Teaching psychology students professionally oriented reading

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Docent, Doctor of Philosophy in Pedagogy, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Teaching psychology students professionally oriented reading

Anzhela Gordyeyeva

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of teaching psychology students reading professionally oriented English texts. It highlights the importance of the development of reading skills in English speaking class and investigates the component skills that are critical to reading comprehension development when teaching English for specific purposes. In this research we try to analyze main curricular principles proposed by scientists to guide reading instructions which can be successfully used when teaching professionally oriented reading to psychology students. In this article we explore goals for reading instructions and try to translate them into practice in various ways in our ESP classroom. Among the component skills that are critical to reading ESP comprehension development we distinguish word-recognition efficiency, vocabulary building, main-idea comprehension practice, discourse-structure awareness, reading strategies for professional goals, reading fluency, extensive reading and students' motivations. We pay special attention to reading fluency, extensive reading and psychology students' reading motivation which are also considered very important component skills for reading comprehension development. We tried to understand how to prepare our psychology students for their reading demands that that they will almost certainly encounter in their professional life.

Keywords: reading instructions, component skills of reading, reading strategies, comprehension practice, English for Specific Purposes, psychology students.

Анотація

Гордєєва Анжела Йосипівна, доцент, кандидат педагогічних наук, Київський національний університет імені Тараса Шевченка

НАВЧАННЯ СТУДЕНТІВ -ПСИХОЛОГІВ ПРОФЕСІЙНО ОРІЄНТОВАНОГО ЧИТАННЯ

У статті розглядається проблема навчання студентів-психологів професійно орієнтованого читання англійською мовою. Підкреслено необхідність розвитку вмінь читання під час опанування курсу англійської мови для спеціальних цілей. Вказано на важливе значення читання як одного з чотирьох видів комунікативної діяльності для майбутньої професійної діяльності студентів-психологів. Проведено огляд наукових досліджень з фахового читання англійською мовою з метою описати компонентні вміння, які є необхідними для успішного читання та розуміння фахової літератури. У цьому дослідженні ми намагаємось розглянути визначені науковцями основні принципи побудови інструкцій, що використовуються у процесі навчання академічного читання для подальшого їх використання на заняттях з англійської мови зі студентами-психологами. Проаналізовано компоненті вміння читання, які є рушійними для урахування їх при підготовці вправ для вдосконалення розуміння прочитаного фахового тексту. В статті розглянуто окремі шляхи формулювання інструкцій для роботи з фаховим текстом, що передбачає виконання завдань на різних етапах роботи з професійно орієнтованими англомовними друкованими матеріалами. З цією метою було визначено, що для покращання якості читання і розуміння прочитаного тексту, необхідно розвивати у студентів не тільки вміння розпізнавати спеціальну лексику та граматичні структури, але й працювати над усвідомленням ними дискурсивної структури тексту. Тому в процесі навчання фахового читання ми вказуємо на необхідності контролю розуміння студентами як організовано текст і на доцільності використання спеціальних інструкцій на стадіях перед-, під час та після читання тексту, які не тільки покращують розуміння дискурсивної структури тексту, але й автоматично формують вправного читача. Під час навчання професійно орієнтованого читання з метою підвищення рівня розуміння прочитаного тексту, ми також розглядаємо зростання темпу та розширення діапазону читання, постлення мотивації щодо читання фахової літератури англійською мовою, які є не менш важливими компонентними вміннями для розвитку розуміння прочитаного.

Ключові слова: інструкції з читання, компонентні вміння читання, стратегії читання, вправи для розуміння прочитаного, англійська для спеціальних цілей, студенти-психологи.

Introduction. The ability to read is an important skill in ESP classroom where students' success depends on the amount of professionally oriented information they can get through reading. In this case students are expected to read a lot and for different purposes. They must be able to identify main ideas and details, be familiar with facts and opinions, understand authors' viewpoints, summarize, analyze, synthesize and apply textual information to new tasks set by teachers in the classroom. ESP reading must provide a major source of input for further students' professional development.

