CASELIA ANGELA 19371/2010 READING REPORT

CHAPTER 3 Intensive Reading

Intensive study of reading texts can be a means of increasing learners knowledge of language features and their control of reading strategies. It can also improve their comprehension skill. It fits into the language focused learning strand of a course. The classic procedure for intensive reading is the grammar-translation approach where the teacher works with the learners, using the first language to explain the meaning of a text, sentence by sentence. Used on suitable texts and following useful principles, this can be a very useful procedure as long as it is only a part of the reading programme and is complemented by other language-focused learning and by extensive reading for language development and extensive reading for fluency development. There are four ways of putting this important principle into practice. 1. Focus on items that occur with high frequency in the language as a whole (see Table 3.1 for examples). Such items will occur often in many different texts. 2. Focus on strategies that can be used with most texts 3. Quickly deal with or ignore infrequent items. 4. .Make sure that the same items and strategies get attention in several different texts. Focuses in Intensive Reading Intensive work on a reading text can focus on the following aspects. These will be looked at in more detail in the rest of this chapter and in other chapters in this book. 1. Comprehension.. 2. Regular and irregular sound-spelling relations. 3. Vocabulary 4. Grammar. 5. Cohesion. 6. Information structure. 7. Genre features. 8. Strategies.

Features of a Good Intensive Reading Exercise Let us look at what a good reading exercise should do. 1. A good reading exercise directs the learners attention to features of the text that can be found in almost any text, or to strategies for dealing with any text, with the aim to develop in the language learner the ability to comprehend texts, not to guide him to comprehension of a text (Davies and Widdowson, 1974: 172 2. . A good reading exercise directs the learners attention to the reading text. 3. 4. A good reading exercise provides the teacher and the learners with A good reading exercise is easy to make. Comprehension of the Text Typically comprehension questions are used as the major means of focusing on comprehension of the text. The learners read a text and then answer questions about the content of the text. There is a variety of question types that can be used. Question Forms 1. Pronominal questions are questions beginning with who, what, when, how, why, etc. 2. Yes/no questions and alternative questions only need short answers 3. True/false sentences are similar to yes/no 4. Multiple-choice sentences are easy to mark 5. Sentence completion. 6. Information transfer. 7. Translation. 8. Prcis The Focus of Comprehension Questions There have been several schemes to describe the possible focuses of comprehension questions (Tollefson, 1989; Day and Park, 2005). Typically they cover the following: 1. Literal comprehension of the text. 2. Drawing inferences from the text. 3. Using the text for other purposes in addition to understanding. 4. Responding critically to the text.

Standardised Reading Procedures There are several examples of a range of techniques and strategies which are put together in an approach that is then given its own special name. These approaches are usually more than just a collection of strategies and include principles to guide the teaching and learning, and a theory that justifies the particular approach. Some of these approaches, such as reciprocal teaching and CORI, have been the focus of experimentalresearch. In the standard reading exercise, the learners are taught a series of questions to ask that can be used with any text. These questions can be taught in the learners first language. Usually the questions cover what are thought to be the most important reading skills, such as predicting, choosing the main points, deciding on the writers purpose, etc. (Edge, 1985; Scott, Carioni, Zanatta, Bayer and Quintanilha, 1984; Walker, 1987). Palincsar and Brown (1986) designed a procedure called reciprocal teaching which involved the training and use of four strategies which could be applied paragraph by paragraph to the text: (1) prediction of the content of the paragraph before reading it; (2) making questions focusing on the main idea of the paragraph; (3) summarising what has just been read; and (4) seeking clarification on difficult points in the paragraph. The set of strategies has been called reciprocal teaching and the idea is that the procedure is modelled by the teacher and gradually taken over by thelearners working in groups, and finally learners working independently. Vocabulary Intensive reading can be an opportunity for teachers and learners to work on vocabulary. In the broad scheme of things, vocabulary work in intensive. The following principles should guide attention to vocabulary in intensive reading. 1. High frequency words (words from the first 2,000 and Academic Word List) deserve sustained attention. 2. Low frequency words are best ignored or dealt with quickly. 3. The vocabulary learning strategies of guessing from context, analyzing words using word parts, and dictionary use deserve repeated attention over a long period of time. These strategies can be practiced with both high frequency and low frequency words. Techniques for High Frequency Vocabulary Pre-teach a small amount of vocabulary from the passage before reading the passage. Such teaching must involve a reasonable amount of time on each word, focusing on several aspects of its form, meaning and use, such as its pronunciation, its word parts, its meaning, different senses of the word, common collocations, its grammar and any restrictions on its use, such as being technical, colloquial, impolite, etc.

 Put the word in an exercise after the text. Such exercises can include completing word family tables, matching words and meanings, classifying collocational patterns, and working out core meanings. Spend time on a word during the reading looking at several aspects of its form, meaning and use. Make a glossary before the learners read the text. The glossary is there to help learn the words. Techniques for Low Frequency Vocabulary Ignore the word. Quickly give the meaning of the word by using a translation, picture, diagram, demonstration, or L2 definition. Replace the word in the text with a more useful high frequency word before the learners work on the text. Simplifying the text aims to reduce the density of unknown words so that the text is more accessible for the learners.