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Approaches to developing reading skills of learner 2

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Approaches to developing reading skills of learners of English Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………... Chapter 1. Reading is conscious thinking process…………………………. 1.1. An approach to develop reading skills……………………………….. 1.2. Theories of reading comprehension………………………………... 1.3. Techniques for beginning reading skill development……………… Chapter 2. What learners need to know to read English………………... 2.1. The importance of phonological processing in reading…………… 2.2. The relationship between syntactic processing and reading……… 2.3. The role of background knowledge in enhancing reading skills…. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….. Bibliography………………………………………………………………..

Introduction Today while implementing the third phrase of National program (Kadrlar tayyorlash milliy dasturi. 1997. 29- avgust) of preparing cadres, all new specialists undergoing the higher educational system are required to know one or several foreign languages. In connection with this, huge tasks are set before teachers of English language; teachers became one of the main subjects of educational reforms. Therefore, if a teacher is open to welcome new pedagogical innovations he can provide goal-oriented introduction of innovative ideas into educational process. Lately, range of significant official acts was issued on accelerating and developing the foreign languages teaching ; they define the state policy towards teaching foreign languages 1 After gaining independence, Uzbekistan has ad

those whose specialty is foreign languages. For example, reading comprehension for them implies the ability of understanding social specialty- related or other long, complex texts; belles letters and scientific-popular books, magazines, periodical materials, instructions, advertisement materials, various information sheets, documents, school record book, questionnaires, informal or electronic letters; memoranda, lectures, critical analyses, and working with working documentation. The actuality of the graduation paper. During conducting our research work we analyzed the significance of ways of developing reading skills to learn English and how to improve English learners’ knowledge. The significance of our work can be proved that we found out several ways of increasing the important parts o

The scientific novelty of the graduation paper. The novelty of this research work is to work out analyzing some approaches by applying them in practice. Also ,we consider the idea of using some activities in teaching reading skills of English language by looking at their abilities. The structure of the graduation paper. The present qualification work consists of introduction, the main part, conclusion and bibliography. The main part of the qualification work includes several items. There we discussed techniques, theories, approaches of reading skills and many processes based on reading comprehension. In the conclusion part our qualification work we tried to draw some results from the scientific investigations made within the main part of the qualification work. in bibliography part we ment

Chapter 1. Reading is conscious thinking process Reading is a conscious and unconscious thinking process. The reader applies many strategies to reconstruct the meaning that the author is assumed to have intended. The reader does this by comparing information in the text to his or her background knowledge and prior experience. Effective reading is essential for success in acquiring a second language. After all, reading is the basis of instruction in all aspects of language learning: using textbooks for language courses, writing, revising, developing vocabulary, acquiring grammar, editing, and using computer-assisted language learning programs. Reading instruction, therefore, is an essential component of every second- language curriculum. Understanding some important facts about reading, lit

1.1. An approach to develop reading skills Reading skills are the cognitive processes that a reader uses in making sense of a text. For fluent readers, most of the reading skills are employed unconsciously and automatically. When confronted with a challenging text, fluent readers apply these skills consciously and strategically in order to comprehend. Every language requires a different repertoire of reading skills, based on the structure of the language and the literacy habits of the native speakers of that language. ESL and EFL teachers, therefore, should train students in the skills that will give them the power to comprehend in English. As Brown and others pointed out, learning a new thinking process is best accomplished when the learner is consciously aware of the process, and an app

meaning. Consequently, teachers cannot assume that students who are good readers in their native language can simply apply successfully the same skills to reading in English. Reading in English requires a set of thinking skills and attitudes that grow out of the spoken and written use of the English language. Teaching reading in standard English to second-language learners and other limited English proficient students means helping them acquire the literate behaviors, the ways of thinking about text, that are practiced by native speakers of English. In fact, learning to read and comprehend a second language requires learning a secondary literacy: alternative cultural interpretations, cultural beliefs about language and discourse, and culture specific formal and content schemata. It is impo

nonfiction selections, etc.). The activity refers to what kind of comprehension task, skill, strategy, or concept the reader is attempting to perform (e.g., discovering the author’s main idea, understanding a sequence of events, thinking about a character’s intent in a story, etc). The situational context of reading comprehension can be thought of in at least two ways. First, the actual setting where reading occurs—at home, in a school classroom, the library, under a blanket at bedtime, and so on—affects how well one comprehends while reading. There is little doubt that children’s reading comprehension is influenced by the setting in which they read. (Aren’t you more focused and relaxed when reading alone at home than if called on to read during a college class?) Second, there is a social

