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Valerie Pobloth
Matrikel-Nr.: 762029
Teaching Young Adult Literature
Prof. Dr. Britta Freitag-Hild
9 February 2015

Seminar Paper
Developing Reading Skills
In this essay I would like to give a short overview about my presentation on
Developing Reading Skills, which I held together with Nina Herter on the 3
November 2014. My purpose was to present the importance of reading, how the
reading process works, reading difficulties that learners have and how the teacher
can help them to develop reading skills.

The Importance of Reading

I will start with a short introduction about the importance of reading at home
and in school. Reading is a key competence which enables the access to
information, communication and media usage. Moreover it broadens the readers
horizons, contributes to frame their personality and offers a genuine enjoyment. All
in all, it is essential for a childs success in his personal and educational
development. Therefore children should be exposed to books and literature from
infancy, parents should visit the library regularly with their kids, give them time to
enjoy books by themselves, but also read aloud daily. Especially reading aloud is
important to prepare a child for reading and learning. It will support the childs
language development, instill a love for reading, enhance their world knowledge,
build up their literacy skill and bolster brain development.

Reading Difficulties
Nevertheless, most parents rarely take time to read to their children. They
rather prefer to expose their offspring to the television or computer. As a result,
children in primary school suffer from poor reading skills. Especially the third grade
is considered as a pivotal point in a childs education where they go from learning to
read to reading to learn. Decoding texts takes centre stage here. Learners from
underprivileged literacy environments normally have fewer oral language, emergent

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literacy skills and limited prior knowledge. Furthermore they often evolve an
aversion towards reading and lack reading strategies. Therefore reading skills and
strategies have to be trained regularly in school.

Readings Skills & Reading Strategies

Since there is a lack of consistency in the use of the terms reading skill and
reading strategy I would like to eliminate the confusion: According to Afflerbach
reading strategies are deliberate, goal-directed attempts to control and modify the
readers efforts to decode text, understand words, and construct meanings of text.
Reading skills, on the other hand, are automatic actions that result in decoding and
comprehension with speed, efficiency, and fluency and usually occur without
awareness of the components or control involved. Before I introduce some of those
skills and strategies, I will now explain the reading process. The comprehension of
the reading process will than facilitate the understanding for the need to develop
reading skills.

The Reading Process

Three factors are important when we look at the reading process: (1) the
construction of meaning, (2) the creation of mental models and (3) the involvement
of emotions. Looking at the construction of meaning first, we have to ask ourselves,
how do we construct meaning? Meaning is transported from the book to the reader,
which is called bottom-up processing and also from the reader to the book, named
top-down processing. Botton-up processing signifies the learner sees a word in a
text and has to decode it. He will decode it visually and phonologically. So on the
one hand side he recognizes the single letters which form a word and on the other
side he reads it out in his head so that he can hear the sound of the word. Than,
finally, he has identified the word. Now he will check if this word already exists in his
memory and if so, hell than understand the semantic meaning. The other part of the
reading process is the top-down processing wich basically is the other way around.
Top-down processing means the construction of information from the reader. Its
also called knowledge-based or conceptually-driven processing. It implies that the
reader fills in the gaps of the words that he didn't understand or information that was
not explicitly mentioned. How can he fill in the gaps? He uses his world knowledge,
his experience and guesses them from the context.

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Moving on to (2) the creation of mental models we have to be aware that
when we read a text our world knowledge gets combined with the textual
information. The fusion of them establishes a precise mental model like when we
are having a movie or an exact picture with a lot of details in our head. If this doesnt
happen while reading a text, it means, that we haven't understood the text. Lastly,
(3) the involvement of emotions while reading plays an important role for the text
comprehension. The emotions the learner is feeling in comparison to the emotions
being portrayed in the content clearly affect his understanding. If he is feeling sad
while reading a sad passage, he will understand that passage better than someone
feeling happy. Therefore a students emotion plays a big role during the learning
process. The teacher's or parents facial expression can play a critical role in
students' language acquisition too. If he is reading out loud showing a fearful facial
expression that contains fearful tones, it will facilitate students learning of the
meaning of certain vocabulary words and comprehension of the passage.

