Some techniques in teaching reading comprehensive lesons

On the other hand the content of the reading texts is often long and contains a lot of new words which are easy to make students discouraged.. - Students read silently - In classes for

INDEX

8 1 The reality of the teaching reading comprehension

lessons in English at secondary schools.

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16 II To the District Department of Education and

Training

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Although the English language doesn’t have the largest number of native

speakers in the world, it has the widest reach of any language spoken today Both native and second-language speakers of English are found on every continent, and English has become the lingua franca in many fields, including business, politics, science, technology, and entertainment, to name a few English is the working language of many international organizations, like NATO and the European Union, and it’s the language of global advertising It is also the most-used language of the internet, accounting for more than half of all websites For many people, learning English is a way to get access to a broader range of information, connections, and opportunities The importance of English is clear

Nowadays English has affirmed the role and the importance in schools, so raising the quality of teaching is the most important issue Reform teaching programme is applied, a wide range of problems of English teaching methodology also arise

The question is: How can the students comprehend the whole knowledge and use it competently?

Learning English is merely to learn a language Wanting to use this language skillfully, learners need to practice four basic skills: Listening Speaking -Reading - Writing -Reading skill plays the important role because it decides whether the students understand the contents they have just read or not As early as

in 6th grade, students were acquainted with short, easy to understand texts The higher the program gets, the more rigorous training skills are required If teachers

do not have good teaching methods, they will not convey all the content of the lessons On the other hand the content of the reading texts is often long and contains a lot of new words which are easy to make students discouraged

To meet the demand, each teacher needs to find the best method which is suitable for real situations and their students

Being a teacher of English, with the desire to bring my knowledge to convey

to my students, and find out my own teaching method, I would like to present to

the educational scientific council this year the theme: "Some techniques in teaching a reading comprehensive lesson" in lower secondary school.

B SOLUTION

I THEORITICAL BASES.

1 The importance of teaching reading skills:

Reading is an important and neccessary skill in language teaching and learning

in all grades In foreign language classes students read to get information, to check the events to find the answers to questions or clarify a particular issue If students cannot read, they will not receive and remember data and information permanently Everyday the students store information through letters, through learning from text books, from the advertisements, instructions, manual machines, equipment, news through newspapers, TV leaning to read means learners practise to recognize the letters and meaning of the information being read

It is more convenient for Vietnamese people to learn English than some other ethnic groups such as Chinese, Thai, Russian, Arabic people Since the system Vietnamese and English are almost the same, just some very little different alphabet

Z, W, J, F Depending on the purpose of the lesson, the teacher can teach reading

in several diffrent ways:

- The reader turns to read out loud (often applied in the beginner class and young people)

- The teacher reads, students read in books

- Students read silently

- In classes for beginners, students must be familiar with the combination of letters in the new writing system and based on the information given to understand the semantics of the words, phrases, clauses and the English sentences

The reading aloud a sentence or a text in English is a hard job for Vietnamese because English is not spelled as easily as Vietnamese In addition, there are many other factors also affect the reading aloud such as stresses, and intonation details because these factors can influence the expression of the meaning of words and sentences

In foreign language classes, reading is usually organized to consolidate the previous practice activities as listening and speaking activities

The reading in class under that method is often forced, because teachers often give the students exercises to perform To teach reading more effectively and in a more communicative way, teachers must have the preparations and make students feel the need to read

The reading texts should be accurated about language, rich and diverse in genre, with content relevant and enriching life experiences of students, causing excitement for reading not boring Directions perform exercises need to notice the reading techniques and discuss the expansion of the reading subject

2 A number of factors affect the teaching: [1]

According to some experts, such as Colvin & Root (1981); Havernson & Haynes (1982); Mege (1977); Thornis (1970) teachers need to pay attention to the requirements that affect the success of teaching reading skill to beginners, such as:

- The ability to concentrate in a minimum time of students

- Ability to read and understand the instructions

- Ability to read by yourself and read with others.

- Ability to co-operate with their classmates

- Ability to name each item in the picture

- Ability to read from left to right and read from top to bottom

- Ability to organize, classify (same / different)

- Ability to present the skills of function as ingenuity, clumsiness

- Ability to read a long paragraph

- Ability to distinguish from left to right, from top to bottom

- Ability to understand and shape symbols

- The ability to read the expression through gestures, facial expressions, body

- The ability to realize the idea from a picture expressing a real object

- Ability to recognize sound symbols and images

- Ability to recognize that the speech can be written

- Ability to recognize affirmative setences and questions that students have heard

- Ability to recognize and speak basic intonation patterns

- The ability to recognize the significance due to two-dimensional objects shown (books, paintings, photos )

These capabilities can be achieved through the process of training reading and writing that students perform The fact that students can get results quickly or slowly depend on the background knowledge that they have already learnt in their mother tongue, their health and acuity

There are also 8 other factors which affect the learning reading skill in a foreign language such as:

- Students who do not have certain secondary education ,they will find difficulty

in transfering knowledge and generalization Therefore they need to be guided carefully reading to increase attention

