So the next assignment for my masters involves reading about teaching reading and writing and designing two reading/writing lessons.
Starting from the premise that as teachers we have to prepare students for real life, I'm wondering exactly how to interpret all the research that says pre-reading activities enhance comprehension. Of course they do, by activating schemata (background knowledge).
In real life, though, don't students have to activate schemata as they read? When I read, I don't spend 10 minutes predicting what I'm about to read...
Richards (writing about listening) said that pre-listening activities are part of teaching listening and that without them you're closer to testing listening. Should I take his word for it and assume that's also the case with reading? Good teaching = pre-reading activities?
This doesn't make intuitive sense to me. I would think that it's better to help students activate schemata while they read rather than before they read.
One aspect of this that does appeal is that Penny Ur (also writing about listening) said that students learn by accomplishing tasks rather than failing them. Pre-task activities that activate background knowledge certainly make students more likely to succeed (my only complaint is that it doesn't do so naturally). I suppose the key is take these pre-tasks and help students apply the schemata activation skills in real-life reading situations where (for example) they don't have ten minutes to brainstorm about a topic before reading.
Posted by James Trotta at January 21, 2004 6:58 AMWhat do you mean by prereading activities? My little nieces and nephews all do prereading before tackling their textbooks and it doesn't require "10 minutes of brainstorming" but is a brief solo activity. They look at the title of the chapter, read the captions beneath the pictures and look at any diagrams, tables or charts. They ask me or their parents questions before they read. They write down what they know about the topic or any questions they have before they start reading. Sometimes they use a dictionary to check out the title. Not necessarily all of these. It's not about predicting what you are about to read. It's about preparing yourself to be comfortable with the reading.
I work in a museum and read a lot of technical literature to keep up in my discipline. I always preread articles before I read them. It's about the only way to get through piles of technical information without zoning out. I can either read the article start to finish (or abstract, conclusion, discussion, techniques) or take a few minutes to decide how deeply I need to read the article, if at all. Most articles fail the preread. Which means that instead of wasting half an hour to an hour I've wasted 5-10 minutes. This is how professionals in the sciences, medicine and engineering have to approach technical journal articles--the prereading is a survival skill. You can always tell which of the professors don't preread, by the way. They have piles of unread journals from this year and never know what anyone is talking about when someone mentions a new discovery or technique from Science or Nature in conference. The ones who preread have heard of it, and, whether they have read the article or not, they are prepared also to listen to their colleague. I have to read abstracts in 30 professional journals each month and decide which articles I want to pursue. When I get the articles, the first thing I do is preread and dump 3/4 of them. These ARE real life reading situations.
Why not activate schemata before you read, instead of allowing them to wake up after you've maybe skipped over something important and having to reread it?
Posted by: KS at March 22, 2004 6:08 PMI would categorize your nieces and nephews behavior as prereading, but what you do as skimming.
Skimming is a very valuable skill (as you say) and well worth teaching.
I'm not so sure about prereading on the other hand. I may not be a typical student, but I have never written down questions before I began reading (reading includes skimming and scanning as well as in depth reading).
As a language teacher, I'm encouraged to get my students to activate their background knowledge before they read (by asking question, discussing the topic, making predictions, etc.). However, as a reader Inever spend extra time activating my background knowledge.
Posted by: James Trotta at March 23, 2004 1:55 AMWell, I do spend time activating background knowledge also. For example, today I am reading articles about evolutionary bottlenecks and did some prereading of abstracts from common and popular examples of evolutionay bottlenecks unrelated to the articles I intend to read. And, yes, I write down questions I want answered before and while I am reading. More usually, though, I just think about them before reading. But as an adult reader in the sciences this is not something I really think of myself doing--but I do it.
I also skim articles. When I skim an article I read the first and last sentence of the abstract, then the last sentence of the conclusion, the opening paragraph of the conclusion, and the first and last sentence of the discussion section. So I don't consider what I do skimming. Prereading is something different, it's about getting into the article. Skimming is about not reading the article because I've already decided I'm not going to read it.
Posted by: KS at March 23, 2004 3:04 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.