Our analysis of comprehension instruction in core reading programs demonstrates several shortcomings that may undermine their effi cacy. First, the comprehension skills and strategies curricula are wide but not terribly deep. The structure of the curricula is often incoherent so that students and teachers do not know how skills and strategies relate to one another or how acquiring these sets of skills leads to becoming a better reader. The review ways you can take control and supplement your core reading program to produce effective comprehension instruction for your students. Research over the past 30 years has contributed greatly to our understanding of the thinking processes involved in reading comprehension. Surprisingly, however, little research has focused on the development of young

knowledge and experiences. The size and content of an individual’s schemas are infl uenced by personal experiences, both direct and vicarious. Therefore, younger children typically possess fewer, less well-developed schemas about a great many things than do mature adults. For example, Figure 7.1 represents a schema for birds that an elementary student might produce, showing it as a network of associated meanings. In 1978, Dolores Durkin reported fi ndings from her studies of reading comprehension instruction as taught by teachers using commercial reading programs (i.e., basal or core reading programs). After observing in both reading and social studies classrooms, Durkin concluded that the teachers spent very little time actually teaching children how to understand what they read. In fact,

comprehension strategies (McKeown et al., 2009), yields particularly strong results for improving children’s reading achievement. Other research evidence points clearly to the need for teachers. Chapter 7 Teaching Reading Comprehension to help students apply comprehension strategies in a variety of text types (narrative and expository) and genres (fairy tales, realistic fi ction, almanacs, encyclopedias, etc.) (Dymock & Nicholson, 2010). Thus, the key to successful instruction is delivering carefully structured learning activities that support children while they are developing the ability to use multiple comprehension strategies to understand what they read (McKeown et al., 2009; Pressley, 2006; Reutzel et al., 2005). It is important that teachers know and understand the minimum expected

about what will happen next, or what ideas the text will advance. In addition, readers continuously evaluate these predictions and hypotheses and revise them as the reading warrants. As they read, good readers vary their reading speed, sometimes skimming and sometimes rereading a section of text that is especially relevant to the reading goals. As they encounter new ideas during reading, they update their prior knowledge. Good readers make conscious inferences, such as determining the author’s intentions for writing the text, clarifying the meaning of unknown words, and filling in information if they perceive gaps in an argument. They create mental images. If, for example, they are reading fiction, they create mental pictures of settings and characters. Good readers are strategic! Good rea

2005) and are used deliberately to make sense of text (Afflerbach et al. 2008). Readers use strategies consciously to make sense of the text, remember critical ideas and integrate new learning into existing schema or prior knowledge. Students need to learn how to use strategies independently, to recognize and solve problems, and to delve deeper into text to make connections and inferences. Reading strategies are not the same as instructional strategies. The goal of instructional strategies is to teach students how to make sense of text. Instructional strategies are the plans used by the teacher to teach comprehension. They include but are not limited to explicit explanation, modeling, pre-teaching, organizing learning and scaffolding. Strategies laid out in this chapter emphasize teaching

develops over time, allowing readers to access text with automatically so they can focus their mental efforts on making sense of what is being read. The Interplay of Strategies and Skills Simply put, comprehension strategies are the cognitive processes and procedures that readers bring to the content of reading; comprehension skills are the procedures they use to grasp the organizational structure of the text. Readers employ various comprehension strategies before, during, and after an initial reading of a text. Comprehension skills, however, are best employed as readers reread a text and do close reading. Why is it important to provide students with instruction in comprehension skills? The most persuasive answer is given by Pearson and Camperell : When we identify a variable, including a

compare and contrast, and other reading skills need to be learned and practiced. They are foundational skills that enable the reader to use comprehension strategies effectively. For example, understanding the concept of main idea underlies summarizing. Effective readers are constantly monitoring their understanding, assessing their understanding, and identifying when comprehension breaks down. They are meta cognitively aware or in control of their own thinking throughout their reading. Luke compares this meta cognitive or self-regulatory behavior to a foreman who oversees monitors all the parts of a project. When the project is moving along smoothly, there is no need for intervention. Depending upon the problem, the foreman may need to stop the project to take some action. And this is exac

