Some ways to redesign the activities in teaching reading comprehension of the 12th english at quang xuong1 high school

The content and topics of reading tasks in the exammostly focus on those students learn in reading passage – English 12.. In order to overcome some of the problems above, I strongly reco

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 REASON FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC:

Nowadays, English plays an integral part in our society It appears as atool, a means of communication It helps people in different cultures, withdifferent languages can understand one another Not only is English an essentialmeans in international communication but it is also a job which can help us get

a lot of money Estimates vary about how many people speak Englishworldwide but some believe English-speakers are likely to number in thebillions English crosses cultures, countries and industries and is often used as a

‘common tongue’ if neither person is a native speaker This means teachingpeople English can be truly rewarding – because students of English have somany new opportunities and doors open to them thanks to their skills With itssuch high roles, English now becomes the compulsory subject in the NationalCurriculum and is the obligatory subject in all examinations in Viet Nam

With the changes in the National Exam for Upper Secondary Educationthese recent years, reading comprehension covers 50 % of total content of theexam paper It includes 3 small parts: gap filling, reading comprehension 1,reading comprehension 2 The content and topics of reading tasks in the exammostly focus on those students learn in reading passage – English 12 Theability in doing these reading tasks depends on what they get and how they learnfrom English 12 – Reading comprehension

In National Curriculum for English – upper secondary education, 7- period, especially in grade 12, students face up to a huge amount of information,knowledge and skills For the teachers ourselves, we meet a lot of difficulties inteaching a great amount of knowledge, whichever is also important and canappear in a test The topics in Reading text – English 12 spread over a largenumber of fields such as cultures, history, science… whereas some teachers stilllack general knowledge in some fields as well as being short of material sources

year-to get year-to know As a result, we get barriers in leading the lesson (Warm – up)

The time of a period for a class is also a problem, as it is too short, whilethere are too many things for the teacher to convey Besides, the number ofstudents in each class is too high, which makes it difficult to cover all of them inshortly 45 – minute period That’s why some students during the lesson canmake sense of the knowledge teacher is trying to convey In total, thedifficulties we may get in the process of teaching Reading skill can be:

 Too many students in the class (often over 40 per class)

 Different levels among students

 Some reading texts are too long, or there are so many new words, newinformation, which make it difficult for teacher to solve the wholelesson

 Limited time to make some opened –ended questions  can notexploit the ability of thinking among students

 Some questions and pictures have little relevance to the topic of thelesson Besides, some of them are out of date

Students themselves in the reading period have a lot of difficulties as well:

 Try to read all words appearing in the passage and translate intoVietnamese, while there are a lot of new words

 Focus too much on the meaning of individual words, forget the mainideas

 Do not have the skill of totalizing the main points of a reading passage

 General knowledge is limited

 Unaware of the importance of learning English Lack of the motivation instudying Do not really be active, especially those from country likeQuang Xuong

In order to overcome some of the problems above, I strongly recommendsome redesigns specially for teaching reading comprehension in English 12,mostly focus on some changes in the tasks in each period, so that I can help my

students get better result in learning reading comprehension My theme “ Some

ways to redesign the activities in teaching reading comprehension of the

12 th English at Quang Xuong 1 High School” aims at helping students easily

do the tasks they are given in each lesson, and better understand the wholereading passage Consequently, they can improve their skill in readingcomprehension I want to use this theme for further study and then share withother colleagues, so that in some extend, helping them as a source of referencematerial in their teaching career

2 AIMS OF THE STUDY:

In this paper, I will discuss briefly the tenets of reading comprehension, thecognitive tasks involved in reading as well as the various activities teachers use

in teaching reading comprehension By redesigning some activities for tasks intextbook – English 12, teacher can help students approach the reading skilleffectively, according to the process: PPP

Presentation  Practice  Production

If this is done well, learners can build their language competence, progress intheir reading ability, become more independent in their studies, acquire culturalknowledge, and develop confidence and motivation to carry on learning

3 SCOPE OF THE STUDY:

Reading texts in Textbook English 12 with students at Quang Xuong 1 High

school

4 METHODS OF STUDY:

My work bases on some basic methods below:

experience  observing  collecting  consulting  experimenting.

 Getting experiences through the practical teaching of myself

 Observing the facts and getting information: Through students’ relatingtheory achievement as well as their solving relating exercises

 Collecting results through some surveys

 Studying references, materials relating Consulting some colleagues

 Experiment: Confirming the correct answers from the mistakes studentsmake.

PART II: DEVELOPMENTS

1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND:

- My own teaching experiences during some years in high school

- The basic background of knowledge about the reading comprehension skill

- The consultation of some reference materials about reading comprehension

- The idea contribution from the colleagues

- The common difficulties and mistakes learners often get during theirlearning

Hedge (2003) states that any reading component of an English languagecourse may include a set of learning goals for

- The ability to read a wide range of texts in English This is the long- range goal most teachers seek to develop through independent readers outside classroom.

