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Date Posted: 09:05:32 10/15/05 Sat
Author: Leonardo Rodrigo Soares
Subject: Final Draft: 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. 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) 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.

World knowledge is fundamental when we want to understand the real meaning of the sentence, in which involves a series of associations. The importance of world knowledge helps in a certain way of 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 to develop those technical and effective analytical processing skills (solving and critical thinking), by providing learners authentic materials with a variety of texts, genres, content areas and styles of writing. In addition, the importance of different cognitive styles must also have 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; comparison and predictions. In the strategy development teachers will teach language learning strategies and admit different cognitive styles. Strategies such as: look for reading material that is at or near students´ level; plan how to read a text, monitor to see how the reading is going, and then check to see how much of it was understood; make ongoing summaries either in one´s mind or in the margins of the text; guess the appropriate meaning by using clues from the surrounding context and use 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 contextualized; 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.


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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