acquired through reading, movies, discussion, or any number of other indirect means, all of which can increase background knowledge. In fact, reading is one of the most important ways that people build prior knowledge. Prior knowledge is the sum of all the knowledge that readers have acquired, experienced, and stored in memory or schema. Schema theory proposes that knowledge is organized in a network of structures called schemata. Readers not only have schemata for ideas and experiences but for text structures such as fiction and nonfiction. When readers activate their schema they link to this network of information. As readers interact with a text, they continually relate what they are reading to their prior life and reading experiences. Readers’ interest in what they are reading influenc

1.2Theories of reading comprehension Over the last decade, a number of studies that have carefully examined young English learners’ early reading in English have found convergence on a number of key points (Manyak & Bauer, 2008). For example, ELs from a variety of first languages can successfully develop beginning literacy skills in English regardless of limitations in English proficiency. Second, the early stages of ELs’ reading development looks a lot like that of native speakers of English, with the same basic underlying factors of phonological awareness, letter identification, and decoding skills. Third, it appears that the same percentages of NS and ELs have difficulties learning to read in English. Finally, explicit instruction has proven to be beneficial for the early English readi

Reading Comprehension that teachers implement pre-reading activities that build ELs’ relevant background knowledge. An activity called synopsis text (Manyak & Bauer, 2008) is recommended for building background knowledge for ELs. First, identify key ideas from an upcoming text into a brief one- to two-paragraph synopsis. Students are asked to read the synopsis twice and then, working in pairs or small groups, identify three key points, one idea they find difficult to understand, and any unfamiliar words. Next, the groups write a question they have that relates to the upcoming reading. This familiarizes students with the content of the text and prompts them to anticipate new information (a schema- building activity). Although families usually do not have the expertise to provide explicit re

background knowledge in addition to what appeared on the printed page, they ultimately culminated in the meta cognitive view which is now in vogue. It is based on the control and manipulation that a reader can have on the act of comprehending a text. According to Dole et al. (1991), in the traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read. Readers are passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and the reader has to reproduce meaning. According to Nunan , reading in this view is basically a matter of decoding a series of written symbols into their aural equivalents in the

provide an understanding of the incoming data from the text we will have problems processing and understanding the text. Cognitively based views of reading comprehension emphasize the interactive nature of reading and the constructive nature of comprehension. Dole et al. have stated that, besides knowledge brought to bear on the reading process, a set of flexible, adaptable strategies are used to make sense of a text and to monitor ongoing understanding. According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on "whether reading is a bottom-up, language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process." It is also no more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on both L1 and L2 readers. Research has gone even further to define the control readers execute

Moreover, they attempt to form a summary of what was read. Carrying out the previous steps requires the reader to be able to classify, sequence, establish whole-part relationships, compare and contrast, determine cause-effect, summarise, hypothesise and predict, infer, and conclude. A more recent theory of reading comprehension is called "schema theory" or the " schema perspective." The goal of schema theory is to describe interaction between what is in the text and how that information is shaped and stored by the reader. The underlying assumption is that meaning does not lie solely in the print itself, but interacts with the cognitive structure or schemata already present in the reader's mind. These schemata represent, in Ausubel's terms, the "ideational scaf

modified or adapted as we learn new information. This idea is almost identical to the Piagetian concepts of assimilation and accommodation except that schema theory limits the input to printed material. In Piaget' s definition assimilation takes place when new knowledge is integrated into a preexisting knowledge base. Thus, accommodation occurs when the knowledge base, or a schema is changed in order to fit in new information. We can construct very specific schema to account for situations and events which occur frequently in our environment. This allows us to process this information faster and easier by helping us focus on a pattern of elements which occurs both in the stored schema and in the text. A particular reader's interpretation of a printed message is influenced by the re

before and after reading. While we have always deplored the teacher who instructed students to "read from pages 91 to 124," the importance of motivating and building interest as well as assessing the knowledge and experience of the reader before having the student read is more important in light of the schema theory. The secondary reading teacher needs to determine whether the students have the general background knowledge or experience to understand what they are reading as well as how to use it. For the remedial student with limited experience in reading, relationships or similarities to vicarious or real-life situations need to be drawn. Students also need to become aware of their personal attitudes and beliefs which can shape their interpretation of a text, giving it a meaning

