Putting Theory Into Practice: Teaching a Content-Based Reading Lesson

Assigning the students a text and requiring them to answer a series of comprehension questions is more testing instead of just teaching the students a strategy of reading, in which it can be used to determine the students’ capability in term of extracting certain kinds of information from the text read. Yet, this strategy does not provide the students with skills and strategies in order to become efficient, effective, and independent readers.  Hence, the missing skills and strategies mentioned are taught as the main thrust of current approaches to reading instruction. A reading lesson, in contemporary practice, is divided into three parts or stages; they are pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. The followings are some brief explanations of each part or phase in reading lesson:

a)             The Prereading Phase

The prereading stage is aimed at three purposes: to activate (or build, if necessary) the students’ knowledge of the subject, to provide any language preparation that might be needed to cope with the passage, and to finally motivate the students to read the text. 

First of all prereading stages’ purposes mentioned is about founded upon the notion, in which the students previous knowledge affect their comprehension of the material. As for the various techniques suggested to mobilize the existing knowledge are the use of pictures, movies, field trips, values clarification exercises, and even role-play. Among the techniques mentioned, however, research has not determined yet which one is the most effective technique. In order to decide the technique, the teacher is suggested to depend on the inclination of the class as well as to use the formal one in case of academic setting.

Secondly, the goal of prereading phase refers to the language preparation provided to cope with the passage. The teacher’s contribution, in this case, is needed to supplement the students with new vocabulary and concepts critical to the reading understanding. Providing vocabulary, then, is considered to be effective in term of easing the students to comprehend the text given.

The last goal of prereading phase is about students’ motivation to read the text. This goal deals with the stretch of discourse, such as a chapter from a textbook. This goal is actually purposed to survey and preview the chapter of the textbook in order to determine the structure of the piece and identify the key ideas. This aim involves examining the tittle and subtitle, summary, and conclusion, and else, the visual support material, such as pictures, charts, maps, and the like.

b)             The While-Reading Phase

The while-reading stage is intended to help the students to understand the specific content as well as to help the students to perceive the rhetorical structure of the text. This goal, essentially, requires the guidance of the teacher as well, which is helpful to ensure that the students active in questioning related to the material so that the students are wondering and attracted to read the text.

In term of helping the students to understand the specific content, the teacher should be providing guidance for the students before they read with a list of questions that direct their attention to the major ideas of the text. There are three levels of understanding that the questions should address in order to get the maximum benefit in this stage: the explicit that refers to solicit stated information, the implicit that is beneficial to ask information that can be inferred, and the applied that is useful to necessitate relating new ideas to previous knowledge or experience.

Moreover, in term of helping the students to perceive the rhetorical structure of the text, the teacher needs to use “guide-o-ramas” and “pattern study guides”, these two terms are literally developed for secondary school content reading classes. Guide-o-ramas is a series of statements, instructions, and/or questions that leads students through the assigned reading and indicates what information is important, how a paragraph or section is organized, and what is to be learned. Furthermore, pattern study guides is beneficial to focus the students’ attention on the ways that paragraph are typically structured to represent the relationship between the main idea and subordinate detail, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, and other. To be noted, however, not all of the techniques mentioned are suitable for every text. Thus, the nature of the material should become a consideration in order to select the text.

c)             The Postreaing Phase

The postreading stage or phase is aimed at reviewing the content, which is divided into two steps: work on bottom-up concerns such as grammar, vocabulary, and discourse features, and the second one is consolidating what has been read by relating the new information to the learners’ knowledge, interests, and opinions. The second step mentioned is useful for the students to integrate the new information with what they have already known. Given to this stage, it would be appropriate to put the students in pairs or small group in order to compare and verify their responses to the questions or graphics and to finally check the result with the entire classmates.

            Above all, it is possible to get rid of some stages, in which all of the stages mentioned are not always used in some cases. For instances, if the students have already been reading a series of texts on the same topic, it might not be necessary to spend much time on the prereading stage. The teacher, on the other hand, does not always require the three parts of reading lesson; one or two stages are able to be gotten rid in order to abridge the time spent by which the reading lesson is conducted.

Monday, May 18, 2020