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Vladimir State University

Reading techniques

Spirina A.A. - student, Koykova T.I. - supervisor

Vladimir, Russia

Annotation

The article describes various methods of reading that help to improve a foreign language.

Keywords. Methods of reading, foreign language, reading speed.

Most of the techniques dealt with in this part already familiar to the students in their native language. But it is necessary to retain them, as some students have difficulty in applying them to a second language.

Sensitizing

The aim of this section is to provide exercises that will develop the strategies that students need to cope with unfamiliar words and complex or apparently obscure sentences. It should ensure that they do not stumble on every difficulty or get discouraged from the outset.

Inference

Inferring means making use of syntactic, logical and cultural clues to discover the meaning of unknown elements. If these are words, then wordformation and derivation will also play an important part.

When dealing with a new text, it is better not to explain the difficult words to the learners beforehand. They would only get used to being given `preprocessed' texts and would never make the effort to cope with a difficult passage on their own. On the contrary, students should be encouraged to make a guess at the meaning of the words they do not know rather than look them up in a dictionary. If they need to look at the dictionary to get a precise meaning - which is an important and necessary activity too - they should only do so after having tried to work out a solution on their own. This is why, from the very beginning, it is vital to develop the skill of inference. The exercises suggested in the book try to develop inference along different lines:

Ш One exercise is devised to train the students to infer as quickly as possible the meaning of previously learned but incomplete words.

Ш The other exercises aim ay making the students work out a strategy of inference for dealing with unfamiliar words.

Ш In the first part of text on inference the exercises are meant to practice inference through the context.

Ш In the second part, they practice inference through word-formation.

Ш Most of the exercises simply require of the students that they should guess the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Ш One exercise, however, leads them to analyse their process of inference more systematically.

Understanding relations within the sentence

Inability to infer the meaning of unknown elements often causes discouragement and apprehension in students when they are faced with a new text. A similar problem arises when students are unable to get an immediate grasp of sentence structures. This will be a definite handicap in the case of texts with relatives, embedded clauses and complex structures. It is therefore important to train the students, as early as possible, to look first for the `core' of the sentence (subject + verb). In order to do that, the learners can be asked to divide passages into sense groups and underline, box, or recognize in some other way the important elements of each sentence in a passage.

Linking sentences and ideas. Another area in which it is essential to prepare the students is in recognizing the various devices used to create textual cohesion and more particularly the use of reference and link-words.

Reference covers all the devices that permit lexical relationship within a text. It is important for the students to realize that a text is not made up of independent sentences and clauses, but that it is a web of related ideas that are announced, introduced and taken up again later throughout the passage with the help of references. Exercises can help the students to recognize this use of reference more quickly. reading language student

If the reader does not understand some words of the passage, some of the facts and ideas will probably escape him. But if he does not understand inter- or intra-sentential connectors, he may also fail to recognize the communicative value of the passage since those words act as signals indicating the function of what follows. From the very beginning, students should therefore be taught not only to understand them when they come across them, but also to look out for such markers. This will be useful to them when skimming, since the simple recognition of those link-words will help them to understand the development of the argument in the passage.

Some exercises are suggested along the following lines:

Ш Recognizing the function of the connectors finding equivalents.

Ш Completing texts with the missing link-words.

Ш Transforming a series of statements and propositions into a coherent text by joining sentences and adding connectors.

This last kind of exercise is a difficult one but very interesting since it admits of several possible solutions and the comparison of the results obtained will show different ways of presenting the same information.

Improving reading speed

Students who read too slowly will easily get discouraged. They will also tend to stumble on unfamiliar words and fail to grasp the general meaning of the passage.

One of the most common ways of increasing reading speed is to give students passages to read and to ask them to time themselves. A conversion table, taking the length of the text and the reading time into account, will tell them what their reading speed is and this will make it easier for them to try and read a little faster every time. Reading should also be followed by comprehension questions or activities since reading speed should not be developed at the expense of comprehension.

When practicing faster reading systematically, the students can be encouraged to keep a record of their results, showing their progress. This should encourage them to read more.

From skimming to scanning

One of the most important points to keep in mind when teaching reading comprehension is that there is not one type of reading but several according to one's reasons for reading. Students will never read efficiently unless they can adapt their reading speed and technique to their aim when reading. By reading all texts in the same way, students would waste time and fail to remember points of importance to them because they would absorb too much non-essential information.

Predicting

This is not really a technique but a skill which is basic to all the reading techniques practiced in this part and to the process of reading generally. It is the faculty of predicting or guessing what is to come next, making use of grammatical, logical and cultural clues. This skill is at the core of techniques such as `anticipation' or `skimming' and will therefore be practiced in those sections, but it may be worthwhile to devote some time to more systematic training by giving the students unfinished passages to complete or by going through a text little by little, stopping after each sentence in order to predict what is likely to come next.

Previewing

Unlike predicting, previewing is a very specific reading technique which involves using the table of contents, the appendix, the preface, the chapter and paragraph headings in order to find out where the required information is likely to be. It is particularly useful when skimming and scanning and as a study skill.

The exercises attempt to put the students into the sort of situation where they would quite naturally apply this technique.

Referents

1. http://www.openclass.ru/node/98651 (интернет-ресурс)

2. https://www.howtolearn.com/2012/08/different-reading-techniquesand-when-to-use-them/ (интернет-ресурс)

3. https://iedunote.com/reading-techniques (интернет-ресурс)

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