TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION TO ESL/EFL LEARNERS
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef, 2005.
Most researches on reading now focus on the effective reading strategies that increase students’ comprehension. Guthrie (1996) argues that most researchers study a single cognitive strategy, rather than conducting a long-term study of multiple strategies. Besides, few studies have addressed the issues related to “motivation” and “engagement”. As Guthrie puts it: Engaged reading is based on motivational and cognitive characteristics of the reader…who is intrinsically motivated, builds knowledge, uses cognitive strategies, and interacts socially to learn from text. These engagement processes can be observed in student’s cognitive effort, perseverance, and self-direction in reading.
It is the teacher’s responsibilities to motivate reading by selecting the appropriate materials and especially for those at the early stages of learning. Guthrie and Humenick performed a metaanalysis of studies that manipulated several aspects of intrinsic motivation support for reading. These findings suggest that “meaningful conceptual content in reading instruction increases motivation for reading and text comprehension.” The second motivation-supporting practice showed that students who were provided choice of text performed higher on reading tasks than those with no choice. The third practice was using interesting texts. This conforms to Hedge’s proposal that in selecting task texts, teachers should seek interesting texts and consider variety of topics. Readers’ interest can be revealed by setting “a reading interest questionnaire” where students check the fields that suit their interest, i.e. short stories, thrillers, science fiction, etc.
Since “each learner will have different strengths to build on and different weaknesses to
overcome” (Hedge, p. 205), there is no one defined reading methodology. In her functional approach to reading, Moorman & Ram (1994, p. 646) focus on science fiction genre since “stories offer many opportunities for creative reading”.
Carrell et al (1989, p. 647) conducted a study on two metacognitive strategies, semantic mapping (SM) and the experience-text-relationship (ETR) method, to study their effect on SL reading. In semantic mapping, categories and associations are displayed visually in a diagram. Carrell argues that besides “being effective for vocabulary development, semantic mapping has proved to be a good alternative to traditional pre-reading and post-reading activities” (ibid, p. 651). In fact, most contemporary reading tasks include pre-reading activities. Therefore, I believe pre-reading activities can be followed by SM strategy since the former aim at increasing learners' motivation.
While semantic mapping is used as a tool to assess students’ schema, the experiencetext- relationship (ETR) method emphasizes comprehension, i.e., reading for meaning. This method is based on discussion aimed at linking what the reader already knows to what he/she will encounter in the text. It has essentially three simple steps: experience, text, and relationship.
In the experience step, the teacher leads the students in discussion of their own knowledge or experiences that are related in some way to the passage to be read. In the text step, students read short parts of the texts, usually a page or two, and the teacher ask them questions about the content after each section is read. In this step, the teacher may also need to correct any
misunderstandings of the text evidenced by the students. In the final step, the relationship sequence, the teacher attempts to help the students draw relationships between the content of the
text (as developed in the text step), and their outside experience and knowledge (as discussed in
the experience step). In all three steps the teacher is attempting to model and to guide the students systematically through the cognitive processes related to understanding a written text.
From the results Carrell et al conclude that …metacognitive strategy training does enhance L2 reading when compared to nonstrategy training, as in the control group [and that ] while there are similarities between the two methods in their enhancement of second language reading on some measures, on other measures there are differences between them. Finally, our results show that there are significant interactions between students’ learning styles and the effectiveness of training in the two different strategies.
Hedge (2003) states that although such small-scale studies need substantiation by “further
experimental work”, they have “contributed to ELT methodology in raising awareness about the
characteristics of effective language learning”.
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