Transformative Teachers
Webinar 6 - Reading Skills - Careful reading
Summary notes
Firstly, thank you for participating in the Trinity College London teacher support webinar series. We are delighted to have over 1000 teachers from 70 countries participate in the series.
In this webinar, Senior Examiner (SELT), Gwilym Jones, is interviewed by TESOL Qualifications Manager, Ben Beaumont. Gwilym and Ben discuss the processes involved in reading, with particular focus on careful reading. During the discussion, they explore the everyday application of careful reading and consider a range of practical classroom ideas to help students develop their careful reading skills.
If you were unable to attend the webinar, you can watch the webinar via the following link:
Webinar 6 video – reading skills: careful reading
Summary of questions and responses
Interview: Gwilym Jones and Ben Beaumont
What is careful reading?
- Carefully reading text in linear way to extract meaning.
- Allows the reader to understand material thoroughly.
- Can be applied in or between sentences, to paragraphs or to the whole text.
Why do students need to practice careful reading?
Students need practice in careful reading to allow them to do the following:- Identify what is the main idea and what are the supporting ideas in a text and to decide how much attention to give these.
- Differentiate between fact and opinion - very useful nowadays in the age of opinion-based articles masquerading as fact.
- Make inferences based on what is implicit in the text.
When do we need to identify main points and supporting points?
- Proficient readers will naturally identify main points and prioritise these when reading and use them to build up an understanding of the text.
- Learners should remember that there is normally one main idea per paragraph.
How can careful reading helps us to differentiate between fact and opinion? Why is this a necessary skill?
- Reading carefully allows us to identify facts (statements that can be proven to be correct) and opinions (subjective statements that indicate the writer’s personal feelings and are not provable).
- Sometimes opinions are clearly identified (I think…; it seems….; in my opinion…..; for many…….)
- Opinions sometimes use more subjective adjectives/adverbs (this is clearly better…. A much easier solution is ….)
- Opinions sometimes contain modal verbs (might, should, would, could…)
- However, in the modern era of fake news, we need to remember that some writers will present facts that are not true in order to support their opinions. Learners need to read critically to assess how reliable/objective the text is.
- Writers can also present a factual account but omit some information that does not support their opinions.
How can careful reading helps us to understand implicit and explicit views in a text?
- It is impossible for a writer to include everything in the text so generally will require the reader to make inferences.
- It is only through careful reading that we are able to identify the writers aims, opinions and ideas both those that are clearly stated and those that are implied or suggested.
- Often to make inferences we need to apply the content of the text to our background knowledge of the topic and the wider world.
What does the cognitive approach tell us about the reading process?
- For cognitive linguists the brain is like a computer and they have put forward a theory of how the text is processed to construct meaning by the reader.
- Firstly we identify the word on the page. After this we access our memory to recall the meaning(s) of the word and its word class. We then group words together to form chunks in order to construct meaning at clause and sentence levels.
- These first, lower level processes are informed by the reader’s understanding of lexis and syntax. The speed that we are able to perform these processed will depend on language proficiency and the complexity of the text. For lower level readers, this will require more time as they will have gaps in their knowledge of the language.
- These processes are traditionally called bottom up processing.
- After this, the reader will make inferences based on the propositional meaning at sentence and clause level to build a mental model between sentences, within paragraphs and between paragraphs.
- These, processes are guided by the reader’s general knowledge, their knowledge of the topic, and also their comprehension of the text so far.
- The final process is creating a mental model of the text as a whole, including the main aim and overall opinion of the writer.
- This is informed by the reader’s knowledge of the genre
- These last processes are higher level and are informed by what is traditionally called ‘top down’ processing.
Why is ‘reading across paragraphs’ a necessary skill?
- By encouraging reading across paragraphs we are helping our learners to develop the higher level processes mentioned above.
- It is only through reading across paragraphs that we are able to identify the relationship between the main ideas within these paragraphs and therefore understand the overarching main idea and purpose of the text.
Why is it helpful to encourage learners to highlight key language when careful reading and what is gained by discussing this?
