[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]
