In Vietnam, in recent years teaching methods have been more and more improved. There have been a lot of activities organized in order to enhance the effectiveness and help students be more active and selfconfident in learning English in general and reading skills in particular 1. Many universities and uppersecondary schools, including Le Loi uppersecondary school apply post reading activities which can be seen as one of the most effective way to develop students‘ reading competence. It is stated that postreading activities encourage student to reflect upon what they have read. For the information to stay with the students, they need to go beyond simply reading it to using it. Until now, there have been a lot of researches done in the area of post reading activities. In 2000, Alderson wrote Assessing reading with the aim of analyzing the effectiveness of reading activities4, including post reading activities. Sasson (n.d) wrote postreading activities – how teachers can end the lesson effectively to give some advice so that teachers can apply when implementing postreading activities. However, there is a gap between the theory and the practice. At uppersecondary schools in general, the advantages of postreading activities have not been fully made use of. In addition, teachers and students encounter some difficulties related to the students‘ level, time, etc; as a result, the implementation of these activities has not been effective. All mentioned above, I have decided to suggest postreading activities I have ever taught my grade 10 students at my school.
Trang 1A INTRODUCTION
I REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH
II AIMS OF THE RESEARCH
III SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD
B DISCUSSION
I POST-READING STAGE
1 The importance of reading
2 General views on post-reading activities
3 The Post-/After Reading Stage
4 The importance of post-reading activities.
5 What students gain from post-reading activities.
6 Interactive post-reading activities
II POST-READING ACTIVITIES FOCUSING ON SPEAKING
1 Post-reading activities focusing on speaking.
2 Demonstration of activities usually used in teaching English 10 at
Le Loi upper-secondary school.
III APPLYING THE RESEARCH IN TEACHING ENGLISH 10
IV RESULT AFTER APPLYING THE RESEARCH IN TEACHING
C CONCLUSION
I CONCLUSION
II RECOMMENDATIONS
D REFERENCE BOOKS
Trang 2A INTRODUCTION
It is widely recognized that reading is one of the most important skillsfor English as a foreign language students to master The ability to read andcomprehend what one reads is crucial to success in our educational system.For academic success, for English language learning, or to expand students’knowledge of language, cultures and the world, reading comprehension hasalways played a central role in the curricula of the schools in this study Atpresent, reading comprehension is not the product of word recognition skills,grammar or world experience as separate entities, but it is considered a highlyinteractive process between the reader and the text, one that enables “theconstruction of meaning by making inferences and interpretations” The post-reading stage of a reading lesson is often confused with the closing of alesson However, having new information from the whilst-reading stageshould bring about a change such as the students would know more, or think
or feel differently from before Teachers should help students connect the newinformation they are now familiar with and their lives This article re-introduces the importance of the post-reading stage and some workable,meaningful activities Interactive activities are chosen so that students notonly process their knowledge obtained from the text but also communicatethis new knowledge to peers
I REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH
In Vietnam, in recent years teaching methods have been more andmore improved There have been a lot of activities organized in order toenhance the effectiveness and help students be more active and self-confident in learning English in general and reading skills in particular.Many universities and upper-secondary schools, including Le Loi upper-secondary school apply post reading activities which can be seen as one of
Trang 3the most effective way to develop students‘ reading competence It is statedthat post-reading activities encourage student to reflect upon what they haveread For the information to stay with the students, they need to go beyondsimply reading it to using it Until now, there have been a lot of researchesdone in the area of post reading activities In 2000, Alderson wroteAssessing reading‘ with the aim of analyzing the effectiveness of readingactivities, including post reading activities Sasson (n.d) wrote post-readingactivities – how teachers can end the lesson effectively to give someadvice so that teachers can apply when implementing post-reading activities.However, there is a gap between the theory and the practice At upper-secondary schools in general, the advantages of post-reading activitieshave not been fully made use of In addition, teachers and students encountersome difficulties related to the students‘ level, time, etc; as a result, theimplementation of these activities has not been effective All mentionedabove, I have decided to suggest post-reading activities I have ever taught
my grade 10 students at my school
II AIMS OF THE RESEARCH
- To introduce how to teach reading skills and post-reading part
- To show ways of teaching post-reading part
- To show how post-reading activities can be designed for teachingEnglish in grade 10 at Le Loi upper-secondary school
- To draw out what the learners understand the reading texts and apply them to their daily life through post-reading activities
III SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD
- Scope : Researching in the process of teaching English 10 at Le Loi upper-secondary school
- Object: This subject is concerned with ways of organizing
post-reading activities in the class
- Researching method: Reading reference books , discussing with other teachers, applying in teaching, observing and drawing out experiences
B DISCUSSION
1 The importance of reading
Reading is an activity of inferring meaning out of written symbols withthe collaborative work of cognitive behaviors and psycho-motor skills
Trang 4(Demirel, 1992) Reading is described as the process of perception in terms
