Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language, by Nuttall, C.

What is Reading?

According to Nuttall, C. oughts to have 3 elements:

• 1. decode, decipher, identify,etc.

• 2. articulate, speak, pronounce, etc.

• 3. understand, respond, meaning, etc.

In the #1 the author is encouraging teachers to help student's identify the foreign words and to be familiar with the second language code.

The #2 talks about the 'reading aloud' feature that helps a lot to second language beginner learners. Teachers should used this tool, to teach pronounciation, practice fluency says the author.

Finally # 3 Nutall talks about meaning as the main idea of her article, this is, the transfer of a message from writer to reader.

To start with a definition of reading I shall adress to the definition that my classroom put together after reading the article, and here it is :
Reading is a process that involves decoding written symbols, in order to find and understand the meaning of someone else's message.

Now we are going to talk about REASONS FOR READING:

1. People read in different ways for different purposes, says Nuttall. This is, you can read slowly (way) in order to get all the details (purpose) or you can read quickly(way) just to find a specific detail(purpose).


2. People read because to obtain something in return, this something is called by Nuttall, the message. This message can have ideas, feelings, descriptions, etc.

Now, why do people read foreign languages?

In this matter, motivations plays an important role, because if students are only reading school assignments. and not reading for pleasure, then the teacher's role is in danger. The teacher should motivate students by making foreing language reading 'interesting in itself', in other words, the teacher should carefully choose the reading material, according to student's own interest. Nevertheless, the reading must be used for rael life purposes.

Reading and the communication process

The communication process deals with 3 esscential parts, which is the encoder (writer) that encodes a message in order to share it with some body else. Then we have the actual message that is transmitted to a decoder, in order words the reader that is going to interpret or decipher the enconder's message.This is the simple way to explain this process, since there are a lot of interfierence when it comes to communicate with others.

The reader can be either active or passive. The passive reader let's all the information gathered by the author just go in his/her mind. This kind of reader, tells us that he/she might not get everything in his/her mind. Wich, depends on how difficult a text can be for a student.

An important question is, what makes a text difficult?

Here are some of the ways in which texts can be difficult:

1. Not being familiar witht he code (language)
2. The amount of previous knowledge (schemata)
3. The usage of complex words
4. And the vocabulary

With this in mind, we must say that is important that writer and reader share some of the 4 points mentioned above, so that communication can take place. More over, some assumptions about the world and the way it works must be shared too. As it shows below:

So, now we can talk about the schema, which is a mental structure (mental map or reality). In communication the "way we interpret depends on the schemata (plural) activated by the text". Consequently, the succes of our interpretation relies on our area of good understanding shared witht he writer , in other words in the being the reader's schemata similar to the writer's schemata.

Schemata are build up from experiences, this means that new experiences are constantly changing ones schema. Moreover, our "schema grows throughout our lives for as long as we retain the capacity to learn".Thus, reading at the same time as we learn changes our exising schemata, this is calles active reading.


Reflection

Active reading is what teachers are looking to promote among students. Invite your students to find meaning in everything they read, and choose carefully the meaning that texts carry, so they can feel confident about their reading, and not frustrated because of the lack of shared schemata with the author or the poor vocabulary they have in order to get the meaning.