To have excellent academic reading skills doesn't mean having only comprehension abilities but also the development of vocabulary and grammar (Shiotsu, 2010). When we speak about the professionally oriented foreign language we can consider that ESP reading also requires a very large vocabulary (terminology), specific grammar structures as well as special strategies and some practice how to use these strategies when achieving specific reading goals in the classroom. ESP teachers must be able to provide their students with special instructions in reading skills development, establishing in this way the foundation for ESP reading skills improvement.

Looking for ways of applying existing principals to guide reading instructions and specific instructional techniques for ESP reading skills development we have made some investigation and tried to find practical classroom activities that can help prepare psychology students for the reading demands that they will certainly encounter in the future. In this article we are going to investigate how ESP teachers can prepare their students for reading for specific purposes. Our goal is to define the purposes of teaching specific English to psychology students, to describe some important component skills that are critical to the development of professional reading comprehension and to demonstrate specific instructional techniques for professionally oriented reading skills development.

Theoretical background. Reading is a complex skill which requires different abilities (Grabe, 2009; Han & Anderson, 2009; Koda, 2005). There has been a lot of research on the problem of skilled-reader abilities which underlines that some of these abilities are very important because they are responsible for rapid and automatic word recognition and for fluency practice and extensive reading. Some scientists provide teachers with practical suggestions for teaching and assessing reading, paying special attention to word recognition, intensive and extensive reading and fluency building (Grabe & Stoller, 2014; Nation, 2009). Others are also considerable as they use all levels of language knowledge and develop main-idea comprehension. They suggest certain principles, techniques and activities for teaching reading (Hedgcock & Ferris, 2009; Jiang & Grabe, 2009). Among the abilities which are necessary for successful reading are ones to identify strategic processing as a means of improving comprehension of more difficult texts and to carry out tasks that require the application of text information. There are also skilled-reader abilities that underline the importance of fluency development, reading practice for extended periods of time and students' motivation (Grabe & Stoller, 2014: 190). teaching professionally reading text

Mentioning skilled-reader abilities scientists pay attention mainly to the developing students' reading skills from the perspective of institutional and teachers' goals. Nevertheless, there are also some curricular principles that can help translate scientific findings into reading classroom improving therefore students' reading comprehension abilities (Grabe & Stoller, 2014: 190). These principles are extremely important because they encourage students to read a lot and to read something interesting and urgent. Following these principle enables teachers to give their students a chance to choose reading material and, in this case, it leads to their engagement, motivation and autonomy. When main curricular principles are taken into account and therefore the activities for reading skills development are build around the main passages in books, students have sufficient background knowledge support and they are skillfully led through pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading stages (Hedgcock & Ferris, 2009). We can state that in this case students really feel satisfaction, realize some benefits from integrating content and language learning goals.

Skilled-reader abilities as well as the principles for academic reading instructions_mentioned above can also frame the process of reading for specific purposes and help develop students' reading skills. It can be done in various ways and in the part of our article that follows we will try to adapt the described reading skills for ESP reading classroom.

Materials and methods. The ability to read is considered the most important academic skill which is necessary for ESP students whose success directly depends on the professionally- oriented information they learned through reading. The purpose of professionally oriented reading is to involve students into the process of reading which provides a major source of input for extended reading and further learning of a foreign language. Developing ESP reading skills we provide both the development of comprehension abilities and language resources (vocabulary and grammar). In this way, our psychology students may work toward meeting the requirements of reading a lot, understanding specific texts and new concepts as well as making connections across texts.

The goals for reading instructions are based on main principles that help frame reading instructions. Exploration of these goals gives a possibility to offer instructional tips. Our psychology students come to ESP classroom with some word and phraserecognition abilities which can be improved when they are offered vocabulary development activities and reading fluency practice. Three activities that improve students' word and phrase-recognition speed and accuracy are word-and phrase-recognition, timed semantic-connection and lexical access fluency exercises (Grabe & Stoller, 2014: 192). These exercises take little time and can be easily applied for each assigned reading in the process of teaching English to psychology students.

