitable for instructional tasks and techniques, and that is integratable with other skills.

c)   Readability: a text with lexical and structural difficulty that will challenge students without overwhelming them.

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Different Approaches to Reading-Chastain

The approach teachers employ to teach reading and students follow to learn to read depends on their functional definition of learning, language, and reading.

There are two approaches based on a difference of opinion exists as to how meaning is derived from the written material.

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Characteristics of Efficient and Inefficient Reading-Ur, 1996

The following table invites you to look at characteristics of efficient and inefficient reading:

	Efficient	Inefficient
1.   Language	The language of the text is comprehensible to the learners.	The language of the text is too difficult.
2.   Content	The content of the text is accessible to the learners, they know enough about it to be able to apply their own background knowledge.	The text is too difficult in the sense that the content is too far removed from knowledge in the experience of the learners.
1.   Speed	The reading progresses fairly fast: mainly because the reader has "automatized" recognition of common combinations and does not waste time working out each word or group of words anew.	The reading is slow: the reader does not have a large "vocabulary" of automatically recognized items.
2.   Attention	The reader concentrates on the significant bits, and skims the rest: may even skip parts he or she knows to be significant.	The reader pays the same amount of attention to all parts of the text.
3.   Incomprehensible Vocabulary	The reader takes incomprehensible vocabulary in his or her stride: guess its meaning from the surrounding text, or ignores it and manages without; uses a dictionary only when these strategies are insufficient.	The reader cannot tolerate incomprehensible vocabulary items: stops to look every one up in a dictionary, and/or feels discouraged from trying to comprehend the text as a whole.
4.   Prediction	The reader thinks ahead, hypothesizes, predicts.	The reader thinks ahead, deals with the text as it comes.
5.   Background Information	The reader has and uses background information to help understand the text.	The reader does not have or use background information.
6.   Motivation	The reader is motivated to read: by interesting content or challenging task.	The reader has no particular interest in reading.
7.   Purpose	The reader is aware of a clear purpose in reading: for example, to find out something, to get pleasure.	The reader has no clear purpose other than to obey the teacher's instruction.
8.   Strategies	The reader uses different strategies for different kinds of reading.	The reader uses the same strategy for all texts.

Micro skills for reading comprehension-Brown

(1)     Discriminate among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic pattern of English.

(2)     Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short term memory.

(3)     Process writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose.

(4)     Recognize a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.

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Some assumptions about the nature of reading-Ur, 1996

1.    We need to perceive and decode letters in order to read words.

When beginning to read a text, or where there is little or no helpful context, we depend on decoding letters to understand words; but as soon as there is a meaningful context we tent to bring our own interpretation to the word according to its 'general' shape and the sense of text rather than according to its exact component letters. Thus, reading activities should stress reading for understanding rather than exact decoding of letters.

 

2.    We need to understand all the words in order to understand the meaning of a text.

We need to understand some words in order to understand the meaning of a text, but by no means all: we often 'skip' or misread words in order to make sense of the whole more quickly or conveniently. The implication of this for teaching is probably that we should not insist strongly on our learners understanding every word, but rather encourage them to go for the overall meaning of a text.

 

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Types of classroom reading performance-Brown

1. Oral and silent reading

2. Intensive and extensive reading

 

1. Oral and silent reading:

oral reading can serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills, double as a pronunciation check, and serve to add some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short segment of a reading passage.

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Issues Regarding Reading SKILL-Brown

1.    Bottom-up and top-down processing

In Bottom-up processing, readers must first recognize a multiplicity of linguistic signals and use their linguistic data-processing mechanism to impose some sort of order on these signals. These data-driven operations obviously require a sophisticated knowledge of the language itself. From among all the perceived data, the reader selects the signals that make some sense, that cohere, that "mean".

Top-down or conceptually driven is a processing in which we draw on our own intelligence and experience to understand text. As Nuttall compares bottom-up processes with the image of a scientist with a magnifying glass or microscope examining all the minute details of phenomenon, while top-down processing is like taking an eagle's eye view of a landscape below. Such a picture reminds us that field-independent and field-dependent cognitive styles are analogues to bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively.

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Research on Reading a Second Language

By the 1970s, first language reading research was dominant, trying to solve the problems of children who could not read. However, with Goodman’s (1970) article, second language reading research became considerably important.

Rivers (1981)also believes Reading can be most easily maintained at a high level by students themselves without further help from the teacher

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First Language Reading Research and Instruction-R. & Renandya

There are 10 major findings of Research in L1 settings for reading instruction. These highlight the:

1.    importance of developing letter-sound correspondences for beginning reading

2.    importance of word recognition and the relatively complete processing of words in a text.

3.    necessity for a large recognition vocabulary for fluent reading

4.    need for reasonable reading rates for processing

5.    usefulness of graphic representations for comprehension instruction

6.    value of extensive reading

7.    importance of dialogue and teacher modeling in comprehension instruction

8.    facilitate the role of Content-Based instruction

9.    need for students to become strategic readers

10. influence of varying social contexts on the development of reading abilities

Second Language Reading Research and Instruction-R. Renandya

The many different L2 contexts do not lead to exactly the same set of findings as for L1 contexts. Research in L2 reading development have informed at least the following 8 issues:

1.    the importance of discourse structure and graphic representations

2.    the importance of vocabulary in language learning

3.    the need for language awareness and attending to language and genre form

4.    the existence of L2 proficiency threshold in reading

5.    the importance of metacognitive awareness and strategy learning

6.    the need for extensive reading

7.    the benefits of integrating reading and writing

8.    the importance of Content-Based Instruction

L2 Reading versus L1 Reading-Schmitt, 2002

Major differences between L1 and L2 reading can be categorized according to three groupings:

1. Linguistic & Processing differences

2. Individual & Experiential differences

3. Socio-cultural & Institutional factors

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Some questions/suggestions about Beginning Reading- Ur, 1996

Q: 1. should we teach orally for a while, then reading? Or start reading and writing from the beginning?

Answer 1: It is generally preferable to begin reading only after the learners have some basic knowledge of the spoken language.

 

Q.2: Should we teach them single letters, and gradually build these up into words? Or teach the written form of meaningful words first, letting them to come to the different component letters by analysis later?

Answer. 2: It is most practical and productive to begin with single letters, starting with the most common and useful.

 

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Knowledge of the Psychology of Reading and Reading Development: Basic Facts about Reading

·         Learning to read is not natural or easy for most children.

·         Reading is an acquired skill, unlike spoken language, which is learned with almost any kind of contextual exposure.

·         The prolonged, gradual, and predictable progression of skill in print translation attests to the difference between processing spoken and written language.

·         Teachers must be reflective and knowledgeable about the content they are teaching.

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Screen Reading

 

Screen reading is the act of reading a text on a computer screen. It is often contrasted with the act of reading a text on a printed page.

In a study conducted by Jakob Nielsen, a leading web usability expert who co-founded usability consulting company Nielsen Norman Group with Donald Norman, it was discovered that generally people read 25% slower on a computer screen in comparison with a printed page. In eye tracking tests, Nielsen also discovered that people read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern that consists of two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

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