Coursework 2: Justification of Activities

According to Joelle Brummitt-Yale, reading comprehension is the act of

understanding what you are reading. While the definition can be simply stated the act is not
simple to teach, learn or practice. Reading comprehension is an intentional, active,
interactive process that occurs before, during and after a person reads a particular piece of
writing. In Malaysian education context especially in KSSR, reading has been implemented
in order to help the pupils to become independent and mature readers and also by reading,
our pupils can have the opportunity to develop study skills such as using dictionaries and
extracting information from the reading text.
I have chosen a suitable reading text for Year 3 KSSR students which are Adams
Family. This selective text in under the theme World of Self, Family and Friends and the topic
is My Cousins, My Neighbour. The text Adams family is basically about describing Adams
family where there are his grandparents, parents and his siblings. This text is appropriate for
my learners level since they are intermediate level of learners and it is referring to the
syllabus of Year 3 KSSR itself. There are few activities that I had plan for the pupils in the
reading lesson.
In the first stage of reading which is pre-reading, I created two activities for the pupils
which are Pictures and Word Search. The purposes for these two activities are to stimulate
pupils interest before reading and to activate pupils prior knowledge on the topic which is
about a family. The point of the purposes is this stage can give the pupils an overview on
what they will be learning and have some feedback from the pupils about what they think
about the topic given. For Pictures part, I will show them a slide presentation which includes
a set of pictures of a family and a family tree. This activity is involving vocabulary and
speaking where they will learn to say the words properly and repeat after me. Then the
pupils will say it loud again but without guidance from me. The reason is to teach them
vocabulary and gives them a meaning on what is family is all about. So this activity will help
the pupils in developing their reading skills in phonetic as they can read with proper
pronunciation as they move on to read an actual text in while-reading stage.
Another activity for pre-reading stage is Word Search. After done with previous
activity, I will give the pupils a word search task sheet. The reason of why I am doing this
activity is to promote engagement and interest by providing students with a means to predict
text content. This is because the pupils at this level tend to have this kind of exercise for fun
and I may apply this activity as for them to be able participating in the lesson. Another
reason or purpose on having this activity is to give the pupils confidence before reading the

text. This can be an important part of learning to read. A pupil who has had fun and success
in word games may be more secure about their language skills and more likely to feel
comfortable with reading. Next reason is for the pupils have some interactions with each
other as the activity is needed for them to work in pairs. So they need to have a good
cooperation in order to finish the word search together. This activity is suitable and relevant
to my intermediate learners level as the word search is not really hard as they only need to
find the words which they are related to the topic and the words were stated below the word
search. This activity can help to make the next stages of reading more easily adaptable for
the pupils to read the text.
The second stage is while-reading. This stage is most important stage as it involves
with practicing the reading text that the pupils had read into their own understandings and
meanings. The activities for this stage are Read and Transfer and True or False
statements. In Read and Transfer activity, I will give the reading text to the pupils. The text
is about the topic that was related back in the pre-reading before which is My Family. The
length of the text is not too long because in the KSSR syllabus, the length of the reading text
is determined from easy to difficult stages in references to the theme in the syllabus. The
range of difficulties will be bigger when it comes to higher topics. This topic My Cousins, My
Neighbours is under the unit 3 where it is still at easy range of difficulties. So that is why I
chose a simple reading text for the pupils to read. Furthermore, it is suitable to my learners
level because they are in intermediate level and the text is not really long, so the pupils will
not learn a lot of new vocabulary for them in one time. That is why my learners level of
proficiency also playing important consideration for me before choosing the suitable text for
the pupils. I will read-aloud the text to the pupils so that they can listen and improves
comprehension by restoring features of speech such as intonation and pronunciation. Then,
the pupils will read the passage silently and complete the family tree given. The point of this
silent reading is to see whether the pupils can manage to read independently and transfer
the information given in the text into the exercise provided. Although my learners level is
intermediate and they will find some difficulties in reading the text silently but this type of
reading will give the pupils the results of listening to me while I was reading aloud to them. If
the pupils find difficulties in reading the text silently, I will repeat to read the text one more
time so that they will listen carefully to what I will be reading to them.
The next activity is True or False questions where this activity is suitable to be in
while-reading stage. The pupils will answer the questions given and they need take a look at
the text so that they can answer the questions. The aim for this activity is this will act as a
stimulus to encourage interpretation and discussion of the text (Chitravelu, 2005). This is
because this activity or task that is given to the pupils will help them to have a better

understanding while they are reading the text. Furthermore, this activity is appropriate for my
learners level since they are intermediate and by having True or False questions, they will
not to be burden with other exercises like multiple-choice questions (MCQ) where they will
may find the questions will be hard since they have a lot of choices. That is the reason why I
chose this activity as this activity is easy for them to choose what to answer and it is based
on the statements given. This activity is relevant and suit to my learners level of proficiency
where they will find this activity is not really hard and suit to their level of proficiency.
Last but not least, the post-reading stage where I decided to make an activity based
on the while-reading activities. The activity is Draw Your Family Tree. At this stage, the
pupils will have their fun getting along as the will be making their own family tree as result to
their reading just now. Lankford (1992) states that moral and aesthetic values as a group of
concepts for understanding the nature and art, links knowing and feelings, raise awareness
and appreciation towards beauty in nature. Hence, this activity can help in developing the
pupils aesthetic and moral values where they will show their own creativity by drawing their
own family tree themselves and the rationale of having this activity is to engage the pupils
with their thoughts and knowledge about their own family and by learning about families, the
pupils will begin to understand their place in groups, communities, and the world. The pupils
then present their own family tree to the class and this involves speaking skills as the pupil
will speak about their own family. This is good production for them to speak as they already
went through the pre and while reading and later they will paste their family tree on the board
behind their classroom so that they can have the sense of loving and appreciate their family
even more. So, this post-reading activity is suitable for the pupils to wrap up the lesson with
something fun for them to do and share their drawings with their classmates.
In conclusion, these activities that are in the stages of a reading lesson above are
suitable and relevant to the intermediate level of proficiency and it is followed with Malaysian
Year 3 classroom context.

References
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