It is important to emphasize that building a large recognition vocabulary is also related to reading abilities. When students read texts, they should present adequate comprehension of the words they encounter. We should encourage psychology students to develop more advanced reading skills and therefore direct vocabulary practice with large sets of terms as well as active vocabulary development. In our ESP classroom we try to carefully select target words, use special techniques for introducing new terms, offer activities to work with big sets of words and to build word-learning strategies. With the purpose of building a large recognition vocabulary it is necessary to provide psychology students with tasks that make them independent word collectors; to look for ways to build students motivation for terminology learning and to recycle professionally oriented texts and vocabulary. Trying to extend students' specific vocabulary ESP teachers should be careful with the selection of terms necessary for their students and be able to analyze key vocabulary given in course books.

It is significant to draw ESP teachers' attention to another component skill which is very important for reading comprehension development. It is the ability to understand a specific text. That is why all reading tasks should be carefully prepared because reading comprehension requires knowledge of basic grammar, abilities to identify main ideas and awareness of discourse structure. When our ESP teachers analyze reading comprehension instructions they try to pay special attention to grammar. However, it is also important to remember that the more advanced reading we have, the less attention is paid to grammar structures. One of the basic ways to check main-idea comprehension is to offer psychology students reading comprehension questions which are suggested in our course book (Seal Bernard, 2009). But we also insist on developing main idea comprehension through class conversations during which psychology students are able to explore the main ideas of the text. We can also suggest a number of texts on the same topic. Having a class discussion, psychology students can understand connections across parts of one text or between some texts. It is worth mentioning that we do not ignore reading comprehension questions and usually start asking and answering them when developing students' reading skills. But after that our students are encouraged to follow up initial responses with further elaboration, during which they can either explain why their answers are appropriate or point out where the text or texts support their answer. The process can be finished with the discussion about how to understand the text better, which helps psychology students share their own ways to understand professionally oriented texts.

Deep analyses of the text with the purpose to find which part main ideas are stated in and what the words that signal these parts are, can also help develop main-idea comprehension successfully. We often ask our ESP students to summarize what they have read considering that this task is very helpful practice in identifying main ideas of the professionally oriented text and establishing links across main ideas and supporting details. For students with lower level of communicative preparation we can offer a summary with gaps which have to be completed or outlined while consulting a text.

It should be noted that many other techniques are used to provide main-idea comprehension in our ESP lessons when teaching reading (Beck & McKeown, 2006). We completely agree that questions about the author's approach to the problem described in their text are extremely important for comprehension skills practice. We often focus our attention on questions with the purpose not only to check text comprehension but to lead psychology students to recover the author's aim with its following analyses and criticism. Our questions are mostly about students' opinion on the author's approach to the question or problem presented in the text. Below are some examples of such questions:

What is the author writing about?

What do you think the author want us to understand?

What did the author mean saying that ..?

How is the author force you to feel about .?

Why do you think the author mention .?

The recent research suggests that main-idea comprehension can be also developed with elaborative interrogation [9]. We use this technique quite often in our ESP classroom because in this way we can make psychology students return to the text several times. When they answer comprehension questions which are usually followed by another question “Why ...?”, they should explain their answers and support them with the fragments from the text. It is important to note that specific texts don't sometimes give the explanation of some important professional issues directly because it can be only found between the lines after a profound analysis of them. Sometimes students' responses can trig a class discussion during which they have a chance to learn to defend their understanding of the professionally oriented texts and explain the strategies used for deciding on their answers. We consider `why questions' extremely useful for developing ESP reading comprehension because they lead to the exploration of the main ideas of the text and encourage reading between lines as well as develop coherence building when psychology students make connections across parts of the text.

Following the investigation of the component skills critical to ESP reading comprehension, we should underline that reading comprehension depends on our students' awareness of discourse structure. ESP teachers should be able to raise students' understanding of how textual information is organized by drawing their attention to different points of pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading stages. When working at a pre-reading stage we often ask our psychology students to examine text headings or subheadings, pay special attention to the highlighted key words predicting what each paragraph of the text is about or we ask our students to decide on the function of some paragraphs in the specific text. When working at a while-reading stage which is mostly not included in textbooks, we encourage our psychology students to complete an outline of the text, fill in a suggested graphic organizer, underline some transition words that signal different sections of the text or underline some lexical clues like cause-effect, comparison-contrast, problem-solution. At a post-reading stage, we can ask our psychology students to reread the professionally oriented text with the purpose to match main ideas and support information across two columns, to recognize scrambled paragraphs or sentences or to create a good summary. Moreover, effective tasks at the last stage can be developed by students themselves. Having enough experience from the previous lessons they can prepare a summary of the professionally oriented text. After this summary is checked by a teacher, psychology students can add some inappropriate sentences so that their classmates find them later. Our students are highly motivated to do reading comprehension tasks like this because they can work in groups, exchange their summaries and create a whole-class discussion to explain to each other why the discarded parts do not belong to the text. It is interesting to note that the mentioned above activities can not only raise students' discourse awareness but also reinforce their behaviours of good readers as well as make the process of learning more motivated.

