Teaching in Secondary Schools

Applying Research in Reading to the Foreign Language Classroom

Millard South High School, Omaha, Nebraska

Teachers frequently are frustrated by students' lack of interest in reading a novel, lack of ability to comprehend what is going on, and lack of daily preparation. Yet, there is a growing amount of research-based reading strategies, which, when used effectively in the foreign language classroom, can enhance reading success and create more interest for the students.

Vacca (1986) has stated that Reading in the Ll classroom is an interaction of three factors: the teacher, the text, and the student. The teacher and students create a context environment where the teacher leads the class attitude about reading, particularly the text. In surveys done of classroom teachers, it was found that the teachers themselves rarely read and assume that the students will not read their texts sufficiently to learn the material. With this attitude, it is no wonder that students perceive that reading is not that important.

A teacher needs to understand some insights into the reading process. The psycholinguistic view, as Goodman (1976) advocates, suggests that readers are users of language whose task is to make sense out of what they read. To do this, readers use their background knowledge as well as their expectations and interactions with the written language to make sense of what is read. Readers search for language cues such as letter/sound associations as clues to meaning. Grammar helps them guess what to anticipate in context. Readers use their knowledge to anticipate meanings of unknown words by utilizing the context to guess the meaning.

Richard Anderson (1979) has studied background knowledge as a factor in the reading process. Using the schema theory as a basis, Anderson suggests that readers activate existing knowledge schemata to interpret text. Comprehension involves matching what the readers already know with the new information. Readers also infer meaning beyond the lines to elaborate on the meaning.

Pearson and Johnson (1978) have investigated text relationships and comprehension. Comprehension is seeing relations among concepts and propositions. Structure, the organization of ideas, is imposed when writing. Perceiving this structure helps in the reading process by improving learning and retention.

Comprehension is defined as exploring and making meaning. In past studies an attempt was made to isolate certain comprehension skills by Davis (1968). Recalling word meanings, finding answers to questions, drawing inferences from the content, recognizing a writer's purpose, attitude, tone and mood, and following the structure of a passage seem to be underlying mental skins. He also found that all these skills appear to be interactive and cannot be isolated. It implies that reading is a meaning-driven process and places skills within that context. Goodman (1976) states that a person can possess all of the skills and still not be able to read. The reader must have the ability to put together the various parts in the process to be able to read.

The goal is for students to become independent learners. The teacher's role should be to guide the students' prereading activities, so that students become able to use metacognitive strategies to comprehend text.

To sum up the Ll reading process, reading is purposeful and selective, based on comprehension and anticipatory skills. To comprehend, readers need background knowledge of the world and of the linguistic code before they can successfully interact with the reading to create new meaning. The interaction of purpose and comprehension lead students to anticipate the content.

In the research literature on second language reading (L2), there has been much effort to apply the Ll reading theories such as those previously mentioned. L2 studies by Carrell (1984), Johnson (1982), and Lee and Musumeci (1988) have been conducted investigating the role of schema activation of background knowledge and the recognition of passage structure. The results showed that students recall more of the L2 reading text when they know something about the passage content or structure before reading. An added finding was that cultural background is sometimes necessary in the L2 reading process in order to understand (Bernhardt, 1984).

Hosenfeld (1979), identified twenty different strategies that an efficient L2 text reader uses. These include identifying meaning instead of words, using think-alouds, considering illustrations, evaluating guesses, using a variety of types of contextual dues, and following through with proposed solutions.

L2 reading researchers (Carrell, 1984, Swaffar, 1988, Phillips, 1984) have developed procedures for attacking the L2 reading process analagous to those of Ll: prereading activities, vocabulary instruction, instruction on how to comprehend, conceptually complete authentic texts, and materials appropriate to the cultural schemata of the readers.

However, Barnett (1988) hypothesized that average L2 students do not automatically use whatever Ll reading skill they have to understand L2 text, and suggests that giving early reading experiences and strategies to L2 students appears to help reading ability in later courses.