questions about a text without recalling some literal facts in the story, and giving a low level response to a high level question. As we begin to focus on reading comprehension in a more who listic way, the overlapping nature of comprehension skills as well as the importance of knowing which to use and how to integrate this into one's cognitive structure becomes more the issue. Hopefully the most significant result of recent research on comprehension would be to see the demise of the practice of teaching skills in isolation. Anyone who has worked with remedial readers has noted that some of them are unable to transfer the knowledge of skills developed in isolation into context while reading. The situation of students trying to outguess the teacher must be changed. A teacher must first

1.3. Techniques for beginning reading skill development The four reading components described are integrated into a reading lesson, but they may not all be practiced in any one day. A reading lesson may cover several class periods. Throughout the lesson, the teacher should be aware of gaps in the learners’ skills and plan activities that give them the practice they need. For example, if students are having difficulties comprehending past tense verbs in a reading, the teacher would then include activities to practice using - ed to form past tense ; if students demonstrate difficulties in pronouncing the past tense marker, the teacher could then include activities to practice the pronunciations of -ed (phonological awareness). The following activities give examples of reading activities tha

with this level learner every time new vocabulary words are introduced. Because a learner needs to know 95-98 percent of the words in a text to be able to predict from context, teaching vocabulary through context clues has limited success with adult English language learners. Therefore, teaching words before they appear in a text is recommended. The following technique can be used with literacy- and beginning-level learners whenever new vocabulary words are introduced. Intermediate- and advanced-level students also need direct instruction in vocabulary. Like beginning-level learners, their oral vocabulary is below the level needed to learn word meanings from context. Teachers often struggle when instructing students who have different levels of literacy. The following lesson plan demonstra

Chapter 2. What learners need to know to read English

2.1.The importance of phonological processing Phonemic awareness is a cognitive skill that consists of three pieces. The first piece concerns a linguistic unit, the phoneme; the second concerns the explicit, conscious awareness of that unit; and the third involves the ability to explicitly manipulate such units. Phonemic awareness is thus the ability to consciously manipulate language at the level of phonemes. Let us take each of these in turn. A phoneme is an abstract linguistic unit. Linguists define it as the most basic unit of language capable of making a difference in meaning. As an example, the difference between the word pairs (each containing three phonemes) bit and pit, bat and bet, bin and bid, is a single phoneme, one occurring in these examples in the initial, medial, or final

she did not, she could not recognize the difference between spoken minimal pairs in that language, like bit and pit. But being able to use that linguistic difference in speaking and listening to language is very different from knowing explicitly that the difference being used is in the initial part of the word. This explicit knowledge is the meta linguistic nature of the skill, or the ability, to consciously reflect upon the linguistic units that underlies language. More than just being conscious of the phoneme, the third piece of the phonemic awareness concept requires some level of skill in manipulating phonemes. In learning to read an alphabetic language, it is not enough just to be aware of the phonemic units, the child also must be able to manipulate those units. Such manipulation is

unless she is consciously aware of both and has the intent to learn the relationship between the two (known as the alphabetic principle). Thus, if you know the letters and you know there is some relation between the letters and the spoken word, but you do not know the units underlying the spoken word, then you will not be able to figure out what the relationship is between the two representations. Much research, conducted under a variety of research designs, converges on the conclusion that phonemic awareness is critical for learning to read in alphabetic languages. First, there is evidence from concurrent correlations, which are derived from research designs that simply measure two skills in a sample of students at roughly the same point in time and then determine how those skills vary w

were measured. These correlations are consistent with a causal relationship between the two variables, where skill in one is the cause for the development of skill in the other, but they do not guarantee that the variables are causally linked (indeed, there might be a third variable that is causing the development in the other two skills). Nor, even if causally linked, do these correlations specify the direction of causation (that is, does phonemic awareness cause the reading skill or is it the other way round?). Even more suggestive evidence comes from a closer look at the distributions between phonemic awareness and reading skills concurrently measured. If you plot skill in phonemic awareness against skill in decoding (measured as reading individual pseudowords), you find triangular dis