- building a knowledge of language which will facilitate reading ability

- building schematic knowledge

- the ability to adapt the reading style according to reading purpose (i.e skimming, scanning)

- developing an awareness of the structure of written texts in English

2 THE ACTUAL SITUATION:

Different levels and intellectual abilities of learners are also real hurdle,which make most teachers find difficult in applying methods in impartingknowledge This inspires us ceaselessly to try to look for solutions

Besides, some teachers find it hard to teach some reading contents that refer

to such field they themselves are not familiar

3 THEORY:

3.1 DESCRIPTION OF THE SUBJECT:

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its

meaning, and to integrate it with what the reader already knows Fundamentalskills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning ofwords, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability

to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in

it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identifythe main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions in a passage, ability

to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passageand determine its tone, to understand the situational mood (agents, objects,

temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.)

conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc and finallyability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw

inferences about the writer (discourse-semantic).

To help students with their reading comprehension skill, firstly, the teacherneeds to help them understand and identify clearly which types of reading skillthey are going to deal with

According to the way of reading, there are two types:

+ Aloud reading: to check the phonetics and its relating terms.

+ Silent reading: to check the speed, the understanding towards the material.

According to the purpose, reading activity is divided into many types:

+ Reading for pleasure

+ Scanning

+ Skimming

+ Reading for further study.

+ Reading for analysis

3.2 DATA COLLECTION AND PROCEDURE:

3.2.1 Data collection:

The reading passages in textbook often aims at helping students not only get

to know information, broaden their knowledge in some specific fields, enrich

their vocabularies but also help them to practice reading skill, so that they can

do well in any reading materials In a reading lesson, teacher does not providethe whole content It’s the students who try to understand what the wholereading passage talks about and how to solve the tasks that relate The teachermust be a guider, a helper who solve any problems raising during the lesson.Like teaching other skills of language, teaching reading skill methodincludes many skills and is done through many techniques In generaleducation, most of the reading passages are designed for intensive and extensivereading In order to get success in approaching the reading passage, both teacherand students must have an aim clearly for it:

3.2.2 Procedure:

Contemporary reading tasks, unlike the traditional materials, involve three

phase procedures: pre-, while-, and post- reading stages In each stage, teacher

must organize some activities in order to solve the duties

a Pre – reading activities:

The pre-reading stage helps in activating the relevant schema Most teacherstend to neglect the pre-reading procedure claiming that there is not enough time

In fact, pre-reading activities motivate students before the actual reading takesplace For example, teachers can ask students questions that arouse their interestwhile previewing the text Drucker (2003) suggests the following procedureteachers can take before reading a text:

“…relate the passage students are going to read to something that is familiar to them Next, provide a brief discussion question that will engage the students and, after that, provide an overview of the section they are about to read Name the selection, introduce the characters, and describe the plot (up to,

but not including, the climax) Last, direct the students to read the story and look for particular information.”

Similarly, Abraham (2002) states that an interactive approach “demands thatthe teachers activate the students’ schema” during the pre-reading phase byhelping “students recognize the knowledge that they already have about thetopic of a text” (p 6), i.e through discussion of titles, subheadings,photographs, identifying text structure, previewing, etc Such activities arecalled “pre-reading strategies” As Orasanu (1986) explicates the notion of

“schema” (or background knowledge) which “… can be thought of as a framework containing slots to be filled by incoming text information For example, if a reader is presented with a text about going on vacation, he or she would likely have a slot in the vacation schema for packing a suitcase Text statements about folding clothes or carrying bags could then fill the slot If a reader did not have a vacation schema with a "suitcase-packing slot," the information about clothes and bags might not be readily understood.”

Pre – reading activities include the activities and techniques that gain thetargets:

 Arouse interest

 Set up the context

 Create reason for reading

 Pre-teach structures, new words

 Introduce briefly the topic, content

 Eliciting, guiding questions

 Predict the context

 Give expectation

b. While – reading activities:

The aim of while-reading stage (or interactive process) is to developstudents’ ability in tackling texts by developing their linguistic and schematicknowledge This phase is the most important one because it is the most active

one among the three stages Therefore, Shahidullah (1995; 1996) suggests thefollowing while-reading activities :

1 Guessing meaning from context,

2 Analyzing sentences,

3 Surveying text structure,

4 Extracting specific information,

5 Getting detailed information,

6 Answering pre-set questions,

7 Matching text with pictures diagrams etc.,

This stage is to check students whether they understand the lesson or notthrough some tasks, which are done during the reading activity or after that Thetasks in this stage are various:

 Choose the sentence A,B, or C that is nearest meaning to the given sentence.

 Answer the questions.

