광진ECC

How does the interactive process foster reading comprehension?

What I have gleaned from this week's required reading is that the interactive process promotes reading comprehension by blending the reader's schema (reader's understanding of the world), the text (new information), and other reader's schema (level of equilibrium) to change or create new meaning for the reader (new equilibrium). Richard-Amato (2003) highlights the importance of the "natural language framework" that appropriately balances top-down approaches with bottom-up approaches to enable the reader to comprehend and crate new meaning during the interactive process. In my reading classes I like to introduced and give students practice using various reading strategies (e.g. previewing, predicting, skimming, scanning, guessing from context, paraphrasing) to help students create meaning. In class I raise questions like:

1.

T: What’s the first thing a good reader does?

Ss: Read the title.

T: Do you know what the title means?

T: Writes the title on the board and the students and teacher work out the meaning.

2.

T: What’s the second think a good reader does?

Ss: Look at the pictures (e.g. graphs, charts, captions, timelines)

T: Why?

Ss: (chant) A picture tells a thousand words. (or a picture tells a story).

T: (chant) Read the title… look at the picture…tell me twenty words.

Ss: predict, guess, provide information they know about the topic.

3.

T: What’s the third thing a good reader does?

Ss: understand they key words

T: Why?

Ss: To make is easier to understand the story

Note: (many of our books have key-word exercises as pre-reading activities. In addition to doing these exercises I may give them an additional homework assignment to find three synonyms for each key- word. If time allows and the student’s skills are at an appropriate level, I’ll have students do an exercise where they underline the sentence in the story that has the key-word and rewrite the meaning of the sentence without using the actual key-word in the sentence. They have to find a different way to express the meaning of the sentence. I want to know if they understand the key words.).

4. When we read the text in class I may have students use a “read and look up” technique. With this technique, students read a paragraph, phrase, or sentence several times, then look up away from the text and tell the class what the meaning of the paragraph, phrase, or sentence says. This encourages students to read for ideas, rather than for word recognition.

 

    ECC 외국인 교수 Bob Feeley