In order to help students read in the L2 classroom, teachers must understand the different purposes for reading. Phillips (1979) divided these purposes into two categories, information and pleasure. Munby (1979) called the two intensive or extensive. If information is the goal, intensive reading follows four types of understanding:

1) understanding the sense, the exact meaning in the text;

2) understanding the implications and inferences;

3) understanding the relationships of ideas;

4) being able to relate the material to one's own knowledge.

Ideally, authentic materials should be provided as much as possible in the FL classroom. Though often difficult to read by novice L2 learners, Munby's (1979) four ways of dealing with text can be applied to a single text depending on the language level of the student. For instance, a newspaper article can be skimmed in Level 1, scanned in Level 2, and read intensively or extensively in Levels 3 and 4.

Text selection should also be made according to students' background knowledge, linguistic code proficiency and interest. If these components are not considered, teachers create very negative feelings toward reading, maximizing the difficulty in getting students to read the next text presented.

It is difficult to assess the appropriateness of the text by a readability formula. The teacher is aware of the vocabulary and linguistic base of the students from previous years and should evaluate the difficulty of the text. A doze procedure can be used in L2 classrooms to determine text difficulty.

The ACTFL Proficiency guidelines suggest a hierarchical scheme of text, starting with forms, money, signs, moving to short narrations, newspapers, and finally literary texts and technical journals. If one follows the ACTFL guidelines, text selection could be based on proficiency level of the students and the levels of language studied.

Perhaps one of the best solutions to this dilemma is to offer options to the students. Magazines of various kinds, newspapers, plays, stories, novels, or poems are all possible selections that appeal to the varied students' interests in the class. Using generic prereading forms can help the students identify the organization of the reading, select difficult vocabulary by skimming, anticipate the meaning, and, thus, activate prior knowledge. Finding others who are reading the same materials can aid the students in comprehension

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by discussing the text while reading.

The following is a typical reading activity for an upper-level Spanish class in which all students are reading the same novel. Phillips' (1984) five stages for teaching reading skills are followed:

1) preteaching;

2) skimming;

3) decoding/intensive reading;

4) comprehension;

5) transferable/integrating skills.

First, the readers are hooked into their own background knowledge to provide meaning. A brief synopsis of the plot and characters is provided by the teacher. The students are asked to recall a time when their own lives may have paralleled the characters' lives. Do they know anyone who is like the characters?

Other prereading activities are necessary. Three-level reading or anticipatory guides are ideal. Graphic organizers are a must for L2 students. They can take the form of structural overviews, timeliness, or other clues that suggest the organization of the reading. As mentioned previously, the book is briefly described so that all students understand the summary. Before each reading assignment is given, the teacher paraphrases what the students will be reading. Skimming the book for illustrations, organizational patterns, chapter titles, and vocabulary all help the prereading process.

Difficult vocabulary is identified through the skimming process. Conceptual organizers using the new vocabulary is a technique to help students learn the new words by categorizing them. The reading gives the students contextual dues for understanding new vocabulary. Reinforcement of important words is critical by placing them in different contexts to give them added exposure.

During the reading process, it is frequently necessary to recall the previous events of the story. Students draw and/or write a description of the events that have taken place up to where they are currently reading. Students are then asked to anticipate the ending of the story by writing and/or illustrating the final events, justifying their conclusions.

During the process of reading, all learning styles are honored by telling students that they can read in groups or by themselves. Time is given in class to read so others are there to facilitate the reading process.

At the end of the reading, a check to see that all students understand the sequence of events is necessary. Higher-level (Bloom) questions and activities are implemented so that deeper levels of comprehension are emphasized. Students analyze character actions, suggest alternate actions, evaluate the plot construction as compared to another story, and explain how their lives have been enhanced by reading this story. Students create their own stories using the same plot, add new chapters, write from a different point of view, or change the ending.

Structured overviews are especially valuable for intensive reading. The students can be prepared to watch for the points deemed important to the teacher. Questions asked before the reading help students anticipate responses. Questions after the reading make students see the holistic meaning. Thus, the teacher needs to decide which suits the purpose of the particular reading task.

For successful reading experiences, some kind of schema activation is essential. The readers' background knowledge and linguistic abilities must be considered, and decisions must be made on the purpose for reading. When there is success, positive feelings are evident and students experience better L2 reading comprehension.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 73, Number 3, September 1990