of written and published words with the help of senses, comprehension ofthese after building meaningful connections; intellectual and spiritualacquisition, active and communicative involvement with the written andpublished symbols, reception consisting of a number of perceptive andcognitive processes, an interpretation and also a reaction According toAlderson (1984), most scholars would suppose that reading is one of themost important skills for educational and professional success Inhighlighting the importance of reading comprehension Rivers (1981)stated that ― reading is the most important activity in any language class, notonly as a source of information and pleasurable activity but also as a means
of consolidating and extending one‘s which are knowledge of the language
As Karakas (2002) pointed that the real objective of reading is fast andright grasp of the meaning Especially, reading at high speed along with fullcomprehension is a critical factor affecting the success of the students.Students who can read at a high speed, understand what is being read, have arich verbal repertoire and have a good master of the language, learn moreeasily and have higher rates of success The level of reading can bedesignated by asking questions about the reading text being read andevaluating the related answers in verbal or written way (Çalışkan, 2004).According to Eskey (1988) in advanced levels of second language theability to read the written language at a reasonable rate and with goodcomprehension has long been recognized to be as oral skills if not moreimportant
2 General views on post-reading activities
Definitions of post-reading activities
As language learning involves the acquisition of thousands of words,teachers and learners alike would like to know how vocabulary learning can
be fostered, especially in EFL settings where learners frequently acquireimpoverished lexicons, despite years of formal study Research indicates thatreading is important but not sufficient for second-language vocabularylearning, and that it should be supplemented by post-reading activities toenhance students' vocabulary knowledge
Post reading activities play an important role in language teaching andlearning There are many reasons for its being important Firstly,learners come across it a lot in their daily lives Secondly, since the students
in this research are preparatory learners who are learning English foracademic purposes, that means students learn English for the examination.Therefore, without understanding the texts, they cannot learn anything; as aresult, cannot be successful in the exams Since post reading is an importantskill in language learning, it is necessary to define it According to Chastain(1998), post-reading activities help readers to clarify any unclear meaningwhere the focus is on the meaning not on the grammatical or lexical aspects
Trang 5of the text Ur (1996) discusses summary as a kind of post-reading activitywhere the readers are asked to summarize the content in a sentence or two It
is also possible to give this post-reading activity in the mother tongue.Karakas (2002) proposes that the readers interpret the text and illustrate therelationship between the questions and their answers by using activities such
as summarizing, question and answer, and drawing conclusions and it ispossible to catch the missing parts of the mental picture through thinkingaloud, discussion and summarizing "Post-reading" (after, follow-up, beyondreading) exercises first check students' comprehension and then lead students
to a deeper analysis of the text, when warranted (Alderson, 2000)
The primary goal of post-reading activity is to make sure that satisfactorycomprehension was taken place If the person is looking for a number in atelephone directory, she or he should be very selective She/he should scanthe directory for the number needed On the contrary, a researcher needs toread an article in detail to get the main ideas of the writer and to learn moreabout the subject Nevertheless, it can still be argued that any reading isselective Wallace (1992) shares the same idea by saying, ―Just as wefilter spoken messages in deciding what to attend to, so do we filterwritten messages And even when we commit ourselves to a full reading, thatreading will still be selective, some parts being read with greater care thanothers
3 The Post-/After Reading Stage
When the during-/whilst- reading stage is completed, the students areexpected to have obtained new information from the text This should bringabout a change of some kind such as they would know more, or think or feeldifferently from before Therefore, we ask, So what? , which leads to theconnection between the new informa- tion the students are now familiar withand their lives According to Nuttall (1996: 164) when intensive work in aduring-/whilst reading stage is completed, general com- prehension must beintended to At this stage, the students should be able to eva- luate the text
as a whole to respond to it from a more or less personal point of view Theymay be asked to agree or disagree with the author or the characters in thetext; relate the content to their own experience; connect the content withother work in the same field; discuss characters, incidents, ideas, feelings; orpredict what can happen afterwards
Common post reading activities are: creating stories or end of stories,producing posters, reconstructing texts, and question- ing the text or views ofthe writer
4 The importance of post-reading activities.
Post-reading activities are simply activi- ties done after during-reading
Trang 6activities are completed At this stage the students are in a temporary change
of state or condition, that is, they now know something they did not knowbefore They know some new vo- cabulary items, some new sentence struc-tures, some new idiomatic expressions, and they have new knowledge about acertain topic However, it is definitely not the right time for the class to justcall it a day How many times do we see lesson plans with good pre-readingactivities and well- planned during reading activities, but brief, classic post-reading activities such as write the answers on a piece of paper , translateparagraph 2 , write a sentence for each of the new words found in thetext , using a similar pattern, write about your house ?
