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Date Posted: 08:23:41 10/18/05 Tue
Author: Leonardo Rodrigo Soares
Subject: Final Paper for Evaluation: Reading as a source of information and expansion of knowledge

Reading as a source of information and expansion of knowledge

In the age of Information and Communication, reading plays an important role in the area of Language Acquisition as a source of information and expansion of world and linguistic knowledge. Second or foreign language learners are supposed to be able “to apply this knowledge to solve problems and to transfer learning to new situations”(Richards, 2003, p.25). Besides, reading represents an important source of exposure to the target language for learners who have the goal of achieving a better performance in the second or foreign language. There is a wide range of strategies that can be used to foster individual reading by developing technical reading skills that will ultimately increase vocabulary, retain knowledge and communicate more effectively in various contexts.

Goodman (1967, cited in Attieh,1997) characterized reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game, that is, a combination of cognition and linguistics, in which the reader makes predictions about what is going to happen. Meaning does not come from the printed letters alone. It involves an interaction between thought and language. While reading a sentence, we select the fewest, most productive cues and produce guesses. What comes next would check these predictions and confirm them. It involves an interaction and integration of top-down (activates previous knowledge) and bottom-up (builds the meaning through language knowledge) approaches as a way of processing information.

World knowledge is fundamental when we want to understand the real meaning of the sentence, which involves a series of associations. World knowledge is important because it helps the reader formulating guesses when some texts do not provide enough clues. We activate previous knowledge (schemata) and build the meaning of the text (top-down approach) while we read a text. In other words, in top-down approach we use our intelligence, experience and common sense.

The importance of developing technical reading skills rather than those used for literary reading is fundamental. Richards (2003) claims that teachers are responsible for developing those technical and effective analytical processing skills (solving and critical thinking), by providing learners with a variety of authentic materials from different genres, content areas and styles of writing. In addition, the importance of different cognitive styles must also be taken into account while developing reading skills.

According to the philosophy behind the pedagogical principles in the Strategic Reading series - a three level reading series taking learners from basic to upper-intermediate levels of reading proficiency - reading is viewed as a cognitive process and as a strategy development.

In the cognitive process, learner will develop skills such as: discerning main ideas; understanding sequence; noticing specific details; making inferences; comparisons and predictions. In the strategy development teachers will teach language learning strategies and admit different cognitive styles. Strategies such as: looking for reading material that is at or near students´ level; planning how to read a text, monitoring to see how the reading is going, and then checking to see how much of it was understood. On the other hand, students will make ongoing summaries either in someone´s mind or in the margins of the text; will guess the appropriate meaning by using clues from the context and using a dictionary to get a detailed sense of what individual words mean are fundamental and effective.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that “the teaching of strategies should be contextualised; strategies should be taught explicitly through direct explanation, modeling, and feedback; there should be a constant recycling of strategies over next texts and tasks strategies should be taught over a long period of time”(Richards, 2003, p.28). Moreover, reading is the process of (re)constructing the meaning of a text, exchanging ideas and interacting. So, the meaning will be built through active participation, that is, making use of previous knowledge.


REFERENCES

.ATTHIEH, Elie. What is reading? New Routes Magazine. São
Paulo,November, 1997. Available at:
http://www.disal.com.br/html/NROUTES/nr0/pgnr0_02.htm.
Access on: September 9th, 2005.

.CELSE-MURCIA & Olshtain. Discourse and context in language
teaching: a guide for language teachers. Cambridge
University Press, 2000.

.Jack C. Richards. What´s new of teaching of reading? New
Routes Magazine. São Paulo, September, 2003. Available
at:http://www.disal.com.br/html/NROUTES/nr21/index.asp?
A1=779125393133243&A2=P.Access on: September 9th, 2005.

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