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How Classroom Reading Activities Reflect the Purposeful, Interactive Nature of Real Reading Classrooms are busy places, but they tend not to be extremely noisy. They are child-centered and structured to enable children to be active and self-determining participants. Children are surrounded by print their own, teacher-made resources, and commercially prepared materials. They are encouraged to interact with their visual environment, and it is not uncommon to see children reading around the room, using showed work as a focus for reading and talking. In-class reading activities allow teacher-student conferences to take place. These conferences are significant in helping children to progress in their reading.
Teachers often confer with individuals during reading workshop, independent reading time, between guided reading groups, or at the beginning of a group while the other children are warming up by reading familiar books. In a classroom, in which students voices are respected, the teacher gains access to information about childrens perspectives and subjective experiences that promotes responsiveness to childrens educational, social, affective, and physical needs (Dewey, 1904; Erickson & Shultz, 1992; Old father, 1991; Weinstein, 1989). Rohrkemper (1989) proposed a Vygotskian perspective on adaptive learning that emphasizes the role of classroom interactions. Rohrkemper defined adaptive learning as the ability to take charge of frustration and maintain the interior to learn while enacting effective take strategies in the face of uncertainty-taking charge of ones motivation, emotion, and thinking (1989, p. 143). Rohrkemper emphasized the importance of interactions with others, as well as with tasks, in working through problems with not easy learning.
Rohrkemper and Corn (1988) established that children could learn important adaptive strategies when they are confronted with stressful situations, and argued that these adaptive strategies can and should be intentionally promoted within classrooms. As students learn to cope with stress and boredom and to respond quickly to new situations, they become able to take control of their own learning process. In other word, they conclude that taking participation in the class not only enhances students motivation but also makes possible for teachers to understand what the students needs are, and students can learn important adaptive strategies as well. In-class reading gives students opportunities to enhance their fluency and accuracy in speaking and listening. Students take participation in debates, role-plays, oral presentations, and consensus building activities and learn how to form, communicate, and support their opinions on contemporary issues. Students listen and react to conversational and academic English on a variety of subjects and learn effective listening techniques.
Reading assignments reinforce classroom activities. Students strengthen their reading skills and expand their vocabulary by reading and reacting to adapted and genuine texts. Students learn how to write more effectively through academic writing coursework. Course topics include reading, writing and revision process, effective sentence formation and paragraph development, and short essay and research report style. In the classroom students read, react to, and discuss a variety of advanced level fiction and non-fiction texts. Academic writing tasks are common, with special attention given to each students specific areas of need as they communicate to structure and language usage.
Students practice inventing, formulating, and supporting a thesis and learn to express and defend opinions effectively. Thanks to in-class interactive reading activities, students can enhance their English language fluency through a variety of language activities related to work place tasks. Students organize and explain findings, practice techniques of argumentation and persuasion, and review principals of conversation running of the type used at meetings and informal discussion groups. Describing processes, expressing hypotheses, reporting findings, and comparing and contrasting ideas are featured basics of the course. Assignments may vary according to individual language skill level. The organization of classrooms typically facilitates activity and talk.
Children mostly sit in groups of between four and ten. The composition of the groups may be social or ability based. In many cases, groups are mixed in gender. Children may change groups several times per day, depending on the reading activity. For most reading activities teachers use ability-based groups and the composition of these groups may also change as the learning needs of the children are addressed. The children know about the ability level of their instructional group.
However, because grouping is very flexible and changes to meet needs and interests, children appear to have absolutely no problems acknowledging difference among their peers. As students needs and strengths change, so should the reading groups change. Continual assessment, inspection, and observation of readers are necessary to keep the groupings flexible. Children may join or leave groups as necessary. When teachers are providing instruction with a particular group, they do not want to be interrupted.
Therefore, the other children in the classroom must be busy. They should know what to do, how to do it, and why. Routines and expectations are clear and known by all students, so that time on task is maximized. Guided Reading provides the necessary opportunity for teachers to teach openly reading strategies at the students individual levels. During this time, teachers reinforce strategies and define behaviors good readers use as they see students use them. Readers shall know what they are doing well and what they need to learn in order to mature as readers.
The more students can express and define their strengths and their goals, the more proficient they will become at reading. In order for individual student goals to be set, teachers need to observe and confer with students. Observations of readers incorporating reading strategies during Guided Reading, individual reading conferences and running records help teachers to determine students abilities and to determine what students need to learn. Teachers in classrooms use reading resources and materials to meet the needs and interests of the children. Majority of teachers are philosophically opposed to the idea that children must fit the resources.
