Teaching Reading Skill

In the attached lesson plan, I am going to teach reading skill to a group of young adults, aged from around 18 to 21 years old.  I am going to give a lecture on a reading passage titled “A brief history of space travel” which is in Theme 2, “Technology”, in student’s textbook. The reasons why I decided to choose reading skill to teach and how I will teach it will be illustrated as follow. 

Amongst the fours main skills, reading is, in my viewpoint, the most important skill students need if they are to acquire and accumulate knowledge. In other words, knowing how to read, effectively and efficiently, students will be able to posses the other three skills easily.  In his book titled “An ABC of English Teaching”, Rhodri (1980) wrote students must have a reasonable command of the basic skills such as the ability to read, to write, to talk confidently and fluently, to listen if they are to play a full and useful part in the society when they leave school; and much of English lessons will be directed towards the acquisition of these skill through practice and through the creation of a sympathetic atmosphere in the classroom.   Owing to this reason, I have come up with an idea how to instill one of these skills, reading, in my students. The reading point I am going to teach will help my students to be able to do scanning, reading for specific information, which is the main objective of my lesson.  However, there are various techniques that can be used in order to achieve this objective, but I decided to choose only five main techniques for teaching this lesson, all of which are: (1) Matching, (2) Understanding Vocabulary in Context, (3) Guidance, (4) Answer to Questions, and last but not least (5) Comprehension Check.

Since the very beginning, after greeting the students and stating the objective of the lesson, I choose the first technique named “Matching” by giving the students a handout containing 15 words with 20 definitions, and then ask them, in pair, to match those words with their correct definitions.  This first technique is very useful for the students to understand the passage they are going to read.  Moreover, this technique is a starting point that ushers the students to the next technique called “Understanding Vocabulary in Context”.  In this second technique, I am going to give the students a short reading text with some missing words, and then ask them to complete those blanks with vocabulary in technique 1 so that it will help them understand the text they are going to read more clearly.  These two techniques I am choosing to use prior to reading of the text are based on what have been stated in three different books. Teacher who spend even a few minutes linking students’ background knowledge—that is, activating schema—to the text they are about to read improve their students’ understanding of that text (Parlinscar & Brown, 1984; Paris & Oka, 1986; Pressley, 2000).

Next, we move to the next step “While Reading”.  In this step, I am going to employ two more techniques, Guidance and Answer to Questions, sequentially.  As the names imply, these two techniques enable the students to have a clear idea about how to read and maximize their understanding of the text.  Several questions, in these two techniques, are to be given to the students as a blueprint to prompt and monitor their activities while reading.  After they finish reading and finding answers to the questions, I, as a teacher, will tell them to compare their answers with a person who sits next to them before checking the answers as a whole class.  After that, I am going to adopt one last technique called “Comprehension Check” in a Post-reading step.  The intention of applying this technique is to check how much the students understand the text they have just read. In this technique, students are asked to form a group of five, and then discuss wit their group members about the text based on the guiding questions I am going to give them in a handout. When they are discussing, I will walk around the class to make sure that my students are working on the exercise and to be approachable in case they need some help. Then, after they have finished the activity, one student of each group is supposed to share what they have discussed with the class. I seriously believe that this technique will help them a lot.

To sum up, the objective of this lesson will be achieved after scrupulously planning how to teach by adopting various techniques. All of the aforementioned techniques are well linked together, and all of them will ensure students’ understanding of the text. I believe that students will enjoy learning and actively get involved in the activities in the class. “Fail to plan means plan to fail.”  

References:

Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). The reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering

and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117–175.

Paris, S. G., & Oka, E. R. (1986). Children’s reading strategies, metacognition, and motivation.

Developmental Review, 6, 25–56.

Pressley, M. (2000). What should comprehension instruction be the instruction of? In M.

Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3,

pp. 545–561). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Rhodri. (1980). An ABC of English Teaching. Great Britain: Butler & Tanner.