146
APPLYING CURRENT APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF READING
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
Dilafruz Kariyeva
Associate professor, “Social sciences and foreign languages department”,
Banking and Finance Academy of the Republic of Uzbekistan
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15340384
Reading is a crucial skill for students of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as
a Foreign Language (EFL), and understanding the rationale behind these methods is essential for
teachers who want to improve their reading lessons.
In linguistics, researchers make an important distinction between
meaningful learning
and
rote learning
. An example of rote learning is simply memorizing lists of isolated words or rules in
a new language, where the information becomes temporary and subject to loss. Meaningful
learning, on the other hand, occurs when new information is presented in a relevant context and
is related to what the learner already knows, thereby being easily integrated into one's existing
knowledge system. According to Ausubel (1968), learning that is not meaningful will not become
permanent.
The new top-down reading is not just extracting meaning from a text but a process of
connecting information in the text with the knowledge the reader has.
For the teacher applying this approach the first task is to select texts that are relevant to
the students' needs, preferences, individual differences, and cultures. The goal is to provide
meaningful texts so the students understand the message, which entails activating existing
knowledge and building new knowledge. After selecting a text, the following three stages of
activities are typically used:
1.
Pre-reading
. At this important stage, the teacher should make sure that students have the
relevant knowledge for understanding the text. This is achieved by having students think, write,
and discuss everything they know about the topic, employing techniques such as prediction,
semantic mapping
and
reconciled reading
.
2.
During-reading
. This stage requires the teacher to guide and monitor the interaction
between the reader and the text. One important skill teachers c impart at this stage is note-
taking, which allows students to compile new vocabulary and important information and details,
and to summarize information and record their reactions and opinions.
3.
Post-reading
. The post-reading activities focus on a wide number of questions, ranging
from simple to complex, which allow for different interpretations and help to check
comprehension.
The pre-reading stage deserves special attention since at this stage students have the initial
contact with the text. It is crucial to have such a pre-reading activity as
previewing
, where
students look at titles, headings, and pictures, and read the first few paragraphs and the last
paragraph. This activity can help students understand what the text is about.
It is interesting at the initial stage to prepare some exercises giving students the chance to
develop their prediction and anticipation skills. With some headlines, students usually have no
difficulty. They easily define the possible topic of the article, define if the article is about past or
future events (
Banks take blame for credit crisis, UBS faces three-year fight for reputation, Lessons
from UBS, JPMorgan seeks jobs for sacked Bear staff, A hard lesson in bank management
).
147
In many cases, though, students need the help of the teacher. Sometimes they encounter
lexical difficulty as in the headline
'The West's financial centers run red'
when some students do
not know the meaning of the phrasal expression 'to run red'. In such cases, the teacher can
recommend to look through the article (or only the first and the last paragraphs) to guess the
meaning of the headline. Sometimes subtitle can clarify the topic of the article. Let's look at the
headline
'When rivers run dry'
which seems to have nothing with economic problems. But after
reading the subtitle
'Can bank regulators and central banks prevent future liquidity crises?'
students understand that the article deals with money issue and the metaphor used in the
headline.
The desire of the author to create a vivid picture while providing as much information as
possible in a limited space, often results in unusual sentence structure of headlines. Such a
headline as
'The End of an Era, Even at Goldman'
can be of difficulty for those who do not know
about problems faced by Goldman Sachs Group in 2008.
Semantic mapping
is another pre-reading activity that can be used to pre-teach vocabulary
and to assess the students' prior knowledge on the topic. This activity asks students to
brainstorm about the given topic as the information is displayed on a graphic "map." As students
make associations, the map becomes a thorough summary of the concepts and vocabulary that
they will encounter in the reading. It can also help build vocabulary that students do not possess
yet. So, while reading the article
'When rivers run dry'
students are asked to find the words,
which reveal the meaning of the headline. Such words as
'precipitate, evaporate, flow, liquid, pool,
dry up'
build new associations for students and facilitate the usage of the words. Again, it is
important to select the texts that contain the material that is likely to be familiar and interesting
to them.
Another type of pre-reading activity called
reconciled reading lesson
, which reverses the
sequence presented by many textbooks where the text is followed by questions. Instead, the
teacher develops pre-reading questions from the questions that appear at the end of the reading.
Using prior knowledge efficiently contributes to fluent readers, and it is important to support
and develop a relationship between visual and nonvisual (prior knowledge) information; the
more the students know the subject, the less difficulty they encounter while reading.
References:
Используемая литература:
Foydalanilgan adabiyotlar:
1.
Ausubel, D. 1968. Educational psychology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston.