Developing Reading Skills

Being aware about the reading process, we will now enter the main topic of
my presentation: developing reading skills. To improve the learners reading skills the
teacher needs to motivate the students and help them to coordinate the reading
process. There are 5 core skills: attention, accuracy, decoding, fluency and
comprehension, which should be trained and automatized step by step. Firstly,
students train their attention and eye movement. Exercises therefore are vertical
reading, jumping with the eyes, reading pyramid words, the flash technique and twostroke reading. Secondly, it should be trained to read accurately and to perceive
every sign. Reading erased or blurred letters, finding hidden letters and spotting
mistakes or superfluous words will improve that skill. The third skill, decoding,
implies to detect word fragments and whole words faster. This is trained by putting
jumbled words back into their order, combining words and reading tapeworm words
or sentences. Another skill to be trained is perceiving sentences as a whole and
linking sentence constituents, which can be described with the term fluency. To
focus on fluency the teacher can instruct the students to find sentence constituents
that belong together and let them fill in given words or phrases. Lastly, the learner
has to improve his comprehension. Reading and understanding texts can be trained
by reading isolated segments, recognizing flaws and putting jumbled texts into order.

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Pre-reading, While-reading, Post-reading
Additionally to automatizing those five reading skills, the teacher has to
coordinate the reading process. Therefore Ill divide the reading process into the
three common known phases: (1) pre-reading, (2) while-reading and (3) post
reading. For each phase there are certain activities the teacher can do with his
students. The activities purpose is to give the students some reading strategies to
interact with the text. (1) Pre-reading activities help students to activate their
background knowledge and make connections. Furthermore they stimulate
predictions and form a purpose for reading. One could for example look at the title,
the cover, at pictures or the genre of the book and than brainstorm. Besides
brainstorming, one could also make predictions about the text, formulate questions
or design a topic web. (2) During the reading, efficient readers use three sets of
cues to predict, confirm and self correct as they read. To encourage students to read
independently and successfully, the teacher has to show the pupils how to structure
the text and how to use a dictionary. Structuring the text not only means recognizing
different chapters, headlines, paragraphs and highlighting important words, it also
means making marginal notes about predictions, questions or emotions. Good
methods for this purpose are graphic organizers or reciprocal teaching. Lastly, (3)
post-reading activities shouldnt be underestimated. Students often finish a reading,
close the book, and don't think about it again until they arrive in class. Consequently
its important to make use of post-reading activities to gain a deeper understanding
of ideas and organize information for later retrieval. The readers should, for
example, skim the text, underline keywords, take notes, scan the text, visualize
segments, summarize paragraphs or chapters and finally evaluate and discuss the
book in the classroom.

Example: Reciprocal Teaching

Last but not least, I would like to give an example on one reading strategy
which I particularly like, namely the reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching is a
quite complex, but very rewarding strategy that can be used for pupils from class 8
or 9 onwards, depending on their language level. The students cluster in groups of
four and assume a role. Each role requires different reading strategies. (1) The
clarifier has to detect unknown words or phrases, clarify them and resolve possible
problems, (2) the summarizer underlines key ideas and phrases, and sums up the
main points, (3) the questioner asks questions that make his partners think and
should also try to answer probable questions of his fellow students and (4) the

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predictor uses clues from the text to make up his mind how the story could continue.
Every group member gets a card with instructions about his role. Firstly, all of them
have to read the text segment alone, than they share their information
correspondent to their roles. Afterwards they swap roles and read the next text
segment with a different perspective. If possible, every learner should try out all four
roles. Additionally to the normal role, one group member will me the group
moderator. This person should be a strong reader who coordinates the discussion
and takes care that everyone gets involved and everything runs smoothly. All in all,
the strategy takes about 30-45 minutes. Its normally very convenient for students to
work in those small groups, because offen they speak more freely and feel more
relaxed if they are not under the pressure to speak in front of the whole class. The
teacher should give clear instructions at the beginning but than just stay in the
background and supervise the ongoing group work. All in all, its an activity suitable
for advanced learning groups which requires a respectful and disciplined learning
atmosphere. If the text level is adjusted to the students language level it will be a
great reading strategy, which supports the individual development of their reading
skills.

Sources

Grieser-Kindel, Christin/ Henseler, Roswitha/ Mller, Stefan. Reading Tool Kid,

Methoden und Materialien. Marburg: Informationszentrum fr
Fremdsprachenforschung. 2009. print.
Nnning, Ansgar/ Surkamp, Carola. Englische Literatur unterrichten, Grundlagen
und Methoden. Hannover: Kalmeyer/Klett. 2006. print.
Lyday, Eric, Reading For The Future (Infographic). dailyinfographic.com. n.p.,
February 27, 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2014.
Afflerbach, Peter; Pearson, P. David and Paris, Scott G. Clarifying Differences
Between Reading Skills and Reading Strategies. International Reading Association.
2008. print.