time, are even more suggestive of causal relationships. Many studies report such correlations, where the time lag between the measure of phonemic awareness and the subsequent reading skill (measured either as decoding or reading comprehension skill) ranges from very small (a matter of months) to very large (a matter of many years). While providing stronger evidence than concurrent correlations do, these results could still appear even when the two variables were not causally related. For instance, as in concurrent correlations, there could be a third, unmeasured factor that is the cause underlying the development of both skills, where the two skills themselves are not at all causally linked. The strongest evidence for a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading comes from

skill, and the more skill in reading, the more skill in phonemic awareness. This indicates a reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, where skill in one supports development of skill in the other and vice versa. But the critical question is whether some amount of skill in phonemic awareness is critical before skill in reading can advance; the evidence suggests (especially that from training studies) the answer to this question is yes. Current research suggests that most children who enter school at kindergarten do not come skilled in phonemic awareness. Research also suggests that if there is no explicit instruction in this skill, many will fail to acquire it. Further, for some small percentage of young people, even explicit training is insufficient to guarantee the

say the middle part of hop; say the last part of stick. Deletion: Say the word pies without the first part. Addition: Say the word you have when you add the sound s to the beginning of the word top. Categorization: Say the word that does not belong in this group of words: pig, pack, top, put. Substitution: Say the word you make when you take out the second part of stop and replace it with the first part of lake. Segmentation: Say how many parts there are in the word build. Second, the sound units that are transmitted in speech that are derived from the underlying abstract phonemes do not arrive at the ear in a strict serial order. Rather the information that allows the hearer to detect the first sound in a word generally comes overlapped with information about the subsequent seg

and subsequent sounds that are to be made. You can get a sense of this for yourself by noting the position of your lower jaw as you begin to say bug and bought. In the latter example, the lower jaw is lowered from the outset to prepare for the pronunciation of the vowel that follows. These co-articulation effects result in the parallel transmission of linguistic information. And this poses a significant problem for acquiring phonemic awareness, for in many cases we cannot isolate even the initial sound (or phone) that is a member of the phonemic category the child is attempting to become aware of. Again, the best we can do is to set conditions where the child will induce the phonemic category we are trying to have her attend to. Third, what we are asking the child to do is counterintuitiv

out the relationships between letters and phonemes. With the prerequisites in hand (namely, knowledge of the letters, phonemes, and the alphabetic principle), the greater the opportunity to pair printed and spoken words, the greater the opportunity to learn the relationship between letters and phonemes. The child who lacks these prerequisites cannot take advantage of such opportunities, and print exposure is no longer efficacious for learning to read. Third, we know that if the child is not making progress in reading by the third grade, there is very little likelihood that she will ever, regardless of the intervention used, be able to read at the same level as her same-age peers. Our challenge as educators is thus to do all that we can to make sure our students are making early progress,

reading comprehension exists, researchers are less in agreement when it comes to determining the specific relations between syntax and each of the two major aspects of reading, namely decoding and comprehension. Some researchers have demonstrated a link between syntactic abilities and decoding and L1 reading comprehension respectively, but have pointed out that there was a stronger relationship between syntactic abilities and the former than there was with the latter. For example, Willows and Ryan found that syntactic tasks of repetition, localization, correction and cloze tasks correlated more strongly with decoding than with reading comprehension. Bowey obtained the same results when she experimented with children in fourth and fifth grades. Onthe other hand, Nation and Snowling found a

hypotheses have attempted to explain the differences between poor and good comprehenders, each offering a fundamentally different view of what reading requires and how language acquisition is related to it. While one view, the processing limitation theory, claims a deficiency in processing and locates the problem in the “subsidiary mechanisms that are used in language processing” (Crain & Shankweiler, 1988, pp. 168-169), the other view, the structural lag hypothesis, blames poor reading comprehension on a deficiency in linguistic knowledge, more precisely on in while most reading research in a foreign language has investigated vocabulary knowledge, also the ability to process structures has an important facilitative effect on reading comprehension (Barnett, 1986; Berman, 1984). Among recen

