Didáctica del Inglés aplicada a la Educación Primaria

READING SKILL

Now, I am going to focus on Reading because I think we waste a lot of time on reading different kind of texts and we aren’t aware of this, for examples, we usually read a book, magazine, newspaper, news and information on internet, even advertising and sign in the streets.

First of all, we have to know that reading is “the skill or activity of getting information from books” (Cambridge Dictionaries Online)but also, we can get information from other sources.

 Reading is one of the four skills that children have to develop in Primary School and teacher often observe that their students have comprehension problems and they wonder what the problem is and how the process of reading may work with their students. These problems can come from inappropriate method of development reading skills that children learn when they are in Primary School.

Reading is not the most difficult skill that children have to learn during their life. I think teachers have to develop this skill in different ways because there are several reading techniques depending on the purpose that we want to achieve.

In this way, we are going to focus on two different types of reading. These are oral reading (aloud) and Silent reading, each one of them have their own advantages and disadvantages for the development of reading skills depending on which is the goal.

On the one hand, traditionally oral reading (aloud) is the most popular type used in classes. Reading aloud is not the same as Silent reading because it is a different skill, and generally, it is not the one which most people have to utilize outside the classroom every day. Nevertheless, this reading aloud skill is a useful technique when used in these three situations:

• “Reading aloud to the teacher should be done individually or in small group” because this let teachers to ask students about meaning, what they think about what happen then… 
• “The teacher can use it as a means of training and checking rhythm and pronunciation” because teachers can read a sentence or phrase and then their students can repeat the same once or twice.
• “Reading dialogues aloud in pairs or small group is an efficient way of checking work” because students can help each other with words and pronunciation and also is a good way to give a feedback to your classmates.

The problem with this type of reading is that teachers use to do it every day in all classes, and also they do it for achieve aims that should be achieve through Silent reading, because it is the appropriate way, so they do not usually make use of reading aloud.  (Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children)

On the other hand, Silent reading can be the most useful type of reading, because normally people will use it and it remains for the rest of their lives. Therefore, teachers should develop this type of reading since early years, and in this way, children will enjoy the wonderful world of reading. (Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children)

So that children can get to the end of this way, teachers should know which activity develop each technique. Thus, I would like to show you the most important techniques that teachers should work with their students through different activities.

• Skimming: “reading a passage quickly to grasp the main idea”.
• Scanning: “reading a passage quickly to find specific information”.
• Contextual guessing: “making guesses about the meaning of words by looking at the surrounding words or situation”.
• Paraphrasing: “the ability to say or write ideas in other words; measures the reader´s understanding of the main idea of a text”.
• Scrambled stories: “also known as “jigsaw reading”: the reader re- orders the mixed up pieces of a text to show he understands how a texts fits together”.
• Intensive reading: “reading between the lines; the reader understands what is meant but not started in a passage”.
• Extensive reading: “reading widely in order to improve reading comprehension, reading speed and vocabulary”.
• Making inferences: “reading between the lines,: the reader understands what is meant but not stated in a passage”
• Information transfer: “exercise which requires readers to transfer information from the text into another form or related text or drawing”.

(Tanner, K and Catherine Green, Tasks for Teacher Education a Reflective Approach, 1998)

Such as I have said before, all these techniques have to develop through different activities year after year. Besides it would be very interesting if these techniques are made alternately, for example teacher can alternate different techniques and not only develop one technique, although children do different activities.

To conclude this post about reading, I would like to emphasize some aspect of three important items. The first one is about oral reading (aloud) and Silent reading; I think good teachers have to develop reading skill through the use of both of them, and also they have to be able to use them alternately depending on the goal that they want to achieve. The second one is about different techniques that good teachers have to be able to use alternately with different kind of activities. And the last one is about the importance of develop correctly the reading skill because from my point of view, we are continuously using this skill though we are not conscious of this.

REFERENCES

Cambridge Dictionaries Online

• http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Tanner, K and Catherine Green, Tasks for Teacher Education a Reflective Approach, 1998

Wendy A. Scott and Lisbeth H. Ytreberg, 1999, Teaching English to Children