Monday, October 3, 2011

SECTION 12

Teaching reading to ESL students to me seems like a very huge challenge and goal to overcome. It is absolutely essential that the students develop reading skills in their L2 in order to be successful in other classrooms that may not be ESL or sheltered. Many of the dilemmas that are presented in 26 present an array of problems that I feel can all be solved. For example, not having enough vocabulary for reading is not always a problem. To give an example, when I was learning how to read in my L2 I was taught that it is never necessary to know every single word that you read. In other words, my teacher told me, "Put the dictionary down, stop looking up every single word that you cross that you do not know, and just try to read the sentence and understand it without using the dictionary." This is exactly what I did, even when I was not very proficient in the language, I would just read the sentences without barely using a dictionary. She taught me the skills that I needed to infer what some of the words meant by looking at the other context of the sentence in terms of words that I already knew. This technique proved to be very successful to me in my second language reading abilities. Other dilemmas presented in this section present a problem that I believe has a solution that can be achieved in the classroom.

Strategic Reading is also very important in an L2 setting. I guess that what my teacher taught me could be described as stategic reading. Although it is much more than that. It is important for the students to know that they must read with a purpose: that is to infer, predict or to understand what the author means; rather than just simply reading the words on the page. I strongly believe in doing pre-activities that can help the students get a better idea of what the reading will be about is so important. Even now, in college, I prefer to know what the reading is about before I read it, because just having that little background knowledge helps me to understand while I'm reading. Otherwise it is just me diving into this chapter that I have no idea what it is about, or what to keep in mind and look for while I am reading.

I really like the idea of Extensive Reading. I think that this can be extremely useful while learning a second language. It helps build vocabulary quick rapidly and also provides the students with an array of genres that they can explore. However I believe that in L2, ER may not always be the best tool, because I believe it also important to provide the students with authentic discourse that they may need in their communicative use of the language.

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