The participants were then tested on the pre-reading level of the Gates- MacGinitie Standardized Reading Test (MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, Dreyer, & Hughes, 2000) which has components known to be precursors of reading ability.2 Correlations between the syntax measure and the precursors to reading indicated that there were more significant correlations between the Spanish syntax scores and English pre-reading than between the English syntax scores and English pre-reading. Correlations between Spanish syntax and English listening also appear to be stronger than those between English syntax and English listening. Based on these results, Martohardjono et al. concluded that there is indeed a strong relationship between syntactic skills in L1 and listening comprehension (as precursor to readi

the prediction of reading comprehension performance. They pointed out that even though a number of contributing factors to reading ability have been empirically validated, the relative contribution of these factors to the explanation of performance in a foreign language reading test is limited. While previous studies (i.e., Brisbois, 1995; Ulijn and Strother, 1990) attached a greater importance to vocabulary knowledge in foreign language reading, Shiotsu and Weir (2007) offered support for the relative superiority of syntactic knowledge over vocabulary knowledge in predicting performance on a reading comprehension test. They further claimed that the literature on the relative contribution of grammar and vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension is too limited to offer convincing eviden

developed fully. Even though there is a widely-held belief that children attain adult syntax at about the age of 5, C. Chomsky (1969) noted that while differences between a 5-yearold’s and an adult’s grammar might not be apparent in a conversation, direct testing can reveal differences. Her investigation supporting this claim involved 40 elementary schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 10. In that study, the researcher elicited information about children’s knowledge of sentence subject assignment to infinitival complement verbs and found that 3 out of 14 children who failed to show mastery of this syntactic feature were over 9 years of age. This suggests, according to C. Chomsky, that “active syntactic acquisition is taking place up to the age of 9 and perhaps even beyond” (p. 121). Thi

Background knowledge and prior knowledge are generally used interchangeably. For example, Stevens defines background knowledge quite simply as what one already knows about a subject. Dochy et al., provide an elaborate definition, describing prior knowledge as the whole of a person’s knowledge, including explicit and tacit knowledge, meta cognitive and conceptual knowledge. Background knowledge is supposed to consist of two main components: “our assimilated direct experiences of life and its manifold activities, and our assimilated verbal experiences and encounters” (Swales, 1990, p.9 ). It is a reader’s background knowledge of the topic, vocabulary, and structure of a text. Prior knowledge may come from experience or from reading. When a reader activates his prior knowledge, he is linking

knowledge. In this research, the role of background knowledge activation will be done through previewing strategy (THIEVES); as a pre-reading activity will be explored from the perspective of schema theory. The study is designed to investigate the increase in readers’ comprehension if their prior knowledge is activated before reading a text. Readers' prior knowledge activation is ensured through the prior knowledge activation strategy of text previewing (THIEVES). This investigation will be carried out through an experiment divided into: Part One and Part Two. In Part One, participants in the experiment; Group1 and Group 2 will work on the first reading selection. In this part, the experimental group is Group2 and the control one is Group1. The experimental group; Group2 will receive t

that examined children's understanding of critical story events and their ability to make causal inferences, we found once again that the low-SES children experienced greater difficulty comprehending the story than their middle-SES peers. These children demonstrated significantly poorer comprehension of the text ( t (75) = 1.99, p = .050), with a moderate effect size (Cohen's d = .46). Consequently, in our third study, we attempted to neutralize background knowledge by introducing a storybook narrative context that would be novel to both groups. Here was our reasoning: If children's preexisting background knowledge underlies these differences in comprehension, then we would expect that there would be no differences in learning among our differing SES groups. For this st

research (Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Recht & Leslie, 1988), highlighting the role of background knowledge on children's comprehension as early as preschool. It makes good sense that to comprehend a story or text, readers will need a threshold of knowledge about the topic. Sometimes we call it domain-specific knowledge or topical knowledge. Without such knowledge, it becomes difficult to construct a meaningful mental model of what the text is about. Consider the following examples. For example, think about the word operation . If you were to read the word in a sports article about the Yankees, you might think about Derek Jeter recovering from his latest baseball injury. If you read the word in a math text, on the other hand, you'd think about a mathematical process like multiplicat

requires the active construction of inferences that rely on background knowledge and are implicit in the text. Second-language learners know for certain that many metaphors, idioms, and other literary devices are based on background knowledge. For example, if we say that you “really hit the ball out of the park” after you gave a presentation to your colleagues, you would quickly understand the compliment. We know that it can't be taken literally because we know what the saying refers to. Writings are heavily dependent on metaphors and idioms. Studies (e.g., Ortony, Schallert, Reynolds, & Antos, 1978) have shown that idioms are often processed just as rapidly as literal meanings, indicating that we are constantly activating background knowledge in comprehension. Informational text ten

