Teaching Reading I

Teaching Reading I

1. Reading is not only see words, it is also understand what those words mean.

2. How do we read?

   • -We can read words by adjusting its general visual shape into a sense context.
   • -Successful reading results from the understanding you bring to a text.
   • -To understand the meaning of a text, it is necessary to understand some words; however, we often skip words to make sense of the whole text quickly or conveniently.
   • -Something significant in reading is the number of sense units (letters combined into meaningful words, or words combined into meaningful sentences).
   • -A text will take more or less time to read depending on the coherence of these kinds of units rather to the amount of words.

3. Types of reading activities

   • -Text and comprehension questions: this type of reading activity consist of a text followed by questions regarding the text (look for a synonym).
   • -Conventional text-plus-questions: the reader has no particular motivate to read the text in the first place.
   • -Another useful type of reading in order to motivate learners is where the questions are given first so as to readers guess the answers, then the texts is given and they are going to confirm if they answers were right of wrong. It allows to students to have previous ideas about the text.
   • -Tasks not based on comprehension questions: students are given a set of titles and texts in disorder in order to they read the texts and then they choose which of those titles is appropriate for each texts.
   • -Alternative reading activities: Pre-question, do-it-yourself questions, provide a title, summarize, continue, gapped text, mistakes in the text, comparison, responding, re-presentation of content.

4. Beginning reading

   • -Teachers of a second and foreign language need to make decisions about how to teach reading.
   • -For people who are learning a second language is preferable to begin reading after they have some basic knowledge of this second language.
   • -It is practical and productive to begin teaching single letters, the most common and useful (the, she, he, this, is are) in order to students to cope with a larger number of words.