Aim: to help students understand the steps of reading and understanding texts with many unknown words; to revise grammar and vocabulary.

Materials: a short text, previously not read

Procedure: the students had to read the text and list the stages of their own reading process. They had 15 minutes for this, then we started the discussion which took us 60 minutes.

Teacher's role: when I noticed that one student was just sitting, I asked him to show me his paper. His steps were: 1. look at the text, 2. try to read the words I know, 3. try to understand the text, 4. take a dictionary. I asked why he needed step 2, he said: to understand the context. Then I asked: does it help to understand the context when you see 5 familiar words scaterred around a page? So I asked him to think why he needed step 2 and how understanding of certain words helps.

Actually, these 4 steps were common for all the students. So, I tried to show them that step 2 - understanding separate words - is useless unless you think about the lexical and grammatical features of these words, what can and can't accompany them.

I wrote several words on the board and asked them to think of the context. And they made up a context. But then I asked them to think about the grammar or these words, for example like in English, -ment is in nouns, ending -s can't be the past form of a verb, etc. This task made them revise their grammar knowledge and enabled the students to predict what else can/can't be in the text. And when we know what to see in a text, we start seeing it. By the way, the 'understood' context changed a bit, more items opened up but with less clarity.

Also, I reminded them that it's important to know why we read a text, what we want to learn from it, eg, if it's a menu, the purpose is to eat, not to enjoy the writing style. Again, such contexts help us predict and evaluate the probability of certain things to appear in the text. Even better, if there are illustrations to the text.

Overall reflection: what I managed to show them during these two lessons was that 1) you don't need separate familiar words themselves, but the resources these words contain, the tools of figuring out the meanings of other words, 2) you have to use additional keys in the text: the situation, the source, pictures, charts, etc.  Basically, we were working with the Step 2 of the Thinking Framework. Later I plan to check how well they understood what we were doing last time. I think I'll prepare some questions for them to answer on the basis of the text (both about the reading algorithm and the contents of the text),


# Alexander Sokol 2011-04-04 16:13
Thanks, Marija. This is basically what I spoke about in one of the previous comments. The 'algorithm' they wrote is completely useless. What they referred to as 'steps' is evident, the key questions are different. In fact, it's quite usual that students' algorithms look like this in the beginning. Our task here is to get them to understand that this is useless. A useful algorithm should deal with the things you're describing when giving examples from English. And normally lots of learning occurs till they realise the difference.
Do you see what I mean?
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