Learning to read in ESL

Learning to read in ESL

1. Reading comprehension: Student's capacities to understand the general idea of a text and in some cases to deepen into specific kinds of information within it.

   • Krashen
     • 1.Pleasure reading is a powerful effect for language acquisition. 2. Provide Students with interesting and comprehensible texts. 3.Reading exposure has a srong effect on the development of language abilities. 4. Reading is a great help in language development, reading comprehension, writing style and more sophisticated vocabulary and grammar.
   • Francoise Grellet
     • Reading comprehension means extracting the required information and finding what we are looking for, quickly.
       • Reading is an active skill because it involves guesing, predicting, checking and asking oneself questions. We should link different skills through reading activities.
     • Exercises in reading
       • They must be: meaningful, flexible and varied. The aim of exercises must be clearly defined and a clear distinction must be made between teaching and testing. Testing involves accuracy-type-exercises whereas teaching develop different skills.
     • students
       • Must be taught how to approach and consider the text in order to become independent and efficient readers, considering that each reader brings his own meaning to the text he reads.
     • Reading techniques
       • sensitizing, reading speed, timing, comprehension questions and activities.
     • Exercises to make students more confident and efficient readers.
       • Predicting, guessing, making use of grammatical, logical and cultural clues, giving students unfinished passages to complete., previewing.

2. Comprehensive Reading: it is the one we expect our students to carry out each time they need to study a determined text, in orden to learn and hopefully internalize and apply contents realted to different objects.

3. Goodman's model

   • Introduces the idea that reading is an active process withing language and thought interact and that at the same time readers and writers interact in a social context.

4. Smith

   • defines fluent reader as a person who can make optimal use ot the redundancy in a piece of text.

5. Critical thinking

   • it is simply the art of ensuring that yu use the best thinking your are capable of under determined circumstances and given your present limited knowledge and skill.
   • We must train students' mids to organize their way of thinking, and for this purpose it is necessary to start the other way round i.e. not using contents as something that must be learned, but as a tool to learn strategies in order to develop the abilities and skills that will be useful in all our student's future fields.

6. Learning Strategies

   • 1. Metacognitive strategies involving thinking about the learning process, planning for learning, monitoring comprehension or production.
   • 2. Cognitive strategies that are directly realted to individual learning tasks. they entail direct manipulation or transformation of learning materials; and social - affective strategies consisting of cooperative learning to achieve commong goals in learning.