What is reading in a second language? What do we read for?
What do we read?
These are just three questions of the many we ask ourselves. All teachers must ask themselves these and some others when reading. When you read you must try to grasp the general idea, so you must take into account that reading is more than just getting a literal sense .It’s getting a global comprehension based on "what you want."
Our students´use of reading is mainly looking for information, so when teaching them you must guide them how to do it. They must learn how to look for main ideas, and details, they should know how to skim and scan from a text, how to use a dictionary, etc. In general they should achieve comprehension.
Of course, all that depends on a lot of factors such as:
- Previous experience in the foreign language.
- Certain mastery of the required vocabulary for comprehension.
- Enough knowledge about grammatical structures used in the text.
- Cultural information.
- Previous background knowledge about topics to be used.
- Students´ own abilities for reading.
- Students´ speed ,motivation, interests, desires,etc
After teaching reading comprehension to industrial engineering students for five years we have realized that most of the students´difficulties in reading lie in the fact that mostly they don’t have a right command of their mother tongue especially some grammatical structures such as the passive voice, so there are often problems of misunderstanding due to those situations. That’s the main reason we decided to carry out this work aimed at implementing activities to improve the students´level of comprehension and to design other activities which could prove to be useful in the process of reading comprehension.
In teaching reading comprehension teachers should be aware that their students must have a certain knowledge of their mother tongue ,and which is more important, a great deal of knowledge of grammar.
This knowledge of the Spanish grammar would be of paramount importance, for example,in helping students to differentiate a noun from a verb or an adjective, especially when looking up a word in a dictionary. This is a problem we have faced in class a lot and which contributes to students´mistakes. (They look for the wrong word and that is misleading in their comprehension of a text or part of a text).
When exercising you must ask your students to look for certain words that they can compare with their mother tongue.
If you teach a synonym, antonym, or any other word you should take into account their origin (Anglo Saxon, or Latin)etc. If possible teach them some characteristics of the English language so that they understand better.(50% Latin,50% Anglo Saxon)
Verb tense is also important in dealing with certain complex texts or texts in which tenses like the passive voice is not so commonly used in Spanish as it is in English resulting in a big problem for students not only for understanding, but also for writing summaries, which they are asked to do in their curricula. For example; when they are supposed to interpret phrases like:
I´ts been stated, or This matter is being studied, it becomes troublesome for them to really grasp what is intended, and as a result, what they infer may not be right and thus interferes with comprehension. In our modest opinion we consider teachers should first of all teach students how the structure functions in the mother tongue, though it means that they really didn’t master such content in their previous studies.
We suggest including a very brief summary of both Spanish and English grammar from the very beginning of the course. It is a common belief that speakers of a second languageusually know more about that second language than their mother tongue. In the case of the mother tongue we most of the time use it but without worrying much about its structures unless you need to, you’re a linguist or your job has to do with it, etc
Another difficulty that we usually come across in dealing with reading comprehension is the interference of the mother tongue which also affects the process. If they haven’t formed the right reading habits in their mother tongue they won’t be able to do it in the foreign language, so certain processes such as recognizing a word or phrase, interpretation of these words or phrases ,grouping of them, etc will not be achieved.
Anyway, certain mechanisms, procedures o reading methods could be of help to those students who never mastered them in their mother tongue.
Taking all these into consideration we believe that when reading you must take into account the purpose while reading, and the kind of material you’re reading. Your purpose will determine your reading rate and here we should remember the most common purposes:
- To locate a specific item of information.
- To get the general idea.
- To have a total comprehension of a material.
- For recreational purposes.
Teachers shouldn’t forget that in learning a foreign language reading integrates with the other 3 aspects of the verbal activity, so it works as a means to reinforce the language learning activity While developing the reading activity students should review the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, etc, but if they have problems with them it usually becomes a handicap and as a result they usually feel lost or they lose their motivation for reading or in general for learning the foreign language.
Taking all that has been stated here we suggest the following activities or exercises to enrich the students´level of reading comprehension as well as integrating it with other skills:
- Brainstorming vocabulary ( According to their specialty, the teacher should check with the person in charge of Engineering studies the vocabulary that is to be used in their future life and look for the correct translation to those words, then ask students to remember as many words as possible and to put them into
use in class) ( This is a way of establishing inter-disciplinary relationships)
- Ask students to look for meanings in dictionaries and to provide other words they know or find.
- Teach some troublesome grammatical structure before presenting the reading material.
(Establish comparisons with the Spanish language. Suggest including short Spanish courses to the students.)
- Make a thorough study of the texts included in the syllabus and the others to be included and from those design a glossary to be given to the student before teaching the class (when possible)
- Students could do independent work and look for terms they could use soon. (Make use of intranet and internet)
- Give students a number of words. Accordingly, they are to predict the kind of text they are going to read. Then they read the text and check their original predictions.
- Students have to match topic sentences with the paragraph they fit.
- Working with newspapers. ( For scanning, skimming, vocabulary, grammar, asking and answering questions)
Prepare newspaper pages for each member of the class . Be sure that each page includes more than one article in it. Give one newspaper to each student. Tell students to read one article and then to write a question about the article read on the board.
Tell them not to identify the article on which the question was based.( The question should be such that it can only be answered by reading the article)
-Give the newspaper back to the teacher.
-The teacher should spread all the newspapers on the table in random order, then ask students to find the answers to the questions on the board.
– Ask students to share what procedures they used and the kind of reasoning they did to locate the articles.
While reading in the foreign language you can do the same as in your mother tongue. If you understand ideas, don’t worry about the meaning of isolated words. That is what some authors say about reading, but if students are given the right instructions and they are aware of what they are taught and the means to achieve comprehension, the process will be fulfilled, the students will feel motivated and satisfied and the teacher’s goals and intentions will have been worth the troubles.
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Authors:
Lic. Luis González Garcells
Msc Rosabel González Cruz
University of Holguín Oscar Lucero Moya