- Students often react in negative way to pages that are printed densely

- Students tend to concentrate the effort to decode the new words , while limited attention to the interpretation of texts

- Teachers can anticipate that students will have difficulty in reading and understanding the contents of text if text is not familiar with them

- Experience speaking of students are used to decode texts according to age and life experiences of the students for learning languages

- Reasoning ability, talk and understand because the conceptions such as words, phrases,sentences, sound and other conceptions have a positive impact on the success of the initial study

- The level of understanding the types of documents, depend on the age and experience of students for national cultures that is being learned

- Students study foreign languages ,they need to explane the involved

metaphors in writing, the idioms, and the cultural information of the languages which the peoples have learned more than the students learn their native language

II PRACTICAL BASES

1 The reality of the teaching reading comprehension lessons in English at secondary schools.

Although English has become an official subject at school, the promotion of its benefits has not been taken much interest Partly due to the limited facilities and teaching aids, but mostly due to the quality of teaching is not high, so it cannot attract the charm to learn of students This expresses in reading lessons Students always refuse to read a text which is full of new words On the other hand, most students are only interested in the meanings of words without pay attention to the content of the reading texts As a result they can not answer correctly questions about the reading Therefore the quality teaching decreases, does not satisfy the requirements of the programs

In addition, the role of the teacher can not mention the quality of teaching has improved or not, teaching methods are renovated to suit each lesson, each student

In the old textbooks, reading skill is trained simultaneously with the skills of listening, speaking and writing, new words and new structures in each reading lesson with familiar topics which students have already known ,teachers only make

up the questions and ask students to answer After the English textbooks were compiled again, reading skill is trained separately, innovation in teaching methods has been focused and compelled Many new topics are mentioned, the number of words increases Students feel overwhelmed, so the old method is no longer suitable Therefore, the teacher plays a key role in this : how to teach to both meet

real life requirements and improve the quality of their learning

III- IMPLEMENTATION MEASURES

Techniques used in each stage of a reading comprehensive lesson:

In teaching we can divide teaching reading into the following stages:

1 Pre – Reading stage:

In this stage, teachers should introduce extensively about topics which they are going to read, remind the information relating to students’ experiences through a number of activities such as: give prediction questions and help students predict the content of the text If the text is a conversation, the teacher may mention the place, the number of participants, and the relationship between people in the dialogue (family members, friends, acquaintances .) If it is an excerpt of a story, teacher can ask one or some students to remind the main events before

In some textbooks there are usually pictures along with texts, teachers should use these pictures to draw students’ attention to the content of the text by helping them to predict ideas and language that will be used in this lesson

- teacher usually mentions a few suggestive questions in this stage The questions should follow the order of events or developments theoretical of readings These questions present the basic structures of the reading and the means help students to predict the content of the reading, then read the text more naturally

Sometimes, teachers can ask students to skim the reading to have some general notion of information in the text By such activities : teachers can inspire students

"desire to read" and make students interested in the new topics.

Activities in this stage may vary according to the real situation of each school and student level The teacher can make one or two activities in this period

Example 1: English 8 - Unit 9: A first - aid course [2]

Teacher: You are going to read a text about first - aid, look at the pictures (the illustrative pictures hang on the board)

Can you guess what happened to the people in each picture? what do you call these in English?

Can you give first - aid instructions for each case? If not, ask teacher to

explain it to you then have a class discussion about it

Example 2 : English 8 - Unit 10: Recycling [3]

section: Read

Teacher: You are going to read a text about recycling Imagine That there are

millions ton of rubbish eliminated in our environment each day

How can they damage our lives if they are not recycled?

What kind of rubbish can we recycled?

What kind of rubbish can we reuse or reduce?

The following words may help: car tires, bottles, glass, drink cans, compost, refill, break up, melt Use dictionary or ask your teacher about the new words

- Students mark in the column "right" or "wrong" some given information : Read the statements and tick True or False

English 8 - Unit 11: Travelling around Vietnam [4]

True False

a Nha Trang is the seaside resort

b Đa Lat is recognized as a world Heritage Site by Unesco

c You can visit tribal villages in Sapa

d There are flights from Da lat to Hanoi everyday

e Ha Long Bay is known as the city of Enternal Spring

- Students guess and fill in some words, the appropriate language in the blanks of

a given passage:

Example: English 8 - Unit 4: Our Past [5]

Little Pea’s father is After his wife He married again

The step mother was very to Little Pea She had to do chores all day Her father was very upset He soon of the broken heart In the fall, the village held its harvest the Prince wanted to his wife from the village Little Pea didn’t have new clothes A fairy appeared and

magically changed Little Pea’s rags into As running to the festival, she dropped her The Prince found her shoe and wanted to her

- Students discussed before and give personal opinions on the subject of the essay

Example: You are going to read a text about the ways to learn language Look at

the pictures How do the people learn languages? Which is the best way to learn language?

