Reading as a Communicative Activity: Reading In and Out of the Classroom

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Del curso dictado por University of London

Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task Based Approach

130 calificaciones

University of London

Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task Based Approach

130 calificaciones

This course explores ways of teaching reading skills in English as Second and Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) using a task-based approach. You will be introduced to the concept of task and the key principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and learning. TBLT uses communicative tasks as the key unit for creating language learning activities. You will also examine the role of reading in real-life and in second and foreign language teaching and current thinking about the interface between TBLT and second language reading. You will explore how TBLT and teaching second language reading can be successfully integrated in practice through analysing task-based reading materials. The course culminates in creating task-based materials for teaching reading in your own language teaching contexts. After completing the course, you will be able to: 1. Explain the main components and tenets of a task-based approach to teaching language; 2. Explain the main issues involved in teaching reading; 3. Illustrate connections between TBLT approaches and the teaching of reading; 4. Integrate tasks into your own teaching; 5. Identify reading texts that are suitable for the construction of tasks; and 6. Construct reading tasks and sequences for use in your own classroom.

De la lección

What is Reading and What Does It Involve?

Welcome to module 2! In this module we examine reading from a number of angles. We start by examining the cognitive element of reading. The second angle we examine reading from is reading as a communicative activity, and its links with communicative language teaching. We then look at reading as a strategic activity, and at the links between reading and background knowledge, and look at the way in which background knowledge is needed in order to understand three specific texts. We end by discussing ways of developing reading fluency.

Reading as a Communicative Activity: Reading In and Out of the Classroom7:27

Conoce a los instructores

Dr Amos Paran
Reader in Second Language Education
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Andrea Révész
Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Myrrh Domingo
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literacies
UCL Institute of Education

[MUSIC]

Think about the last time you read a text that was not a student essay.

A newspaper article, a novel, a political statement for

an election, maybe an article in a professional journal.

Presumably, you chose to read the text because it interested you.

At some point during or after reading, you probably discussed it with a friend or

a partner, perhaps giving a short summary, or

you may have read a line aloud or maybe you just chuckled to yourself.

Maybe you were bored by the third line and stopped reading.

In any case, what you did was to engage in an ongoing

continuous reaction to what you were reading.

Later on, you may have acted on some of the information.

If this was a professional text, you may have written down one or

two important points or made mental notes.

Or you may have read a review of a CD and later gone out to buy it.

At this point,

I'd like you to answer a short poll about a text that you read in the last few days.

So think about a specific occasion and a specific text, and then answer the poll.

Compare your answers to the poll with what your learners had to do the last time you

used a text in the classroom.

You probably introduced the passage with a pre-reading activity, asked the learners

to read the text, and then did a number of comprehension exercises.

You might also have done some vocabulary exercises with them, exercises which had

nothing to do with actual text, but focused on useful vocabulary in it.

You then probably assigned some homework tasks on the text

before the lesson finished.

If we compare these two situations systematically,

we can see that reading in the classroom and the reading that we do

outside the classroom are different in many important ways.

Outside the classroom, we choose what we want to read.

Of course, there are cases where we don't have a choice if we are reading for

work or if we read email messages that we've received.

But in most cases, if we read the newspaper, a novel, a piece of nonfiction,

or when we are surfing the web looking for information, we do choose.

And our choice in itself often entails some reading.

We may read the blurb on the back of a book or the title of a web page.

Our choice is also related to our purpose.

It is we who determine the purpose of reading,

which is normally to gain knowledge or understanding about the world.

So I might access a Wikipedia page in order to remind myself

about certain facts about a country.

Or I may read a news report about the Oscar nominations

in order to understand the allegations of racism that are brought against them.

I might read a novel for pleasure or

a biography of a composer because I'm particularly interested in him.

Once we've decided to actually go on and

read a certain text, we don't necessarily go about it in a linear fashion.

We often skip parts or we stop reading if we think that we have received enough

information from our reading.

We may often go back to check something in the text.

Sometimes we go back just a paragraph or

two to remind us who someone mentioned in a news story is.

In a book-length text,

we sometimes go back even more to previous chapters to check on various details.

When we finish reading, there may or may not be a follow-up.

We may discuss the article that we read with a friend or a partner.

Sometimes they've read the text, but sometimes they have not.

So if I'm reading the newspaper, I may comment on it to my partner,

who may not actually have read it.

And in that case, I may, for

example, provide a short summary of what the article I've read says.

If both of us have read the text, I may start a short discussion.

Did you read that article about the elections,

about the American presidential race?

What did you think about it?

In a conversation with friends, I may mention a book that I'm reading and

my reactions to it.

So the mode of the follow-up in my private reading is very often spoken.

At other times, though, it might be an action.

During the day, I may read the instructions for taking medicine, or

I may consult a recipe.

Or I may read an email from a friend and email them back.

And of course, many times in the day, I receive texts from friends and

colleagues and write a short response.

So the response, in this case, is written.

Reading in the language classroom is very different.

Firstly, the person who chooses the text is not the learner.

It's not even the teacher.

Most teachers use course books, so

the person who chose the text is the textbook writer.

The teacher may sometimes have autonomy in terms of deciding

not to read a certain text with the class.

And many times, teachers have enough autonomy to bring in supplementary texts.

But learners normally have very little choice in what they read.

Learners also often don't have a say in the purpose of their reading.

The purpose is often determined for them.

And although the first reading of a text might be to gain some understanding of

the text, the main purpose will be to dissect it linguistically, and

most of this discussion of the test will be about its linguistic properties.

Tim Johns and Flo Davies have called this view of the text the text as

a linguistic object, or TALO for short.

The way we ask our learners to read is also different from the way we read

outside the classroom.

We normally ask them to read in a linear fashion.

They have to read the whole text.

They are not allowed to stop in the middle and not continue to read.

Sometimes they're instructed to skim the text, but

that is always in preparation for rereading the text in detail and

working with the teacher on understanding it.

And when we ask them to skim the text for an overall impression or to scan it to

find specific information, we are the ones who are dictating to them how to read.

Whereas outside the class room, there may or

may not be a follow-up, in the classroom there always is.

We ask our students to do things with the text,

to reread it, to extract information from it, to examine the language in it.

This is, of course, very strongly linked to the purpose I mentioned earlier,

using the text to learn language.

Some of the differences I've discussed are unavoidable.

For example, in many countries or

schools, teachers simply have no choice about the text they will use.

You may also say that learners accept that what they do in the classrooms may

look artificial and may mirror what they do in what we sometimes call real life.

But other issues can be worked around and

changed if we change the way we think about texts.

That will be the subject of the next module.

[MUSIC]

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