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UDK 82.0
Toshmatova M.A.
Assistant of Ferghana polytechnic institute Uzbekistan, Ferghana city THE MAIN EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES IN TEACHING READING
Annotation: This article is about how Reading is one of the most significant processes of our life. Reading and its strategies are used in the class in order to make lesson easier and enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. You have to take into consideration your students' ability and their age in choosing reading strategies and activities.
Key words: young learners, adult learners, significant process, to contain, to assign, target language, to verify vocabulary, to comprehend, to be more crucial in reading comprehension, adequate.
Reading is one of the most significant processes of our life. While reading we know and learn a number of words. The more you read the better you can get a lot of information. Grellet suggests that reading is assigning meaning and extracting information from written texts [2]. Reading and its strategies are used in the class in order to make lesson easier and enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. In this article we explained reading strategies and activities for young learners and adult learners. There is given a number of tasks and examples which contain reading and its strategies. As Tierney and Pearson said: "If teacher understand the nature of reading comprehension and learning from a text, they will have the basis for evaluating and improving environments"[7].
Reading is considered an interactive process. Reading gives a lot of opportunities to learners such as knowing and understanding vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, listening, etc. There are a number of useful strategies and activities to introduce and teach reading skill in a foreign language. Let's discuss young learners. Young learners, five to ten year olds, can write and read only in their first language. Reading words, sentences, topics in the target language is a bit difficult for them. Before giving reading tasks teacher should introduce pupils with letters and sounds of the target language. He/she teaches the alphabet and phonics. Teacher should demand to learn phonics and alphabets from learners on time. After acquiring phonics pupils are able to combine words and read. But it requires more practice and work. On the other hand children regularly don't want to study, especially reading. In order to involve them teacher should use illustrations, stories, picture dictionaries, activities and games, pictures, worksheets, handouts, big books for shared reading in class, audio recordings, etc. Most of young learners are unable to read and write in the target language for the first time. These mentioned things help them learn easily [8]. Here are some strategies:
Look and Say
Look and Say is an effective reading strategy which used by teacher for
primary learners. In this activity teacher uses some cards and by showing them teaches how to read correctly in target language. On the other hand words and phrases are written on the cards. In order not to confuse there are should be written only one word in one card, not a sentence.
For ex.:
an apple
our school
my mother
Teacher shows the card and says it with attention. Pupils are asked to repeat after him/her. Four or at least five new words are enough for one lesson. Besides reading correctly the new word on card they have a chance to learn it faster after repetition. By using cards teacher may organize other beneficial activities too, such as matching words and pictures. In this game teacher needs two cards. There are will be words on the first card and pictures on the second card. Teacher shows them to pupils and they are asked to match words with pictures. Because of game and interest young learners try to do exercise very well. In order to recognize new word learners need lots of practice. Teacher's task is to make easy and interesting lesson and avoid reading the same things. Because young learners will lose their interest if they read the same things more than once. If words are written on the coloured cards they can easily recall and save them in memory for a long time.
In order to consolidate learners' reading skill and vocabulary teacher plans variety activities such as finding word families(or lexical sets) of words. It would be better if teacher use words or phrases which are familiar for learners. In this activity teacher collects a number of words which belong to one word or family. For example: names of birds, clothes, toys, kinds of colours, etc. Learners are asked to put these words in appropriate form:
Table
Birds Clothes Toys Food
Matching sentences to picture
Three or more pictures and sentences are given to pupils. Learners should be able to understand the meaning of sentences in order to match them with pictures. So teacher gives suitable sentences which are known for pupils. After reading and comprehending sentences learners are asked to match them. After finishing matching they read their examples turn by turn.
Shared group reading
Shared group reading is very enjoyable and interesting activity for young learners. While shared reading teacher uses Big Books. Because, these books are especially written for group reading. First of all if there are any opportunities in the class teacher should rearrange the seat of pupils before starting the reading. Instead of chairs, sitting on the floor while shared reading is more comfortable and
relaxed. On the other hand learners can move, act and imitate while reading. A number of researchers found that shared group reading is the best way to introduce reading as a fun and group activity. Not only reading, but listening skill will be improved by it too.
Reading a story
Young learners love stories fairytales, coloured books. Especially they want to listen to interesting stories from teacher. Children gain more benefit from listening to story than other strategies. Reading a story is one of the most effective ways of creating friendly and real English atmosphere with pupils. While listening to story learners draw the pictures of the events in their mind, fantasy and they look forward to the ending of story. But in a reading story teacher cannot change the events of story. He/she reads turn by turn which is written on the book. Reading aloud
The simplest advice for teachers is slow down before starting reading. Teacher should give enough time to learners in order *to choose a book *to look through the book *to observe the images, pictures of the book *to guess the context
Reading aloud is a good way of checking pronunciation and stress of pupils. It also verifies vocabulary and introduces new words, phrases. Hubbard suggested that reading aloud is useful as a test of pronunciation and general fluency. Reading aloud motivates learners to learn and acquire language with interest. On the other hand most of young learners like reading aloud and it improve their pronunciation too [7].