- Predicting the meaning of some words or look up them in the dictionary

Example: English 6: Unit 16: Man and the Environment [6]

These words are necessary for your understanding of the text on “Environment” Are they similar to you? If not , look up their meanings in a good dictionary

destroy gas waste burn

trash coal pollute oil

- Teachers can organize games (use of words related to the lesson such as Bingo, questioniares )

2 While- Reading Stage:

In this stage, activities are organized to help students practice reading comprehension skill , some other reading skills that are combined in reading comprehension skills

The skills which are generally used in this stage are intensive reading and read extensive reading Intensive reading means readers understand all content that they have read and can answer questions about specific information that is expressed through the text

Extensive reading means students read for main ideas of the text; they do not need to understand every word or every idea Intensive reading helps students read extensive more effectively On the other hand, extensive reading will also make students more confident when exposing to the exact texts

For long reading texts, teachers ask students to read extensively in a few paragraphs and read intensively in the other paragraphs If we make students read a too long text intensively, they will lose their interest and there will not be enough time to train skimming skill

Readings in the old textbooks are usually compiled carefully, selectively and there is a limitation of language for the students to read intensively However, in the new textbook, reading texts are diverse and precise With extensive reading,

students will understand main ideas of the reading text even though their English is not so good

In grade 8th,9th, we shouldn’t ask students read aloud the text because it is

so difficult for them A specific reading text has many new words which students

do not know how to pronounce, the conversation may require an understanding of the structures, special intonation that students do not know Reading a text which hasn’t been prepared in advance will make students feel less confident, hesitant, or mispronounce, which will affect other students While reading aloud texts many students will pay attention to the pronounciation more than the meaning of the text,

so that students can read well but understand little, even they do not understand what they are reading

First , the teacher should read the whole text or let students hear the tape which is read by native speakers, then has students read the text silently Teachers will help students who have trouble while reading Students should be asked to

prepare before reading aloud texts so that their reading doesn’t take much time and inefficiently

Teachers also need to change reading techniques In extensive reading, silent reading is very appropriate and effective Teacher limits the reading time and then give some questions to check students’comprehension Most of the literature discourse, discussion is written to read silently only genres like poetry, children's songsand conversation are written to read aloud Therefore, teachers should depend on the category of reading texts to apply suitable reading techniques If we ask students to read aloud, they should be prepared in advance and we can make changes in a number of ways as follow:

- For classes of beginning level, teachers read first , the class repeat sentence by sentence

- In mass classes, apart from repeating teachers, students can read after the tape Repeating the tape is often harder than repeat the teachers because the voice

in the tape is often more inaudible than the teacher’s voice

- The teacher read a passage, then the whole class reread

- A student read sentence by sentence after the teacher

- The class is divided into groups of two or more Each group prepare a section, later a representative of each group will read a passage In case the reading

is a dialogue, groups cast and prepare Teachers discusses with the group that have difficulty with pronunciation (stress, rhythm and intonation) Then each group will play the role to practice before the whole class

During the lesson teachers should raise a number of questions to guide students’ reading and check their understanding of the information in the text, and also to measure the level of students, so teachers can explain unclear details The content

of questions need to direct the attention of students Teacher needs to read unknown sample before or while students are reading

Ex: Read and arrrange the paintings in the right order, complete the table and answer the questions

Example: English 8: Unit 13: Lesson: 3 Read

I Objectives:

By the end of the lesson, Ss will be able to understand Christmas which is an

important festival in many countries around the world

II Language contents:

1 Vocabulary: spread, Christmas carol, Patron saint, jolly, decorate

2 Grammar:

III Teaching aids:

Cards, extra board, text book

IV Procedures:

Warm-up

( 5’ )

? Ask Ss some questions:

+ What do you often do at Christmas?

+ Do you celebrate the Christmas?

* Brainstorming:

Christmas tree Christmas hat Christmas carols Christmas card Santa claus

Whole class

Pre-reading

( 7’ )

* Pre-teach vocab:

spread (v) Christmas carol (n) Patron saint (n) Jolly (adj) Decorate (v)

- Set the scene: Christmas is an important festival in many countries around the world

* Grid:

Christmas Specials Place of origin Date

Riga

mid-19 th century Christmas carols

USA

Whole class

While-reading

( 20’ )

? Ask Ss to read the paragraph again and complete the grid

? Work in groups and fill in the grid

? Give the correct answers

* Answers:

Christmas Specials Place of origin Date

The christmas tree Riga Early 1500s The christmas card Enland mid-19 th century

Group work

Post-reading

( 10’ )

* Comprehension questions:

a How long ago did the Christmas tree come to the USA?

b Why did the Englishman have someone design a card?

c When were Christmas songs first performed?

d Who wrote the poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas?

e What is Santa Claus based on?

Pair work

Christmas

? Ask Ss to work in pair to answer the questions.

? Give the correct answer

* Answers:

a The Christmas tree came to the USA more than a century ago

b Because he wanted to send Christmas greetings to his friends

c Christmas songs first were performed 800 year ago

d An American professor named Clement Clark Moore

e Santa Claus is based on the description of Sain Nicholas

in professor Moore’s poem

Homework

( 3’ )

? Ask Ss to learn new words by heart

? Ask Ss to do Exs in workbook

? Ask Ss to prepare the next lesson