TEACHING READING

Nowadays, we have found different ways to teach such as stories, videos, etc. But, I am going to focus on reading stories, because as I see it is one of the best ways to teach different things in an effective way. Children can imagine their own worlds and understand values and the real word in a different way. With these stories, children can be close to the reality. An interesting thing is that we can find many books depend on the age of the student, because of this there is a wide variety.

It is very important knowing that there are four steps when we read a story. These steps are: pre-reading, before reading, while reading and post reading. The pre-reading activities that we can do with children are varied; these can be a domino, a song or something like that. Before reading we have to make some question or do some tasks about the story about their previous knowledge such as sentences: true or false, fill the gaps, discuss the topic before reading it, etc. When we are telling the story (while reading) we can ask some questions about pictures, words, characters, etc., because children have to follow the story and they have to be able to explain some details about it. At the end, when we have finished reading (post reading) the story, we can make comprehension questions or they can make a picture. These kinds of activities will change depend on the age as I said before, since students demand different things because of their level.

Another thing inside this type of teaching, we can find different ways of reading, these types are that the teacher has to read aloud and the students follow it in silence, the students read it silently and the last one is that the students read it aloud in turns. What about real life silent or aloud? There are some advantages and disadvantages. If we focus on reading aloud, we can find some advantages such as the students do an individual reading with the teacher, they can improve the pronunciation and rhyme and if they do it in pairs or in groups, they can help to each other. The disadvantages are for instance that the story will not be interesting for the students, some mistakes can be encouraged and it could be not a good way of using the lesson time.

It is important taking into account to start with texts (emergency literacy). Then we will continue with sentences, then with words and finally with letters. It is interesting that children predicting because these things connect with the real life. We have to show them this aspect.

My strong belief is that as teachers we have to take part in school events related to reading and also writing with children. We have to teach them that reading is important and fun too. Besides we can catch their attention decorating the class with labels (put a label on a table, put on the right places, etc.), posters, messages (in a student´s birthday we can write a card) and reading aloud. We can show them these stories using traditional books, new technogies, etc. Also we can make gestures, use puppets, add voices, etc., to introduce children better in these readings.

 

Besides, we can talk about reading techniques and we will use them depending on what type of thing we want to do in that moment. For example, we can use skimming (reading a text in order to understand the gist), scanning (reading a text quickly in order to obtain specific information), intensive reading (reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks), extensive reading (reading text for enjoyment and to develop general reading skills), predicting, etc. As I said before we can use them depend on the moment. For instance, if we can know what kind of prior knowledge that children have, we will use predicting technique; if we want that they read and understand everything, we will use intensive technique and so on.

The most important thing, it is the age of student as I said before, since we will choose one book or another or a technique or another. If children are babies, a good book will be Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See, because this book stimulating them with pictures and colours. In the case that children are in Infant, there are a lot of books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Rainbow Fish, etc. If children are in Primary, we can use Monkey Puzzle, Room on the Broom, etc. In addition to this, everything depends on whether we teach with books, since these stories have vocabulary, grammar, rhyme, phonetic, etc.

To sum up, I must say that reading is an essential thing in our lives and in our future. We need to learn to read for everything. As teachers, we have to read them or to teach them to read in a proper way. We have to choose a good book for them to teach values, vocabulary, grammar, etc., helping them to develop strategies and show them the importance of the imagination and the real world.