Definitions of Reading

Among the many definitions of reading that have arisen in recent decades, three prominent ideas
emerge as most critical for understanding what "learning to read" means:

Reading is a process undertaken to reduce uncertainty about meanings a text conveys.

The process results from a negotiation of meaning between the text and its reader.

The knowledge, expectations, and strategies a reader uses to uncover textual meaning all
play decisive roles way the reader negotiates with the text's meaning.

Reading does not draw on one kind of cognitive skill, nor does it have a straightforward outcome
most texts are understood in different ways by different readers.
Background Knowledge
For foreign language learners to read, they have to be prepared to use various abilities and
strategies they already possess from their reading experiences in their native language. They will
need the knowledge they possess to help orient themselves in the many dimensions of language
implicated in any text. Researchers have established that the act of reading is a non-linear
process that is recursive and context-dependent. Readers tend to jump ahead or go back to
different segments of the text, depending on what they are reading to find out.
Goals
Asking a learner to "read" a text requires that teachers specify a reading goal. One minimal goal
is to ask the learner to find particular grammatical constructions or to identify words that relate to
particular features or topics of the reading. But such goals are always only partial. For example,
a text also reveals a lot about the readers for which it is written and a lot about subject matter that
foreign language learners may or may not know or anticipate.

A Holistic Approach to Reading

The curriculum described here is called a holistic curriculum, following Miller (1996). Holistic
education is concerned with connections in human experienceconnections between mind and
body, between linear thinking and intuitive ways of knowing, between academic disciplines,
between the individual and the community.
A holistic curriculum emphasizes how the parts of a whole relate to each other to form the whole.
From this perspective, reading relates to speaking, writing, listening comprehension, and culture.
Pedagogical Stages of Reading

Ideally, each text used in such a curriculum should be pedagogically staged so that learners
approach it by moving from pre-reading, through initial reading, and into rereading. This
sequence carefully moves the learner from comprehension tasks to production tasks. In addition,
these tasks should build upon each other in terms of increasing cognitive difficulty.

Pre-Reading: The initial levels of learning, as described in Bloom's Taxonomy, involve

recognizing and comprehending features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks
involve speaking, reading, and listening.

Initial Reading: Initial reading tasks orient the learner to the text and activate the
cognitive resources that are associated with the learner's own expectations. For example,
discussions of genres and stereotypes may help the learner to identify potential reading
difficulties and to strategize ways to overcome these challenges. Simple oral and written
reproduction tasks should precede more complex production tasks that call for
considering creative thinking about several issues at the same time.

Rereading: In rereading, the learner is encouraged to engage in active L2 production

such as verbal or written analysis and argumentation. These activities require longer and
more complex discourse. At this point, the language learners' critical thinking needs to
interact with their general knowledge. Ideally, cultural context and the individual foreign
language learner's own identity emerge as central to all acts of production.

When the stages of reading are repeated over the course of a semester or year,
learners tend to improve not only their language skills, but also their cultural
literacy. Multiple stages in reading engage the learners by returning to the language
of the text from different points of view. A curriculum built around such stages is
considered holistic if they involve practice that integrates language various kinds of
language acquisition and fills multiple cognitive demands in interlocking activities
that spiral learning. For example, a pre-reading for sub-topics of a subject, an initial
reading to identify how topics are described, and a rereading to modify those
descriptions by inserting them into a new genre or describing them for a different
audience.

Pre-Reading
Pre-reading activities cover a range of possibilities, all directed at helping learners engage in a
process of discovery and to feel authorized to engage with the form and content of the text. What
all successful pre-reading activities have in common is that they are student-centered. The
instructor has to identify the potential problems of readability inherent in a chosen reading text,
and then has to help students find ways to surmount those difficulties. Rather than just provide
answers or summarize the content, the instructor can help learners identify the sources of their
reading difficulties.
Two pre-reading activities are very commonly used in tandem:

Brainstorming: Students pool what they know about the topic of a text and share their
knowledge in the native or target language. The goal is to activate the learners' horizon of
expectation, and help learners identify what the text is about. Pre-reading exercises can
take different forms, but ideally they are learner-centered rather than teacher-centered.
For example, if the text is a film review, and only one student has seen the film, that
student can tell the others about the plot or other notable features of the film.

Skimming: The second pre-reading activity is skimming. In class, allot a short period of
time (two minutes or so) for the learners to skim the first paragraph or page of the text,
look at illustrations and subtitles, and identify the words in the text that explain the
"who," "what," "where," and "when" of the text contentto identify core vocabulary
words that will help them work through uncertainties.

Overall, pre-reading helps students

activate their horizon of expectation (background knowledge, syntactic and semantic

resources, cognitive strategies),

take charge of their own learning, and

become willing to tolerate ambiguity.