Choral reading
One of the useful reading aloud activity is choral reading. Teacher gives a reading passage to pupils and shows the intonation, major stress, pauses. First of all learners are asked to look through the passage with attention and teacher begins to read. The class repeats the passage in chorus after teacher. In order to verify learners' pronunciation and intonation one member of class is ordered to read the passage on the blackboard without teacher. Dramatic reading
The next reading aloud activity is dramatic reading. Learners are given a text. If the text was written as a dialogue teacher allows learners to participate together. Teacher points the dialogue to each pupil and they are asked to read all characters of the dialogue. Dramatic reading helps learners how to communicate with one another and how to create real conversation. During the task learners' intonation, pronunciation and stress are controlled by teacher. Reading text based on child's language
In this reading strategy teacher allows pupils to use their native language freely [5]. And it is based on various pictures which are shown by teacher. After showing picture to learners they are asked to describe it. If learners have some difficulties on describing the picture in second language they may use their first
language (young learners are unable lack of vocabulary). Then teacher translates pupils' sentences into target language and writes them in the child's book. After finishing teacher says the word in second language and pupils repeat the sentence after him/her. Moreover learners are asked to read sentences loudly with attention. In order to be easy and understandable for young learners teacher uses simple sentences, such as "She is my mother. She is young. She is my grandmother. She is old. "
As you see, Reading is not easy process for young learners. It requires knowledge and ability, different activities and games from teacher. Moreover teacher should be perfect person. In order to teach and interest young and naughty learners teacher should be a brilliant music teacher, kind and sometimes strict teacher, patient and happy teacher as ten year old pupils said. Before giving task and introduce materials teacher should get on well with pupils and especially teacher should respect his/her pupils.
Let's see the process in teaching Reading with adult learners [1,3]. Lack of vocabulary readers cannot read and understand the text in target language. Nation pointed that about 4000 word families are needed for reading instructionally with approximately 95 percent of words known in a given text. That means that in order to understand and analyses the text which is written in target language learners is able to know at least 4000 word families. On the other hand scientists found that a minimum of 10, 000 words gives a chance to reader to comprehend an academic text.
Knowing the strong relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension helps teachers conduct and find the useful and easy strategies of vocabulary learning and comprehending the text for adult learners. Other researcher Hirsch explained that knowing at least 90 percent of the words of a text gives a chance the reader to get the main idea. Roehrig, Guo and Sedita also explain the relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. As they mentioned vocabulary is more crucial in reading comprehension and helps learners to identify the general idea of the text. In order to check students' ability in reading comprehension and vocabulary observers organized an achievement test. The text contains 50 questions, and twenty five questions are the questions to measure students' reading comprehension and the other twenty five questions are to measure to students' vocabulary. After calculating the data from achievement test some students included into excellent category, some of them included into good and average category in comprehending a text and vocabulary. But some learners included into poor category. After the result of achievement test it is found that the background knowledge and the ability of students' vocabulary help students comprehend the text and do tasks without difficulties.
Having more and adequate vocabulary makes the student understand the text easily. Moreover reading strategies help learners to comprehend the text too. According to the text we knew that there is a relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension. They fill in one another and learners who have high scores in read also have high scores in vocabulary too. As it was mentioned more
experience and background knowledge help learners understand and identify reading materials and vocabulary tasks. By using those learners find unknown words and they can guess the meaning of unknown word. So if teacher gives more vocabulary to students and demands them to learn new words regularly, it works well. And the teacher achieves what he/she want- the good result. On the other hand vocabulary improves students' knowledge and participant on the lesson [4].
As it was mentioned in above most of language learners find and learn new words incidentally. Incidental vocabulary learning is a process of acquiring new words through reading topics, texts or passages. And it isn't planned process. But some learners are unable to understand new words incidentally. Because acquiring new words incidentally through reading in context is not easy process and it requires more vocabulary and practice. If learners encounter unknown words more than five or six times in context they can learn and remember them quickly and easily. The main aim of reading comprehension is to enhance learners' vocabulary and knowledge. Incidental vocabulary learning is a good way of acquiring new words. Moreover during the incidental learning students are able to do all tasks such as identifying the specific information and comprehending the whole meaning of the text, learning unknown words incidentally is not learning a word but it also improves students' fluency and reading comprehension too.
References:
1. Ж. Жалолов. Чет тил укитиш методикаси - Тошкент 2012 й.
2. Bernaus, M., & Gardner, R. C. (2008). Teacher motivation strategies, students perceptions, student motivation, and English achievement. The Modern Language Journal, 08, 387-401.
3. Bradford, A. (2007). Motivational orientation in under-researched FLL contexts: Findings from Indonesia. RELC, 38, 302-322.
4. British Council (2012) Changing perceptions of skills, Conference Reports and Recommendations, p.19-20 January, 2012 Tunisia, Accessed October 24,2012 at http://www.britishcouncil.org
5. Common European framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment (Language Policy Unit Strasbourg www.coe.int/lang- CEFR)
6. Carter, B.-A. (2006). Teacher/Student responsibility in foreign language learning. New York: Peterlang Publishing, Inc.
7. Council of Europe (2006) European Language Portfolio (ELP) Principles and Guildelines (with added explanatory notes). Language Policy Division, Strasbourg. Digital document at www.coe.int/portfolio
8. Johnson, 1981; Implications of basic research for the assessment of reading comprehension, University of Illinois.