Something must be done to help the students use what they now know
so that these new things will become more than just knowledge In a reading stage students are not studying about the language of the text and theyare not comprehending the text, either At the post-reading stage stu- dentsare supposed to apply what they pos- sess
post-Post-reading activities are expected to encourage students to reflectupon what they have read The purposes of the activi- ties are for thestudents to use the familiar text as basis for specific language study, to allowthe students to respond to the text creatively and to get the students to focusmore deeply on the information in the text For the new information to stay
with them, the students need to go beyond simply reading the information to
using it Follow- ing up in the post-reading stage is critical to both
comprehension, which is instruction sensitive, and obtaining and working onnew information, which takes the students to their real life situation Well-designed after-reading activities usually require the learners to return to thetext several times and to reread it to check on particular in- formation oflanguage use Students, indivi- dually or in groups, should have ample time
to share and discuss the work they have completed This enables the students
to tie up loose ends, answer any remaining ques- tions, and to understandthe interrelation- ships of topics covered When readers are called on tocommunicate the ideas they have read, it is then that they learn to con-ceptualize and discover what meaning the text has to them Althoughteachers should be careful to spend just some time in the pre-reading stage,they are actually ex- pected to spend more time in the post- reading stagewith several activities A two- fold purpose is involved here, namely: stu-dents need to (1) recycle what they have obtained from the text and (2) gobeyond the text and enter the real world, equipped with the newly-obtainedinformation
5 What students gain from post-reading activities.
At least six principles in foreign lan- guage teaching-learning by Brown(2007: 62-81) can be fulfilled From recycling some language components indifferent ways through different language skills, au- tomaticity is certainly on
Trang 7its way Meaning- ful learning is carried out because at a post- reading stagestudents relate new informa- tion with their own life and experiences Eachstudent is asked to respond to parts of the text she or he has read Becausestudents are active in responding to the texts they have been, and the teacherputs himself in the background, students are empowered and to a certainextent, in control of the ac- tivities This may lead to students autono- my.Willingness to communicate, which involve students willingness to take risksand being self-confident, is gained because they are supposed to be well-prepared to do the post-activities When students are given different tasks,they have good opportuni- ties to use the language, orally as well as written.This puts them in a position where they can develop their interlanguage.Final- ly, post-reading activities are not interested in the right versus wronganswers to com- prehension questions anymore Students do not have toprove they understand the voca- bulary and grammar of the text, anymore.Therefore, students are not only taught to achieve linguistic competence butalso dis- course and strategic competence, so com- municative competence isalso taken care of We can conclude that from post- reading activities, thestudents are develop- ing themselves to achieve automaticity, meaningfullearning, autonomy, willingness to communicate, interlanguage, and com-municative competence.
6 Interactive post-reading activities
Reading comprehension should not be alienated from the other skills(Harmer, 2007: 267) In reality, for example, we tend to talk about what wehave read, especially when the content is actual, interesting, un- expected,
or simply strange and unbelievable
Therefore, we may link reading and writing, for example, bysummarizing, note- making, mentioning what has been read in a letter Wemight link reading and listening by comparing what we have heard to read-ing a news report, comparing the song we heard from the radio to the songlyric down- loaded from the internet Still, we might link reading andspeaking by discussing what we have learned from a reading pas- sage andretelling stories
There are many activities that will refine, enrich, and increase interest
in the as- signed topic of a text However, the primary goal of the postreading phase is to further develop and clarify interpretations of the text, and
to help students remember what they have individually created in theirminds from the text Good post-reading ac- tivities should be able to get thestudents to recycle some aspects from their whilst- reading activities; to gobeyond the text; to share opinions, ideas, feelings; and to give reasons tocommunicate
There are various kinds of interactive post-reading activities that relatereading to other language skills The following activities are mostly taken
Trang 8from Bamford and Day (2004) and, after some adaptation, are proven tohave worked well in my classes.