 Explain the meaning of the italicized words/ phrases in the following sentences.

 Give Vietnamese equivalents to the following words/ phrases.

 Decide whether the following statements are true(T) or false(F).

 Choose the best title for the passage.

 Choose A, B, C, or D to complete the following sentences about the reading passage.

 Scan the passage and complete each of following sentences.

c Post – reading activities:

After finishing the tasks, the teacher can check up students on whetherthey understand the whole reading passage, whether they can apply what theyhave just read to the new task…

Haller (2000, p 21-24) modeled a number of school-based post-reading

activities which enhance learning comprehension through the use of matching

exercises, cloze exercises, cut-up sentences, and comprehension questions For

the cloze activity, the teacher puts blanks in the story in place of some of thewords, usually every fifth word but not the first or the last words in the text Acut-up sentence activity uses sentences from the given text and helps learners togain confidence by manipulating the text in various ways The use of lines inmatching can be sometimes confusing for beginners Haller proposes the use of

“paper strips” at the beginning where a student is given the strips and asked tomatch for example a name with its corresponding activity Later students canwork in pairs as they understand the concept of matching and, finally, theteacher can introduce matching through lines For extra practice students cancopy their matching word slips onto another sheet of paper

The activities in this stage include:

+ Summarize the passage, based on the years: 1967, 1998,…

+ Summarized the reading passage by writing ONE sentence for each paragraph.

+ Fill in each space of the following paragraph with a suitable word.

+ Make a comparison between……

+ Discuss the advantages of….

+ Scan the passage and make brief notes.

+ Discuss the questions.

3.3 DATA ANALYSIC

3.3.1.Learners’ Analysis

Question one: What is your purpose from reading?

Most of learners (52%) said that their purpose from reading is to enrichtheir general knowledge, while (20%) state that their objective from reading is

to enlarge their vocabulary knowledge, the same percentage is the answer ofreading for the sake of answering needs related to their studies, while only(8%) claim that they read for pleasure For the purpose of knowing the kinds

of materials that learners’ best prefer this question was asked

Question two: what will you do if you do not understand when reading?

( 32%) of the informants state that when they read and do not understand theytry to translate to their mother tongue which is Arabic, while (32%) answeredthat they carry on reading without understanding, and (24%) of the participantssaid that they use the dictionary Only (13%) of them stop reading when they

do not understand the reading materials at hand

Some of the participants add that they ask the teacher or their classmateswhenever they come across some ambiguity in the text

Question three: What are the difficulties that you face when reading?

Some informants (48%) agree that when they often read they haveproblems with ambiguous words and that they cannot understand the whole text.while (20%) of them claim that they face problems with words that seem to beconfusing sometimes, like some deceptive words Just (16%) of the informantsanswer with the problems of reading aloud in the classroom, some of themsay that while they are reading loudly some of their classmates laugh at themwhen they cannot read perfectly, and for this reason they consider readingaloud as an obstacle As for difficulties of pronunciation, it was the samepercentage (16%)

Question four: What are the reasons behind reading difficulties?

When asked about the main reasons behind reading problems, (40%) oflearners agree that they do not have the habit to read, while (24%) of themconsidered that the main reason behind their reading problems is due to thelack of time and (20%) of the answer relate reading difficulty to the kind oftexts that they read Lastly, the remaining (16%) agree on the difficulty of thereading skill itself

3.3.2 Conclusion

The present practical part provides a practical analysis case study that wasdone both qualitatively and quantitatively by using two research tools In fact,from the data analysis phase, the finding showed that 12th grade learners cannot

read fluently, because they face a number of difficulties in readingcomprehension The results reveal that teachers related the learners’ readingcomprehension achievement mainly to their lack of reading habit; learners donot often read and this is due to the globalization age and under the use ofInformation and Communication Technologies, that is why the followingwriting seeks to present some suggestions and solutions in order to expand thelearners’ vocabulary knowledge, and thus to lead to a better comprehension

while reading 4 SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ ABILITIES IN READING COMPREHENSION SKILL: 4.1 Before - you - read activities:

These tasks are important for both teachers and learners, because theyprepare students for the text they are going to read In this respect, Abraham(2002) maintains that an interactive approach demands that the teachers shouldactivate the students’ schemata during the pre-reading phase by helping themrecognize their prior knowledge about the topic of the text From my ownexperience, I suggest some pre-reading activities, which are mostly used toarouse students’ own interests and take advantage of their own knowledge ofthe topic

Example 1: Unit 1: HOME LIFE – Part A: READING

By the end of the lessons, Students will be able to talk about home lifeand discuss the role of each member in the family

Instead of using questions in textbook, the teacher gives students handout, withthe following model:

Wash the dishes

Wash the clothes

Clean the house

Buy food for the family

Prepare the breakfast for the family

Cook dinner