UNIT 5 READING

Every language in the world is involved by skills that help to its learners to get the reception and production of that language. English language is not the exception. In English language we may find four skills that help us to learn it, two of them are focused to receive the language and two of them are focused to produce the language. The receptive skills are Listening and Reading, and the productive skills are Speaking and Writing. Since it is already mentioned that Reading is a receptive skill, it means that this skill involves to respond to the language, in this case, to respond to a written text by making sense of it. Adrian Tennant mentioned in his article Reading matters: What is Reading? (2016) that Reading consists in a recognition of words, individual letters, and what they mean in a text to an individual person. In other words, Reading is a synonim of recognition according this author. In the definition that B. D. Smith published in his book Breaking through college reading (1995) mentioned the Reading skill as an interactive process where the prior knowledge that the reader has about the world around him interacts with the message that is being conveyed, and it can be in a direct or indirect way. 

Reading is, as it is mentioned, a process and recognition. However at the moment to learn a new language, teacher should teach some vocabulary related to what students will read about. In this case teacher must use some strategies like for example Pre-teach Vocabulary, Brainstorming, Lead-in, Predicting, etc. In my case as teacher, something that has helped me to make my students understand what they read is to provide them articles or dialogues with pictures related, and also to pre-teach some vocabulary of words that I think they will find difficult. For me as teacher, Reading is the language skill that must be taught first at the moment to learn a second or foreign language, but as teacher I must also teach them vocabulary that will be useful for them. 

References:

Tennant, A (2016) Reading matters: What is Reading?

Smith, B. D. (1995) Breaking through college Reading.

Payne J. A. (1982) A study of comprehension of verb-particle combinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/what-reading