6.1 Interactive Post-reading Activities Focusing on Listening
6.2 Interactive Post-Reading Activities Focusing on Writing
6.3 Interactive Post-reading Activities Focusing on Speaking
6.4 Other Interactive Post-reading Activities
II POST-READING ACTIVITIES FOCUSING ON SPEAKING
1 Post-reading activities focusing on speaking.
Students are likely to understand more when they discuss with each otherwhat they have learned, so they must have special opportunities to orallydiscuss their opi- nions, feelings, and conclusions, from their reading activity.Some of the ways to do this include the following activities
1.1.TV reporters
Students can pretend to be television reporters with two minutes to sum
up the highlights of the "story." They work in small groups to decide on thehighlights which are written as news prompt on a laptop or a large piece ofpaper put on a stand
1.2.Main ideas list
Students list the five (or more) main ideas of the text beginning with themost important to the least (not following the order in the text) This can bedone in a Round Robin type of activity, in which each student is a group of 4-
5 students takes turn saying one main idea
1.3.Teacher-absent student
A student becomes the "teacher" and explains what was covered in classwith a student who was absent This is a good and meaningful activitybecause the students are trained to decide important aspects of a lesson Theactivity may become really entertaining when the teacher plays a role of areal teacher the class know
1.4.Debate
The students can take specific sides of a topic and debate an issue.Depending on the levels of students, the activity can range from the studentsjust mentioning likes and dislike to a real debate activity
1.5.Hot Seat
One student becomes the writer of a text or a character in a text,answering the class’ questions The questions can be creative, whose answersare not found in the text Here, there is aspect of unpredictability, which isone important characteristics of real communication Funny answers areexpected, and these are the interesting parts of the activity
1.6.Vanishing cloze
This activity helps the students memorize a poem by doing a clozeprocedure orally The teacher adds the blanks until no more words are left.Although it is a teacher-centered activity, the teacher can assign the students
Trang 9to work in groups of four and at different point of the process the teacher andcall out students in different group to recite a certain part of the poem Togive equal chance to the stu- dents, this activity can be done in a NumberedHeads Together format.
1.7.Team Review
Students review material already studied and share their knowledgewith other students This can be done in groups, where students move to othergroups to socialize their knowledge
1.8 Story Reading
This activity is meant for reading with an audience such as younglearners The reader of a text (usually a short fable, folk tale, fairy tale, orprocedure text) has to be well-prepared in terms of pronunciation, intonation,key or new vocabulary, when to pause and give comments, show pictures ormake use of media, or ask questions
1.9 Retelling (a strory)
In this activity, the story teller has to really know the story He or shehas to prepare the story and rehearse again and again so as not to make anylanguage mistakes when doing the actually story telling To help the teller tocommunicate his or her story as well as the audience to understand the story,some media such as puppets, cut-outs, realia, or animation on LCD, can beused
1.10 Interactive cross-word puzzle
The purpose of this activity is to recycle vocabulary items learnedfrom some reading texts The students work in pair in an information gapactivity, in which each member has a different set partially completed cross-word puzzle without clues The pair take turns asking each other so that theycan have the completed cross-word puzzle Because no clues are provided,the student who has the answers should construct the clues to be guessed bythe other student in the pair
1.11 Role-play
Role-play activities allow students to act out concepts For example, in a
computer technology class, after students read about the functions of thevarious computer components, the teacher could select students to act out theroles of the CPU, the monitor, the modem, and the printer
1.12 Quiz Questions
After students read a chapter or section of a chapter in the course
textbook, ask them to develop questions for a quiz (This can also be done
with other reading materials.) This activity forces them to analyze theinformation in the chapter and decide on the most important concepts toremember
Formulating questions can also helpthem to organize the concepts into logicalchunks of information for easier retrieval Working in groups on this activity
is helpful for further discussion of concepts
Trang 10Students can then present their questions to the class and see who cananswer them correctly The students trying to answer the questions may offersuggestions on how to write a question more clearly so that it can be easilyunderstood Teachers might also offer suggestions for revision of questions.Other SEA Site modules, for example, "WH-Questions" and "Passive Voice"can be useful for teachers in providing guidance in using structures that will
be more easily understood by students
2 Demonstration of activities usually used in teaching English 10 at Le Loi upper-secondary school.
2.1 Tv reporter:
Examples : Unit 14 – The World Cup - Part A: Reading
After you read
Work in groups Talk about the events mentioned in the passage, using the
Students: Prepare the questions related to the events
1 In what year was the world cup held in both Korea and Japan?
2 How many national football teams attend in the world cup nowadays?
3 When was the first world cup held?
4 Do you know in what year FIFA was set up?
5 By 2002, how many World Cup tournaments had people witnessed?
…
2.2 Main ideas list
Example: Unit 5 – Technology and you – Part A: Reading
After you read
Trang 11Work in group: Discuss the uses of the computer in our life.
Teacher: -Asks students to work in a groups of five to talk about the uses of computers in our life nowadays
+ Gives some suggestions: the uses of computers in communication, entertainment, business, storing, etc
+ Aks students to present the uses of computers in our life nowadays in turn
Students: Work in groups of 5 to talk about the uses of computers in our life nowadays
2.3 Debate
Example: Unit 5 – Technology and you – Part A: Reading
(This activity is only used for better students at a certain class)
After you read
Work in group: What are the advantages and disadvantages of the computer
in our life
Teacher: Asks students to work in groups to debate the advantages anddisadvantages of computers The groups in the right side discuss theadvantages of computers and the ones in the left discuss the disadvantges ofcomputers
Students: Work in groups devided by the teacher and debate the two sideeffects of computers