How to teach reading effectively

HOW TO TEACH READING EFFECTIVELY

Bukhara region Shafirkan district
29^th public secondary school

English teacher: Samadov Dilshod

Reading is an interactive process. There are several types of interaction in the process of reading: between textual form and content, skimming and scanning reading strategies, top-down and bottom-up processing strategies, reader’s anticipatory guesses and confirmation from the text, reader’s schemata and information from the text, text and reality, textual and reader’s reality, text propositions and critical thinking, communicative message and reader’s response.

Surveying, Skimming, Scanning, Phrase reading

Surveying is a strategy for quickly and efficiently previewing text content and organization using refer­encing and non-text material. Although specific strategies depend on the type of text, surveying basi­cally involves making a quick check of the relevant extra-text categories:

1. Reference Data—e.g., title, author, copyright date, blurb, table of contents, chapter or article sum­maries, subheadings, etc.

2. Graphical Data—diagrams, illustrations, tables, maps.

3. Typographical Data—all features that help infor­mation stand out, including typefaces, spacing, enumeration underlining, indentation, etc.¹

Like most of the approaches to extensive strategies suggested here, the actual reading exercises should involve time limits. In addition, students should at first work on texts below their ability level to give them the confidence to skip large chunks of text or develop the skills to pick out main points.

Approaches

1. Predicting content from titles (often tricky) and tables of contents.

2. Matching texts with the correct summaries or diagrams.

3. Predicting which chapters contain answers to given questions, based on chapter titles.

4. Deciding which article can best answer a given question based on a choice of article summaries.

5. Deciding which books on a reading list would be most relevant for a particular researched essay topic.

Skimming. Efficient readers unreflectively skim most of what they read to some extent. Skimming is a more text-ori­ented form of surveying and refers to the method of glancing through a text to extract the gist or main points. Generally speaking, about 75% of the text is disregarded. This is a valuable technique for reviewing material or determining whether it is relevant for more detailed investigation.

Skimming involves knowing which parts of a text contain the most important information and reading only those. More than most kinds of reading, there­fore, it requires knowledge of text structure. In partic­ular, students should be able to learn something of the text topic from the title and any subheadings; they should know that the first and last paragraphs often contain valuable background, summarizing, or con­cluding information; they should be aware of the importance of topic sentences and where to find them. Eventually, students can be introduced to the different functions of paragraphs (such as narrative, descriptive, defining, explanatory, etc.) in order to more effectively sense the pattern of the text and to recognize the rela­tionship between main ideas and other information from lexical and grammatical indicators.

Approaches:

1. Ask students to find the misplaced sentence in a paragraph. This develops awareness of topic sentences and paragraph coherence.

2. Further practice can entail the reconstruction of

Paragraphs from component sentences.

3. Provide several newspaper or magazine articles on the same subject, and ask students which ones deal with a particular aspect of the topic.

4. Have students match a short text with a headline or picture.

5. Ask students to give titles to short texts.

6. Have students fit topic sentences with particular paragraphs.

7. Provide texts with an increasing number of words removed to give confidence in selective reading.

Scanning. Scanning is a rapid search for specific information rather than general impression. Scanning demands that the reader ignore all but the key item being searched for. It is a useful skill for data gathering, review, using reference books, or judging whether a text contains material deserving further study.

Although an easier strategy to master than skim­ming, many students do not scan efficiently, randomly searching and allowing their attention to be caught by incidental material. The reader must therefore, more than in other types of reading, fix the reading purpose clearly, perhaps formulating specific questions before systematically dealing with the text.

Approaches

Scanning exercises are familiar to all teachers and are easy to produce. As the essence of scanning is fast retrieval of specific information, exercises can be timed and competitively managed.

1. The student races to locate a single item such as a word, date, or name in a text (e.g., indexes, dictionar­ies, or pages from telephone directories). Columnar material is easier to start with, as readers can be taught to sweep down the middle of columns in one eye movement.

2. The student races to locate specific phrases or facts in a text.

3. The student uses key words in question: search for indirect answers.

4. The student matches adjoining sentences, u; supplied markers expressing relationships and log patterns.

5. The student fills in missing link words from text or reconstructs paragraphs from sentences to help rhetorical pattern recognition.

1^ Penny Ur 1983, “A course in English Language Teaching”.