Initial Reading

After pre-reading, learners need to be led through their initial reading of the text. While prereading deals with identifying the global issues that are shared among many readers and texts,
reading, whether done in class or assigned, requires learners to move to textual specifics. Where
the pre-reading activities stressed the "who," "what," "when," and "where" of the text, initial
reading adds details. It should also ask learners to apply the text's genre to help structure their
reading process.
Knowing the genre of a text helps a reader engage with the details. The main characters in each
text type will have different functions. Knowing that a text is a mystery or detective story will
mean that there will be multiple moments of investigation and discovery. That makes it possible
for learners to look for various stages in the investigation as their more specific taskto find the
episodes that characterize the genre.
In the discussion that follows the initial reading, teachers should help learners weigh the textual
details they have identified. When they compare their work with that of their classmates, for
example, teachers can ask students to discuss and justify their choices. At this stage, learners
begin to move toward the "how" and "why" of the textsynthesizing concepts or engaging in
problem-solving. For example, where is the mystery or reader interest in a detective story is told
by the murderer?

Guided Matrix

A guided matrix can be introduced after the in-class brainstorming and skimming activities. It
requires readers to select phrases or sentences from the text that help readers reconstruct the
logic of the text. In its most rudimentary form, a guided matrix consists of a table with two
columns with headings that guide readers in making selections from the text.
Guided Matrix Headings
The headings used in a guided matrix reflect a pattern of logic. The following table gives some
examples of logical relationships and headings.
Logical Relationships
(Headings)

Type of Text

A text that contrasts two people or the "before" and "after" of an

event or problem (differences in their characteristics)
Issues and their Features or A text that critiques a movie (what's right or wrong with it and
Results
why)
A text about an historical era (political, economic, social issues and
Problems and their Solutions
how they were addressed)
A news story about a current event (what happened/who was
Events and their Impact
affected and how)
Contrasts or Comparisons

The structure of a guided matrix requires precise cognitive and linguistic work; learners have to
note the way the text expresses information according to the categories established by the matrix.
Such precision helps establish a correlation between the learners' horizon of expectation and
semantic and syntactic elements of the foreign language texts.
Advantages of a Guided Matrix

The advantage of using a guided matrix as a task to structure reading is that learners are likely to
reread parts of a text (or re-view sections of a film) in order to find the information they want to
include. In so doing, elements of syntax and semantics are reinforced in context, as part of values
and expectations found in the given foreign culture. Such incidental contact will prepare learners
for more detailed contact with the world from which the text stems, and help them make the
transition from reading to writing.
The Importance of Rereading

Rereading consists of on-going and repeated encounters with a text, guided by a particular task
so that segments of the text get revisited and rethought. Rereading is the most effective type of
reading, especially of foreign language texts, because it offers learners the opportunity to re-think
messages and see features they have not noticed in initial reading.
Readers learn more language and information when they engage with a text using a guided
matrix or other task that encourages them to peruse the text again. That perusal does not mean
that they should be reading the text linearly or translating it, but rather that they should be using
their prior knowledge and what they gained in initial reading exercises to become confident
about what a text says. At this point, learners should aim to be sufficiently familiar with a text's
information to be able to summarize that information from memory.

Differences between Initial and Rereading Activities

Activities in Initial Reading
Identify the main topic, examples of its features
(summarize content in a FL)
Identify words and phrases conveying author
messages and author POV (point of view)
Identify genre features (expected order of events;
types of people, events, ideas, or objects;
characteristics of style)
Comprehend and reproduce text language in
appropriate categories using provided matrix
headings

Activities in Rereading
Talk or write about details and their
implications (analyze or interpret content)
Role play or write about that POV from the
reader's perspective (modify, agree, disagree)
Perform or rewrite in a different genre (from
description to dialogue, letter, diary entry,
etc.)
Use different categories to change the text's
messages (e.g., from before/after to
problem/solution)

When learners read through the whole text two or three times, they will find that their own
comprehension of the text improves, especially if their goal is to find how information is
presented or arranged in that texthow it is sequenced and weighted. Such assessments help
readers take a further analytic step. Readers start identifying ways a text's structure or semantics
can suggest a point of view (positive, negative, dismissive, laudatory, impartial, incomplete, etc.)
or an approach typical or atypical for the text's genre.
Rereading Strategies

Teachers can guide their students in successful rereading by helping them structure the discovery
process in light of the cognitive and linguistic difficulties of the text. Learners need to be given
tasks that correspond to their level of linguistic and cognitive sophistication. Learners must also
be given a model of what they are going to be called on to produce, and they should be
encouraged to use words and phrases from the text when writing and speaking about it.
Structuring the Rereading Assignment

In such structured rereading assignments, learners are able to act as authorized learners
authorized because they are selecting their own answers. They will, moreover, be engaging the
text repeatedly as they defend their choice. They engage in a process of discovery in reading that
leads to production when they participate in a class discussion or work on a writing assignment.
The following chart provides examples of ways rereading can activate different learning goals.
Rereading Activity
Learning Goal
Identify or rewrite specific grammar constructions
Recognizing or modifying grammar features
that occur repeatedly in a text (passive voice, verbs
in context and how grammar signals
in various tenses, cases, singular plural distinctions,
meanings.
etc.).
Identify or rewrite statements that suggest a
Recognizing or using language that conveys
particular speech act (e.g., a command, an
speaker or author intent (pragmatics).
argument, a plea, etc.).
Look for text features to revise in another genre
Recognizing or discussing how changing the

(changing a conversation to a description or a news genre of the source text changes its rhetoric
report to a diary entry).
and the order of presenting its information.
Writing During Rereading
The note-taking and short writing required by structured reading assignments are useful in
helping learners process and recall textual information.
http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/modules/reading/07/