By Flor de María
Vila A.
One of the advantages of living the Fourth Industrial
Revolution (1) is that our access to knowledge is unlimited. Any person with
access to the internet can obtain information about anything in less than a minute.
This chance takes us to the inescapable question: How much of what we read, we
really understand? Are we, teachers, helping our students to go beyond
identifying specific information, for instance? Are we teaching how to read?
Some educators may say that the answers to these
questions depend on different factors: the age of our students, the place where
we are teaching, and the purpose of the course we are giving among others. It
is true that it is not the same to teach small kids as to teach teenagers, young
adults or adults. Their cognitive development and their motivation, for
instance, are different. It is not the
same to teach in a school as to teach in a private language institution. In a
school, all courses may be part of a cross-curricular approach whereas, in a
private venue, the course stands by itself. When teaching English, we may be
teaching it to people who just want to learn the language or to others that
study it to sit an international exam, for example.
In any case, our main objective is to help students
achieve theirs and to do so they must receive a lot of input as Krashen (2) states.
One of the ways is through reading. Reading is an important source of a number
of samples of what good language is as well as of the knowledge required for
different purposes. We need to point out this to our pupils even if we think
that it is obvious. In addition, we could show them how the language written in
the texts display how language is constructed as well as how the ideas are
presented by native speakers. If we help them make a deep analysis of the
passages, we will aid them to find a wonderful spring to which they can always
return over and over to learn from it.
Needless to say, we have to help them go beyond the
well-known and useful strategies used before, during and after reading. We also
have to show them how to use the metacognition while reading in order to
monitor their understanding, for example.
You may want to take a look at the following articles
to review some of the strategies and other important aspects of the reading
process.
It is valid to say that there are people who are
motivated, will read and find the information they need. Others are accustomed
to finding the answer to a specific question and sometimes used to building
knowledge with pieces of information as if they were making a kind of "patching
reading". The problem with that practice
is that it doesn’t help much to develop critical reasoning. It is as if some are
finding the pill for the pain but not curing the illness. In our case, students
learn to answer questions for a text, but not necessarily know how to read.
This may be observed in exams that require to answer questions which evaluate
different levels of comprehension.
Thus, in addition to asking for information that
requires literal or inferential comprehension, why don´t
we ask questions that require the reader to make a personal response to a
character or situation in the story or to the author’s purpose? With this, we
will be helping students to develop their appreciative comprehension. We can
always pose questions the request our pupils to make a judgment about the
author’s use of language, style of writing, execution of the text, or the
author’s ideas in the text. This will enable them to reach a critique
comprehension of what they are reading. If we want to help our students
develop an evaluative comprehension, we will need to propose questions
that help them make a judgment about an aspect of the story such as a
character’s actions and demonstrate or support that judgment.
Even though, it is clear that some students engage in
reading in order to gain specific information and that is enough for them, our
job is to enable them to go beyond and reach little by little different levels of
comprehension. This will inevitably help them achieve their goals and at the
same time show them the entrance of a world of wisdom and culture.
Now it´s
your turn:
What else can we teach about
reading?
Is it easy to teach how to read? Why? Why not?
(2)
Krashen,
Stephen D. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning.
Prentice-Hall International, 1988.
(3)
Estrategias de comprensión
lectora: enseñanza y evaluación en educación primaria
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA
M.A. in Cognition, Learning and Development from PUCP, B.A. in Education with a major in English Teaching. Ms. Vila is currently Teacher trainer, Pedagogic Consultant and Member of the Research Team at Centro de Idiomas de la Universidad del Pacífico. She is Academic Director of International Contacts (test training & foreign applications advisory) and relationship manager for American universities´ MBA admissions officers with International Contacts. She is official Examiner for several University of Cambridge tests, freelance consultant with Universidad ESAN, experienced speaker on diverse English teaching issues for prestigious institutions, and senior international examinations trainer (GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS)
