In the era of "knowledge", it seems that reading "strategies" have fallen out of favour. We no longer tend to have regular lessons where pupils select from readers in the Target Language to practise their reading. Was this because the whole idea of reading strategies you can deploy was bogus? Or because there wasn't enough focus on deploying focussed strategies that work?
There certainly seems to be inequality around pupils' confidence in accessing texts in a foreign language. Some seem more "skilled" than others. This suggests that there are skills and strategies that some have learned and others haven't. In this case, we need to find out what those pupils are doing, and work out how to teach other pupils to do it too.
What are we hoping that pupils are doing when they read in a foreign language? In purely linguistic terms, perhaps it is:
- Meeting known words in new contexts
- Seeing how sentences are articulated by high frequency words and inflections of words.
- Engaging in a feedback loop between decoding word by word, and overall meaning.
But each of these contains interesting complexities around the two opposing views of language learning: acquisition through incidental input and communication, versus direct instruction of step by step conceptualisation and deliberate repeated retrieval.
Meeting words in new contexts.
There is an argument that in order to learn a language, we have to use language not just in practice exercises, but in order to comprehend or communicate real information. This strikes me as something of a romantic argument. But even the opposing point of view, based on repeatedly and deliberately tracking how many times learners meet new words, stresses the value of meeting them in different contexts. Perhaps because this is how the brain processes language and builds the complex articulation of the way words can fit together and create meaning.
Seeing how sentences are articulated by high frequency words and inflections of words.
In the past, the accusation leveled at this kind of reading text, was that pupils were finding cognates and guessing from knowledge of the content, and glossing over the high frequency little words. The knowledge approach puts much more emphasis on the high frequency words found in all texts. So although it usually advocates pupils reading sentences which tightly model known language, this approach could actually be compatible with texts to be read for information or pleasure. Because pupils are much more familiar with the little words that hold sentences together. A caveat would be that there is a reason why the focus continually slips away from these words. Learners' attention is inevitably drawn towards words strong on meaning, rather than the nuance of words that articulate sentences but whose own meaning is more slippery.
Engaging in a feedback loop between decoding words and overall meaning.
The direct instruction approach would have us believe that reading consists of parsing known words and known grammar to arrive at meaning in a one way street process. This is clearly not true. The overall understanding of the content, and the interpretation of individual words is held in constant tension. The reader actively makes sense of the text. At all levels. This includes their prior knowledge of the subject matter, their vocabulary knowledge, their grammatical knowledge, and their willingness to hypothesise meaning. And most of all their resilience with a degree of uncertainty and the ability to monitor the strength of the validity of their emerging hypotheses.
So this brings us on to the "skills" and possible strategies to employ. What is it that confident readers can do, that less confident readers could learn to do?
Of course, some pupils will have a firmer grasp of vocabulary than others. And one of the purposes of asking pupils to read in the Target Language, is to encounter those words and to practise retrieving their meaning. Our strategies will need to challenge pupils to do this, while finding ways to make sure it's a learning opportunity for pupils who didn't know the words.
And equally, depending on the text, some pupils will bring greater prior knowledge of the topic than others. We can exploit this by tailoring texts to pupils' interests and knowledge. We need to make sure we use this as a way of engaging with the text, not to allow them to gloss over it!
When it comes to confidence in dealing with uncertainty, hypothesising and bouncing between the overall meaning and the detail of the sentence structure, we need to observe carefully how different learners behave. Often it is confidence that is key. A pupil who fears being told they are wrong, may tend to jump to an answer and give that as their one attempt, before giving up with an "I knew I couldn't do it." It takes a lot more confidence to go through the process of tentatively assigning meaning to words, working out what that would mean for the overall sentence, accounting for all the words and even the inflections, tweaking or revising assumptions depending on whether it all made sense or not.
In Part 2, I will look at specific texts with a series of activities which take pupils through, building up meaning. I will look at to what extent these activities are one-offs which just apply to guiding the pupils through this particular text, and to what extent they could be strategies that a pupil could apply to any text. And whether this means pupils are learning to become better readers.
If you can't wait for Part 2, here's a link to how I tried to achieve exactly this transferability of strategies in the 1990s. It will be interesting to see in Part 2 if I've made any progress!
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