1 A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE READING ACTIVITIES IN THE APPROVED INTERMEDIATE COURSEBOOKS By Mihaela Ochiana 2 CONTENTS 1.INTRODUCTION 2.TESTING READING..…………………………………………………..3 2.1. Reading difficulties …………………………………………………......5 2.2. Preparing reading comprehension tests ………………………………...7 2.3. Types of reading tests …………………………………………………..8 3.A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE READING ACTIVITIES IN THE APPROVED INTERMEDIATE COURSEBOOKS 3.1.Which textbook? ……………………………………………………16 3.2. Teaching receptive skills with reading strategies in different course books……………………………………………..........19 3.3. Teaching Productive Skills with Reading Strategies in Different Coursebooks ………………………………………………….30 3.4. Extensive Reading ………………………………………………….35 3.5. Summative Evaluation on Reading ………………………………..38 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………...41 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………….43 3 1.INTRODUCTION This book constitutes the practical component of the theses required for obtaining Teaching Degree Level 1 and is an analysis of some of the coursebooks in use at the intermediate level which are approved by MECI. The criteria used for comparing the benefits and the drawbacks of the five textbooks concern only the reading skills. In this way we hope to help other teachers too, in choosing the right coursebook according to their expectancies related to teaching reading to other teenage intermediate level students. 2.TESTING READING Students’ work is assessed for two major reasons: to assign a grad, thus evaluating the individual student’s level of success or failure and to provide formative feedback, both to the students and to the teacher. Both are important and necessary elements of the teaching process. Good assessment means continually monitoring students’ performance by seeing what students know or can do while learning. The first step in assessing is evaluation for diagnosis. At the beginning of a course or of a part of a course, it is necessary to assess what the students already know about what is to be learned. For the types of classes we teach – large and mixed ability intermediate classes – the step of pre-testing is a primordial condition for successful teaching. A pretest can help the teacher know the strengths and weaknesses of students and can suggest ways to change learning activities. Diagnostic tests represent the link between teaching and testing. In fact, Hughes says that ‘the proper relationship between teaching and testing is surely that of According to their purposes, tests are of different types. Besides the diagnostic test, Hughes identified the following types of tests: 1 Hugues, Arthur (1991): Testing for Language Teachers, Cambridge University Press, p 2 4 1. Proficiency tests – meant to measure students’ ability without relying on a certain segment of the course, or on any other training; 2. Achievement tests – meant to assess performance on certain language courses. These tests can be final, when being performed at the end of a learning period, or progress tests, when being performed during a certain learning interval in order to measure students’ progress in a certain field. 3. Placement tests, meant to provide information which will help to place students at the stage of the teaching programme most appropriate to their abilities. Tests are used to gather information for assessment. The qualities of the information obtained are what matters most in performing fair assessment. In order to be good, a test must be valid and reliable. A test is valid if it measures what is intended to measure, if it reflects the goals of the course and it is reliable if it produces similar results for the same student across time and circumstances. The degree of reliability can increase if the teacher gives clear instructions and communicates the objectives of the test to the students. Another important quality of a test administered to a large class is that of being heterogeneous. This means that weaker students must be able to do most of the test, while better students have the chance to prove what they know. Penny Ur refers to the complexity of a test: ‘testing is one acceptable way of raising short-term motivation to learn specific material, but that if it is used as such very often, and as the main source of pressure to learn, then there may be long-term negative results. Both teachers and students may cease to seek and find enjoyment or satisfaction in the learning itself, or to see the goal of knowing the language as intrinsically valuable: the whole teaching-learning process is in danger of being devalued, of being seen merely as a means to get good 2 Ur, Penny (1997): A Course in Language Teaching (Trainee book), Cambridge University Press, p 37 5 2.1. Reading Difficulties When teaching to mixed ability classes, the students should be encouraged particularly to manage without understanding every word while the tasks should encourage selective, intelligent reading. It is the task of the teacher to adapt texts and tasks to his class, purpose and the level of the students so as to make them participate and involve in the reading activities. It is nor rarely that some students finish reading the assigned text and start doing something else, or compel the teacher to call on them to answer while others may still be reading. The slower readers start to panic and feel inferior, knowing that out of the reading texts they will not have time to complete them, which is not pleasant for the atmosphere in the class. Thus the gap between the few best students and the silent majority widens steadily, even though the teacher is setting the right sort of tasks to train all the students in the reading process. Generally, students are slow in reading because they try to understand more words than it is necessary in dictionaries. They do not try to guess the meaning of difficult words from context and thus they cannot adjust their reading speed. Good readers do not read word by word and a good reader makes fewer eye movements than a poor one because his eyes take in several words at a time. The poor reader does not know how to chunk the text into sense units, each consisting of several words and each taken in by one fixation of his eyes. Other faulty reading habits are transferred from the native language, as if the reader is a poor one in his native language he cannot read efficiently in the foreign one. Other readers do not completely eliminate vocalization either sub-vocally or mentally and the rate of reading is slower than that of thinking. Other criticized reading habits refer to finger pointing, as it slows down reading if the finger points word by word, and regressive eye movement, when the eyes move back to check previous words instead of sweeping steadily forward. There are more factors which affect the students’ ability to learn to read English as a foreign language: • conceptual development based on external and internal stimuli; • experiential background; • language competency. 