- Highlighting key information gives learners a visual clue of how items in the text relate to one another.
- By highlighting phrases in the text and in any questions, learners are developing the bottom up processes of identifying language and building up a sentence level meaning. By highlighting these in the text and the question, they are comparing parallel phrasing and synonymy.
- Discussing what they have highlighted, rather than just the correct answer to a comprehension question, learners are actually talking through the reading process, how they identify main ideas and prioritise them.
Is it advisable to give learners a translation of a problematic word when doing a reading exercise?
- There are different schools of thought on translation and this would also depend on institutional preference.
- By giving a student a translation of a word, the teacher is lowering the cognitive load for the reader and allowing them to engage in more higher level processes.
- There are many ways to deal with problematic vocabulary in a reading exercise: pre-teaching, giving a glossary, giving a translation. During the reading exercise the focus should be on developing reading skills and it may be advisable to avoid spending too much time on low level vocabulary that will not help the learner when reading a variety of texts.
- If preparing learners for an exam, they need to be equipped with the skills for handling unknown vocabulary in an exam (is the word important?, what word form is it?, what can we deduce about its meaning from its context?
Can lower level readers get a text level (macrostructure) understanding or is this just for higher level learners?
- This is a higher level process but that does not mean it is not possible for lower level learners.
- More proficient readers are able to construct a macrostructure understanding for much longer, more complex texts as they are devoting less energy to lower level, bottom up processes.
- Lower level learners are able to get a macrostructure understanding of shorter, more simple texts.
How important is it to activate the schemata when doing careful reading exercises?
- Activating the schemata is vital. As mentioned above, we need to have some topic knowledge, general knowledge, and knowledge of genre to enable us to make inferences and build a mental model of the text.
- For lower level processes, activating the schemata is also vital as it may help learners to understand unfamiliar vocabulary.
What activities can we do in class to practice careful reading?
- Jigsaw reading
- A text is cut up into paragraphs / sections and students have to assemble the text in the correct order. Helps practice reading across paragraphs and identifying main points in a paragraph.
- This can be done in pairs / groups or as a whole class where learners have to get into the correct order based on the paragraph that they have.
- To make this more challenging, the text could be removed after the learners have read it in pairs. Thereby forcing learners to use processing memory.
- Five word titles
- In pairs / groups learners have to write titles for paragraphs of a text that are no more than five words in length. The class then discusses and choose which title is best.
- Summary writing
- Learners identify the main ideas in a text in groups. The teacher boards these main ideas and then the learners work in groups to make a summary of the text helps with identifying main points and inferencing.
- Could also try summary by deletion - learners delete all the supporting ideas from a text and are left with only the main ideas. They then delete all the unnecessary words from those main ideas and then write a summary from whatever is left.
- Learners could use the words from the text to make a summary, or different words to expand vocab.
- Multiple texts
- Learners look at two or more texts on the same subject and identify the differences.
- The two texts could be different opinions based text (eg newspaper biases) and learners identify the facts, opinions and discuss the bias of the writer - great for inferencing, identifying fact and opinion.
- The text could be two different text types on the same thing (eg newspaper vs textbook) and writers identify the differences in structure facts and opinions. Great for identifying genre features.
- Questions
- Class questions / group questions - give learners a text and get them to write challenging questions for other groups based on a section of the text.
- Guess the questions - learners are given words rather than questions and after reading the text they have to in groups write the questions that the words appear in. The teacher checks at the end and boards good examples and then as a class, they answer the questions. The teacher can also feed in the ‘real’ questions that the words come from.
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We very much look forward to welcoming you to the seventh webinar, on Wednesday 23 May at 13:00 UK time, when Alex Thorp, Academic Lead - Language (Europe), will be interviewing Manuela Kelly Calzini, Academic Coordinator, Italy. They will be discussing vocabulary learning and how we can help learners develop a range of strategies to facilitate their language acquisition.
Click on the 'Join Webinar' link below at the appointed time for the next webinar.