To this end, classrooms have different resources the childrens own written works, teacher-made booklets and charts, trade books, and commercially published materials. These materials reflect the experiences of children, are flexible, and enable teachers to make professional opinions about their children. In addition, the teachers reference material is conceptually sound, in line with the widely held philosophy of holistic learning. Journals can be also used to facilitate reading activities.
These journals typically contain articles, stories, plays, poems, puzzles, jokes, and so forth, often covering a number of different topics, which can be interested for students to read and to discuss. Teachers use journals to find suitable in-class reading materials for their topics and the reading levels of their children. For example, a class might be studying the topic of animals as part of their science studies. Teachers use the journals to provide applicable materials at different levels so that while individual students are learning at their own pace, the whole class may be developing similar concepts and having similar learning experiences, creating a sense of unity and purpose within the classroom.
Children are also able to choose their own texts for reading, but teachers are always glad to help with selections if necessary. At the conclusion of reading activities in many classrooms, teachers and students will share snippets of their texts, or words or phrases they found interesting or difficult. This practice gives the readers a sense of connection with other students, who might participate in different reading activities, although it is informal and unforced. Individualized reading is usually related to thematic studies. It enables students to select the materials they will read, pace themselves, choose from a range of independent activities, and decide how they will share and appraise their work. This aspect of reading by was developed initially by Don Holdaway.
It is evident in many classrooms. It requires appropriate materials, in appropriate quantities, as well as explicit routines and organization. Individualized reading enables teachers to act as coaches providing individual instruction relating to needs identified during conferences and ongoing assessment. Guided and independent reading activities assume greater importance when children reach the upper primary classes, as they move from learning to read to reading to learn. Teachers help children to develop research and study skills, and extend their use of high-quality literature, such as books nominated for various international awards and books by specific authors. In addition, different trade materials and newspapers are used regularly to increase effective reading.
Teachers want their children to develop a love of reading, as well as the ability to read well be readers who can and do read in order to obtain needed information and be happy about their discoveries. Moreover, reading is the best way to increase reading skills, which will significantly influence academic performance of a student in the future. Stanovich (1986) points to a phenomenon identified by Merton (1968) as the Matthew effect. This suggests that the more children read, the more they increase their reading abilities.
Stanovich (1986) claims that readers who are reading well and who have good vocabularies will read more, learn more different word meanings, and hence read and understand texts better. Readers with inadequate vocabularies who read slowly and without enjoyment, read less and obtain less information. As a result, they have slower development of vocabulary knowledge, which in turn inhibits further growth in reading ability. Thus, the more exposure a student has to language through reading, the greater the possibilities that overall language proficiency will increase.
By increasing reading rates, second language readers are exposed to much more language than if they read at a slower, more laborious rate. Since students often do not like to read on their own, it appears that in-class reading is very important. Often, trying to assist students in order to increase their reading rates, teachers overemphasize accuracy. When this occurs, reading fluency is obstructed. Hence, the teacher should work toward a balance in reading-rate improvement and reading comprehension. This balance may change depending on the topic of the reading passage, level of reading difficulty, and the purpose of the reading.
In-class reading activities that are aimed at reading-rate build up are very purposeful. Reading-rate activities are not designed to teach students how to read with blasting speed but how to increase their reading rates above a minimal threshold necessary to move beyond reading at the word level and to gain greater fluency in reading. Building these activities into an existing reading class can increase the reading rates of our learners. This will allow readers to read more with greater understanding, thereby leading to amplified language proficiency.
The reading-rate activities should be especially used in language reading class to increase reading rates of students. These activities are based on reading-rate development theories and practice in first and second language reading (Anderson 1983; Fry 1975; Harris 1966; Samuels 1979; Spargo and Williston 1980). The activities do not need specially developed texts or any complicated equipment; therefore, they can be implemented by classroom teachers using class texts or materials. Moreover, the activities are short and can fill small periods of time. A major purpose of these activities is that they make the reader aware of the importance of reading rates not at the cost of reading comprehension but in conjunction with comprehension. Students find these activities worthwhile and see measurable progress in their reading rates as a result of these activities (Coady and Anderson 1993).