Having discussed the importance of discourse-structure awareness, we are ready to present reading strategies which are really necessary to achieve reading comprehension goals. We completely agree that goals for the development of strategic reading should include students' ability to use different strategies in combination for better comprehension as well as student familiarity with strategic responses to texts (Pressley, 2002). In our ESP lessons teaching for strategic reading take place when teachers plan and form goals before reading, carefully choose what to read and try to predict the outcomes. ESP teachers' responsibilities are to introduce a strategy, explaining how and when to use it; to practice this strategy with psychology students, organizing and accompanying wholeclass discussion and sometimes offering students a combination of strategies; and at last to promote ways to monitor comprehension, asking if the text is making sense and deciding what the main ideas of the text are. Thus, teaching ESP students to become strategic readers is extremely important and should be central to comprehension instructions.

Further investigation of the problem of component skills critical to reading comprehension development draws our attention to building psychology students' reading fluency which can be achieved when it is incorporated as a consistent part of reading curriculum. It is worth mentioning that this process can be time consuming and it requires a great effort from teachers who should help psychology students understand that developing word- and passage-reading fluency can be carried through repetition and practice. We encourage our psychology students to reread professionally oriented texts or read along when some paragraphs are read aloud and, of course, to do extensive reading which is followed by timed- and passed-reading activities.

It is widely recognized that students can master reading skills only by reading a lot. Providing consistent extensive reading opportunities is extremely important to ESP teachers. It is necessary to emphasize that extensive reading requires a curriculum-wide commitment and therefore can improve fluency and reading comprehension development. Our psychology students have reading sessions regularly; they are taught special reading strategies; together with their teacher they can change reading staff because of difficulty or lack of interest; they can be offered some periods of silent reading and they are always carefully monitored by a teacher who controls their engagement and comprehension. So, it is significant to underline that extensive reading can also promote students' motivation to reading. When ESP teachers share their interests with students discussing the staff, reading strategies, encouraging them to share impressions, they become powerful motivators. Psychology student motivation is the last component skill that is considered critical to reading comprehension development. Our students will never be skilled readers until they read a lot. Thus, promoting the development of group cohesiveness when students support each other during reading comprehension activities; increasing students' expectancy of success, when selecting appropriate reading stuff; encouraging reading by devising attention-catching introductions to major texts and preparing provocative questions; making students realize what they can actually achieve by extensive reading are the numerous ways to motivate psychology students to deal with professionally oriented texts.

Having commented all important to reading comprehension development component skills, we can underline that each of them deserves our attention and we hope that our ESP teachers fully recognize them all because only the integration of components can help achieve the final objecive - making ESP students skilled readers of professionally oriented texts.

Conclusion. Reading is carried out for many purposes. The future may bring us new ways of reading but the need to read for specific purposes which is extremely helpful in professional development is obvious. In our article we tried to analyze peculiarities of ESP reading which should be considered by ESP teachers who are open to new strategies to motivate their psychology students to become skilled readers. Professionally oriented texts include special vocabulary and sometimes specific grammar structures. We focused our attention on special component skills which are required to improve reading comprehension and thus making ESP reading successful. Among the component skills that are critical to reading ESP comprehension development we distinguish wordrecognition efficiency, vocabulary building, main-idea comprehension practice, discourse-structure awareness, reading strategies for professional goals, reading fluency, extensive reading and students' motivations. While investigating the issue we tried to understand how to prepare our psychology students for the reading demands that they will almost certainly encounter in their professional activity in the future.

The area of our future research can be the problem of choosing important practical techniques for teaching and assessing ESP reading with special attention paid to fluency building.

References

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