Reflection

「閱讀技巧教學」摘要（一）

Author: Chieftain
July 20, 2003
986 Views
Category: 教育 education

A Summary of Chapter One: What is Reading
in Teaching Reading Skills

The book Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language contains three main parts: introductory, reading skills and strategies, and planning and teaching. The introductory one has three chapters that give teachers in foreign language reading teaching a concrete vision of reading process and important concepts for teaching students how to read. A summary of chapter one is given as follows:

The view of reading offered in this book is “reading for meaning.” Teachers should bear in mind that the transfer of messages from writers to readers is the main concern in helping students to develop their reading ability. Teachers can make teaching more purposeful and classes livelier by treating reading as a purposeful activity. Reading is to get meaning from a text. However, the readers are not passive as if the texts could actively give meanings to the reader. For example, we usually experience a phenomenon that a text is easier to some certain persons while the text might be extremely difficult to others.

We, as readers, might encounter difficulties in reading when we don’t share the same “code” with the writers. When we don’t have the previous knowledge required, for example, the knowledge of a specific field or subject, difficulties in reading arise. If we encounter a text that contains easy words to convey complex concepts, we will also have difficulties in comprehending. If the writer tries to use difficult vocabularies, we may still have difficulties when we share the same code with the writers, have the background knowledge, and have enough complex concepts to know a text. These statements account for the conclusion: the reader’s role is active.

If there is a mismatch between the presuppositions of the writer and those of the reader, messages could not be transfer from the writer to the reader. Therefore, the role of the schema (mental structure) is very important in reading process. Ken Goodman argues that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game in 1967; from this statement, readers are making assumptions based on their own experiences, or say, schema, in reading process.

In order to make sense in target readers’ minds, writers should presuppose what schemata readers bear in their minds. Readers could make sense of a text when they share the same presuppositions with writers. Readers can learn better by using prediction well in reading. Playing well in psycholinguistic guessing games makes readers effective in reading.

There are two ways of processing a text: the top-down and the bottom-up approaches. The two ways are complementary to each other. Using the two approaches in comprehending a text is known as interactive reading. When using the top-down approach, we use our overall schemata to predict the writers’ purposes and to know the messages conveyed. Using bottom-up approach means that a reader builds up a meaning from the smaller units of a language, for example, the vocabulary and syntax. The reader can use the knowledge of the smaller linguistic units in a language to help them achieve understanding a text.

As stated before, the readers contribute to the meaning of a certain text actively. For example, some people may hate the poem other people love. Some different interpretations would arise from carelessness of readers, and others from readers’ reasoning. The task of the teachers is to eliminate the carelessness of readers (students) and to encourage reasoning. This book teaches teachers how to develop the reading skills of an intermediate level student.