Or when there is little to build on? If you asked us, for example, to read an elementary physics text building on our previous knowledge base of physics, you would likely see blank stares, akin to a deer in headlights. This issue becomes even more complicated in the age of Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS place a premium on the amount of background knowledge we provide to children prior to reading a text. It's not that the standards negate background knowledge or its contribution to comprehension; rather, the authors of the publishers' guidance to the CCSS emphasize close reading, developing knowledge through text, regarding the deliberate and careful analysis of text as the gateway for developing independent readers (National Governors Association Center for Best Pract

 Use analogies. An analogy is another type of comparison, but this time the comparison is made between two things that are usually thought to be different from each other. Analogies help children build knowledge because they compare something new to something we already know. For example, try something like, “bird is to feather as dog is to… (fur).” Children can use similes (comparisons using the words like or as ) or metaphors (comparisons without using like or as ) to build new knowledge.  Encourage topic-focused wide reading. Reading builds knowledge, but wide reading has typically been interpreted as reading about a lot of different topics, demonstrating breadth rather than depth in reading. Try this variation: Encourage children to identify an interest and read as ma

to identify two main areas of cognition that contribute to the ability to read and understand written text: decoding skills, consisting of the ability to identify speech sounds and link these to individual letters; and listening comprehension, which is based on the reader’s ability to recruit her mental grammar of the language and process sentences. Since syntax is a significant component in processing and at the same time a domain of language that reading researchers are only beginning to investigate, we have made it the main focus of our study. In the following section we report some of the findings on the relationship between syntax and developing reading skills in monolingual children. Conclusion Students today are faced with ever increasing demands to read and read well. The importanc

has been found to impact students’ appreciation of reading as a process, the goal of which is to understand what is being read. But the ultimate objective of comprehension instruction should be student ownership of the strategies and skills, knowing when comprehension breaks down and how to address the problem and repair the breakdown. Teaching students to use a repertoire of comprehension strategies and skills can set them securely on the path to becoming lifelong readers. Many opportunities to read independently allow students to begin to coordinate the strategies they have learned; to adjust, modify, or change strategies and skills until they are able to make sense of text. The higher order thinking of strategic readers also enhances their reading experience and responses to literature

to enhance background knowledge, differences in children's knowledge base may further exacerbate the differences in children's vocabulary and comprehension. The imperative to foster children's background knowledge as a means for providing a firm foundation for learning, therefore, is greater than ever. Reference 1. Burt, M., Peyton, J., & Adams, R. (2003). Reading and adult English language learners: A review of the research.

2. August, D., & Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. 3. Burt, M. (2003). Issues in improving immigrant workers’ English language skills. 4.Florez, M. C., & Burt, M. (2001). Beginning to work with adult English language learners: Some considerations. 5. Hadley, A. O. (1993). Teaching language in context. 6. Moss, D., & Ross-Feldman, L. (2003). Second language acquisition in adults: From research to practice. 7. Birch, B. M. (2002). English L2 reading: Getting to the bottom. 8. Burt, M., Peyton, J. K., & Adams, R. (2003). Reading and adult English language learners: A review of the research. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. 9. Eskey, D. (2005). Reading in a second l

12. Hadley, A. O. (1993). Teaching language in context. 13. Hood, S., Solomon, N., & Burns, A. (1996). Focus on reading. Sydney, Australia: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. 14. Kruidenier, J. (2002). Research-based principles for adult basic education reading instruction. 15. Nation, I. M. P. (2000). Learning vocabulary in lexical sets: Dangers and guidelines. 16. Nation, I. M. P. (2005). Teaching and learning vocabulary, Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning . 17. Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of reading development. New York: McGraw Hill. 18. Chomsky, C. (1969). The acquisition of syntax in children from 5 to 10. Cambridge. 19. Clarke, M. (1979). Reading in English and Spanish: Evidence from adults ESL students. Language Learning, 29 , 121

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