In the rate build-up activity, students have 60 seconds to read as much material as they can. They are then given an additional 60 seconds to read once more from the beginning of the text. They shall read more material during the second 60 -second period than in the first. This drill is repeated a third and fourth time in a row. The purpose of this activity is to reread old material quickly, shifting into the new. As students eyes move quickly over the old material, children actually learn how to process the material more rapidly.
The exercise does not really emphasize moving the eyes quickly; instead, the material should be processed and comprehended by students more efficiently. (Wallace, 46) As students take participation in this rate building activity, they learn that indeed they can increase their reading rates significantly. The repeated reading activity develops reading rates as students read a short passage over and over again until they achieve needed levels of reading speed and comprehension. For example, students may try to read a 100 -word paragraph four times in two minutes. The criterion levels may vary from class to class, but reasonable goals to work toward are criterion levels of 200 words per minute at 70 percent comprehension.
Results of a repeated reading study with native English speakers showed that as the student continued to use this technique, the initial speed of reading each new selection was faster than the initial speed on the previous selection. (Hedge, 126) In addition, the number of re-readings required to reach the criterion reading speed decreased as the student continued the technique (Samuels 1979: 404). As learners do repeated reading exercises in class, they come to realize how this activity can improve their reading comprehension. They understand more when reading something twice at a faster reading rate than when reading it slowly only one time. This activity helps to empower second language readers and strengthens their meta cognitive awareness of the merit of faster reading rates. (Wallace, 53) Moreover, students compete to read faster and they are aware of the importance of fast reading skills. The class-paced reading activity allows the class to set a goal for a minimal reading rate. Involving the learners in determining this minimal reading rate goal incorporates principles of student-centered education.
Once the class establishes the goal, students calculate the approximate number of words per page of the material being read and conclude how many pages need to be read in one minute in order to achieve the class goal. For example, if the class goal is to read 200 words per minute (wpm) and the material being read has approximately 100 words per page, the class would be expected to read one page every 30 seconds. As each 30 -second period elapses, the teacher tells the class to move to the next page. Students are encouraged to keep up with the established class goal. Of course, those who read faster than 200 wpm are not expected to slow down their reading rates. As long as they are ahead of the designated page, they continue to read.
For those readers who cannot keep up at the designated pace, continued reading-rate practice is highly recommended. There is absolutely no doubt that in-class reading activities improve students fluency and accuracy in speaking and pronunciation, besides they develop listening comprehension skills. Students listen to conversational and academic English on different subjects and practice speaking through reading, interacting with classmates in small group discussions, participating in role-plays, and oral presentations. Especially language reading assignments reinforce classroom activities.
Through ongoing assessment using running records, individual conferences, and observations of students reading, student progress is carefully observed and supported by teachers. Teachers often do not have opportunity to meet with every child every day in a guided reading group. Nevertheless, other teaching methods are available. Classroom reading activities are very useful, because they allow students to grasp new material rapidly; however, it is still important for teachers to assist children needing the most reading support daily. Bibliography: Hedge, T. 1985.
Using Readers in Language Teaching. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Wallace, C. 1992. Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press Rohrkemper, M.
M. (1989) Selfregulated learning and academic achievement: A Vygotskian view. In B. J Zimmerman & D. H.
Schunk (Eds. ), Selfregulated learning and academic achievement: Theory, research and practice. New York: Springer Verlag. Rohrkemper, M. M. & Corn, L. (1988) Success and failure on classroom tasks: Adaptive learning and classroom teaching.
Elementary School Journal, 88 (3), Coady, J. and N. Anderson. 1993. The relationship between comprehension and reading rate.
Paper presented at the meeting of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Atlanta, GA. Anderson, N. 1983. Rapid reading in the ESL classroom. Paper presented at the meeting of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Toronto, Canada.
Fry, E. 1975. Reading drills for speed and comprehension (2 nd ed. ). Providence, RI: Jamestown Publishers. Barnett, M. 1989.
More than Meets the Eye: Foreign Language Reading Theory in Practice. Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice Hall Regents. Duckworth. E. (1987). The having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning.
New York: Teachers College Press. Weber, R. 1991. Linguistic diversity and reading in an American society. In Handbook of reading research, Vol. 2. eds.
R. Barr, M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, and D. Pearson. New York: Longman.
Free research essays on topics related to: reading comprehension, language proficiency, reading skills, classroom activities, academic achievement
Research essay sample on Reading Comprehension Academic Achievement
