Working on Unit 3 this week has been very intensive - it was all about reading and vocabulary. It reminded me how important reading is and that there’s so much more to it than simply understanding what words connected with each other mean. It also reminded me that reading almost always goes hand in hand with vocabulary. When learning about vocabulary, I was reminded again how much more complex the whole process of learning new words is. It’s not just about knowing the meaning of the word but also about the way it is pronounced, spelled and used in the sentence. One of my “a-ha” moments in this unit was that we have to encounter a new word between 7-16 times before we begin using it in our speech. (Webb and Nation, 2013). This makes me think about devoting more attention to the post-reading exercises to make sure that my students come across the words they have learned several times.
While learning about teaching reading, I realized that most of the time I use the same strategies with my students who are preparing for their IELTS test – skimming and scanning. As all of my students are adults and know how to work independently, so I tend to leave reading to them as they usually ask for more speaking practice. However, it doesn’t have to be the case. I really liked the idea of pre-reading phase where I can include activities prompting my students to speak more. I am definitely going to bring reading into the classroom more often and use a variety of reading strategies with my students. I was really inspired by Andrew Drummond’s video where the teacher uses different reading strategies throughout the lesson, including a warm-up and predicting, which led to great introduction to a topic and some good discussions.
Below are some tips that I will remember when teaching reading:
1. When planning a reading lesson, consider student’s level of proficiency and type of text they will be reading to come up with best strategies.
2. Always ask your students to have their pen/paper ready before listening. We tend to retain things better when we write them down.
3. Ask yourself “Would this text be interesting for my students?” Offer reading on relevant and motivating topics!
4. Encourage your students to develop strategies to learn vocabulary on their own. A lot of times my students are too lazy to keep their dictionaries up to date but all of them want to watch Netflix and read news online. “Studies show that in order to understand television shows learners need to know about 3,000-word families and have knowledge of proper nouns (Web & Rodgers, 2009)
5. Try to allocate specific class time to vocabulary learning.
It has been a great week, looking forward to the next week where we’ll be working on our own lesson plans!
Andrew Drummond. (2016, January 27). How to teach a reading skills lesson TESOL/CELTA [Youtube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/iu-yLD8qQM0
Brown, D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (Rev. 4th ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education.
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