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.
