Week 10 Readings-"I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date!"

This weeks readings focused on teaching reading and the different techniques that teachers can use when instructing in an E.L.L. setting.

H.D.B. talked a lot about teaching reading strategies such as skimming, scanning and reviewing. He also listed the many different genres and how teachers can use those different structures to make students aware of the text and discourse structure. There was a sequence given for reading that I had never heard of before called the SQ3R and it involves the different steps students should take when reading a text. H.D.B. also explained that teachers should not simply give their students a text to silently read but to explain why the students are reading the text, what strategies should be used when reading and finally using comprehension activities after the text is read.

The peanut butter book broke down the different reading strategies even more to top-down and bottom-up processing. It was concluded in the book that a mixture of both is best for students. It was also stated that readers take one of two stances on reading: efferent and aesthetic. An example of efferent is when graduate students read text books they are expecting to take away a certain amount of information. Aesthetic reading is different in the fact that reading is done for the experience and not for the specific purpose of gaining information (although that can happen on accident in aesthetic reading). I like the example the book gave of the boy listening to the story of Alice and Wonderland and when the rabbits says, "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date!" he tells his dad that rabbits cannot talk. In this instance the boy missed the aesthetic purpose of the text by taking a efferent stance.

I gained a lot of information about reading and I think of the idea of teaching reading a lot differently. For one, reading is not simply about saying the words out loud but it is about the structure of the text and the background knowledge that students bring to the text. Also, the idea of cohesive ties can be very difficult to teach but with exposure to the words and their contexts students can learn about their importance in texts.