Essential Methods for Teaching Reading and Vocabulary Skills
Foundations of Teaching Reading
Reading is a receptive skill focused on understanding written texts. It consists of two related processes:
- Word Recognition: The process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language.
- Comprehension: The process of making sense of words, sentences, and connected text. Readers utilize background knowledge, vocabulary, and grammatical knowledge to achieve comprehension.
Kinds of Reading
Reading is typically classified into three kinds:
- Extensive Reading: Reading primarily for pleasure and general understanding.
- Intensive Reading: Reading for detailed information and specific analysis.
- Oral Reading: Reading text aloud.
Reading to Learn vs. Learning to Read
Reading is an essential part of language instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways.
Learning to Read is the acquisition and practice of the skills necessary to understand the meaning behind printed words. For a fairly proficient reader, the skill of reading often feels simple, effortless, and automatic.
Effective Reading Strategies and Techniques
These strategies help learners engage with and process written material:
- Skim: Read quickly to get the brief idea or general concept.
- Scan: Read specifically for details or a particular piece of information.
- KWL Method: A strategy to determine what you Know about the topic, what you Want to know, and what you Learned.
- Skip and Return: If you do not understand a word or section, keep reading ahead. Come back to the section or word later and try to figure out the meaning. Use a dictionary if necessary.
- Structural Cues: Look for headings, subtitles, and keywords to anticipate content.
- Read Out Loud: Useful for beginning readers to connect written symbols with spoken language.
- Reorganization: Create timelines or charts to reorganize what you read in a different format.
- Transformation: Rewrite the text in a different tense or format.
- Active Engagement: Illustrate concepts, write questions, or summarize sections.
Understanding Graded Readers
Graded Readers are books that have been written specifically for English learners at a defined proficiency level.
Teaching Vocabulary Acquisition
Components of Knowing a Word
Knowing a word involves several dimensions:
- Recognition: Being able to recognize the word when it is heard or seen, and distinguishing it from words with a similar form.
- Meaning: Realizing that vocabulary items often have more than one meaning.
- Word Usage: Understanding that a word’s meaning can be changed, stretched, or limited by the context in which it is used.
- Word Formation: Students need to know facts about word formation, how words change their shape and grammatical value in different contexts, and how the words are spelled and how they sound.
- Coverage: The capacity of a word to take the place of other words. A word is more useful if it covers more concepts than if it only has one very specific meaning.
Techniques in Vocabulary Instruction
The Three C’s Approach
- Convey Meaning: The teacher should clearly convey the meaning of the new word.
- Check Understanding: The teacher checks that the students have understood the word properly.
- Consolidate and Contextualize: The teacher should consolidate learning and try to get the students to relate the word to their personal experience, preferably using it in a personally meaningful context.
Direct vs. Indirect Vocabulary Learning
- Direct Vocabulary Learning: Learners do exercises and activities that focus their attention explicitly on vocabulary (e.g., word building, guessing words from context).
- Indirect Vocabulary Learning: The learner’s attention is focused on some other feature, usually the message conveyed by the speaker or writer, allowing vocabulary acquisition to happen naturally.