Teaching Second Language Reading

Welcome to Teaching Second Language Reading mini wiki! This wiki is especially for ESL teachers and students in the reading class. Here, you are about to explore what is reading, approaches to teaching reading, vocabulary in reading, note-making steategies for reading comprehension, and reading assessment.

These are the heated issues in L2 reading, and I hope you can also contribute your experience here!

Now, let's get started to improve L2 reading!


 * What Is Reading?

=Definition of Reading= Reading is like an infectious disease: it is caught not taught. (And you can't catch it from someone who hasn't got it...) - Christine Nuttall (1983)

Aebersold & Field (1997) discuss the 3 elements involved in the reading process: the reader, the text, and the interaction between the reader and the text:

The Reader
The readers' past experience influence their process of reading:
 * 1) The family inlfuence: family members shape children's reading behaviors, habits, and attitudes.
 * 2) The community influence: the social events occured in the community shape children's bases of knowledge.
 * 3) The school influence: children learn how to read at school. They share different experience or values with other classmates.
 * 4) The cultural influence: culture shapes children's way of interpreting the reading and this world.

The Text

 * Sources of text: authentic materials, such as labels, instructions, advertisements, and notes; artificial materials, such as textbooks.
 * Rhetorical structure: description, classfication, comparison, contrast, cause and effect, process, argument, and persuasion.
 * Syntax and grammar: cohesion
 * Vocabulary: content words and function words

The Interaction between Reader and Text

 * Interaction through reading strategies
 * Effective word recognition
 * Use text features (subheadings, transitions, etc.)
 * Analyze unfamiliar words
 * Read for meaning, concentrate on constructing meaning
 * Interaction through schema: knowledge readers bring to text
 * Content schema: a basis for comparison
 * Formal schema: organization forms and rhetorical structures of texts
 * Linguistic schema: decoding features for word recognition

=Models of Reading=

Bottom-up theory (decoding)
Constructing the text from small units

Top-down theory
Fitting the text into reader's existing knowledge and checking back when new information appears.

Interactive school of theorists
Top-down and bottom up processes occured alternately or simultaneously.


 * Approaches to Teaching Reading
 * Vocabulary Issues In Reading
 * Note-making Strategies
 * Reading Assessment