Page 98 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Reading and Writing

Table 6.1 Types of Reading Knowledge and Awareness
Type Examples
Knowledge about print Letters on a paper represent sounds; writing in a certain direc-
tion.
Graphophonic knowledge Letters form certain sounds; pronunciation of sounds.
Lexical knowledge Certain words are very common; some words go together (e.g.
lunch time).
Syntactic knowledge Typical structures or chunks (e.g. How are you? See you later.).
Semantic knowledge Language is related to the knowledge of the world, experiences
and culture.
Notes Adapted from Brewster et al. (2002, p. 110).

Reading
What is behind Reading?
In the process of developing reading skills learners acquire different types of
knowledge and awareness (Table 6.1). In addition, reading involves several
subskills. In a language classroom, reading for specific information or scan-
ning is very common. Reading comprehension questions, such as ‘How old
is Anne?’ or ‘How many brothers has she got?’ are examples of reading a text
to find a specific piece of information. These types of questions prevail at the
beginning stages of reading, because they are not demanding for learners.
However, we have to bear in mind that learners need to develop other read-
ing subskills as well, e.g. reading for gist or skimming, which involves reading
a text to get the main idea of its contents or to be able to tell what the text
is about. Reading for detail or intensive reading is another subskill with which
readers focus on the new vocabulary or language structures in a text. It is the
opposite of extensive reading, which is related to reading longer texts, e.g.
stories, books. When we read extensively, we focus our attention on differ-
ent parts of the text and we use contextual clues to understand the contents.
When learning how to read in an FL, it is good to include reading tasks that
develop different kinds of subskills, as learners will need to use a variety of
them in the future.
In addition to different types of knowledge and reading subskills that en-
compass the reading process, several authors emphasise the importance of
the vocabulary range which the learners need to master to be able to read
a text effectively. In this context, Hu and Nation (2000) argue that learners
need to know as many as 95–98 of all the words in a text to be able to read
it independently.

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