Basic Reading
статья по иностранному языку на тему

Basic Reading

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Reading in a foreign language is hard work, especially for younger children. The teacher will have to decide which skills to focus on and devise activities which actively support learners’ understanding and guide attention to the chosen skill.

The following guide-lines may be useful when planning how to develop students’ reading ability at an early age.

• - Do not place too many reading demands on younger learners, who are at an early stage of reading development.
• - Give the students confidence. Students should be told that they cannot always be expected to understand every word. The use of support materials (e.g. pictures, drawings and charts) will help them feel confident and show them what it is important to concentrate on.
• - Help the children to develop strategies for reading. Some of the most important reading strategies include:
      a. Recognizing sound/letter correspondences.
      b. Predicting – it is useful to encourage children to predict what they think might come next in a text. This means that they can then read on to check whether their expectation is true or not.
      c. Working out the meaning from context. Although the teacher might like to teach “words” before the children read something, he / she also needs to encourage them to use pictures and their general knowledge about a topic to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words.
      d. Recognizing discourse patterns and markers. Words such as “and”, “then”, “but” give important signals about what is coming next in a text. This is especially important when reading a story or a set of instructions.

Here are some activities which aim to develop these strategies.

1. Dominoes
Students learn to match words with the sound, words and pictures, upper and lower case letters. For example you give groups cards with pictures and cards with words. These are divided up so each student has the same number of cards. They hold the cards in their hands or place them on the table in front of them. One student starts by putting down a card (e.g. a picture of a dog). The student who has the card with the word dog puts that card down next to the first card. The student to the right then plays their card. If one student has both the picture and word card for the same object, they can lay down both cards (Lucky them!). The winner is the first to put down all their cards.
You can use the flashcards which come with course books or are downloadable. You don’t need to prepare your own.



2. Rearranging Sentences
Students put sentences into the correct order from a text you’ve cut up.

3. Spot the Difference
Students identify differences between words / identify the word which does not belong to the group E.G. Which is the odd one out? dog, cat, horse, pen

4. Rearranging Words
Words are rearranged to produce a meaningful sentence. E.G. eat cake like I to

5. Using the Title
Students look at the title and say what they think the text will be about / make a list of words they think will occur in the text.

6. Matching Two Halves of a Sentence
Students produce a meaningful sentence by matching two halves of a sentence / two clauses.

7. Sound Snap
Students play the well-known card game – saying “Snap” when the words on each card rhyme.

8. Matching Pictures and Captions
As the students read, they match what they read to the correct picture.

9. First Lines
The students read the first line(s) of a text and then say what they think comes next.

10. Picture Talk
The use of picture prompts to encourage students to speculate about what they are going to read.

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