6 Many of the texts can be culturally oriented, thus making it difficult for an EFL student to arrive at the accurate meaning. The reader may not be familiar with certain social, geographic, economic and linguistic realities and wrong meanings or shades of meaning result in distorted understanding or no understanding at all. Thus reading a foreign language requires the reader to have adequate language competency and experience. One possible drawback of the teacher facing such situations is that he may be tempted to give the same importance to the oral work generated by reading as to the reading itself. Many teachers insist simultaneously on both the content of the students’ answers and their linguistic correctness. One cannot stress correctness without inhibiting fluency and the students in large classes whose spoken English is weak will be intimidated by giving oral answers to reading comprehension tasks, even if they have the right answers. However, if the teacher’s objective is to develop the skills involved in text comprehension, then his evaluation of the answers should focus only on their content. In order to acquire good reading habits a lot of practice with the texts is necessary. A text that is linguistically difficult for a student is unlikely to be suitable for the development of most reading skills. If it is loaded with new vocabulary and complex structures, it is probable that the student will resort to translation, which not only slows down the reading speed but also interposes the native language instead of letting the foreign language speak directly for itself. Jim provides some ways of encouraging students with poor results in reading comprehension. He suggests the setting up of competitions meant to encourage students to read faster. In this case, the task may be to scan the reading by a certain deadline in order to check the validity of certain statements. The drawback of this activity would be that faster readers always win. That is why the teacher offers another activity that might help unknown words from context. He suggests the technique of adapting the same list of comprehension questions to the levels of the students by making them easier or harder. The tasks below go from easiest to hardest: 3 Roth, Jim (1996): ‘Adapting Readings to Encourage Slow Readers’, in English Teaching Forum, vol 34, Nr 1, January 1996 7 a) the reading comprehension questions parallel the order in which the answers are revealed in the text; b) questions are scrambled so that the answers do not come in the same order as they are revealed in the text; c) the reader is given a list of comprehensive questions and some of them cannot be answered directly from the assigned text. 2.2.Preparing Reading Comprehension Tests When we are preparing these assessments, we may go through some of the following: • ensure that we select an appropriate text; • make sure that the language used in the text is suitably pitched to our students' proficiency; • carefully scrutinise the text to ensure that the information in each paragraph is tested. However, some teachers may not be aware that the comprehension questions they formulate only test students' ability to understand and recall ideas and information directly stated in the given text. It is indeed unfortunate if comprehension assessments do not go beyond this level of comprehension. Teachers need to be aware that there are actually three main levels or strands of comprehension--literal, interpretive and critical comprehension. • The first level, literal comprehension, is the most obvious. Comprehension at this level involves surface meanings. At this level, teachers can ask students to find information and ideas that are explicitly stated in the text. In addition, it is also appropriate to test vocabulary. • The second level or strand is interpretive or referential comprehension. At this level, students go beyond what is said and read for deeper meanings. They must be able to read critically and analyse carefully what they have read. Students need to be able to see relationships among ideas, for example how ideas go together 8 and also see the implied meanings of these ideas. It is also obvious that before our students can do this, they have to first understand the ideas that are stated (literal comprehension). Interpretive or referential comprehension includes thinking processes such as drawing conclusions, making generalizations and predicting outcomes. At this level, teachers can ask more challenging questions such as asking students to do the following: o Re-arrange the ideas or topics discussed in the text; o Explain the author's purpose of writing the text; o Summarize the main idea when this is not explicitly stated in the text; o Select conclusions which can be deduced from the text they have read. • Finally, the third level of comprehension is critical reading whereby ideas and information are evaluated. Critical evaluation occurs only after our students have understood the ideas and information that the writer has presented. At this level, students can be tested on the following skills: o The ability to differentiate between facts and opinions; o The ability to recognize persuasive statements; o The ability to judge the accuracy of the information given in the text. Dividing comprehension into literal, referential and critical strands is only intended as a guide for teachers when preparing reading assessments. Studies have shown that teachers tend to ask their students mainly literal comprehension questions. They need to be aware that there is more to reading than just the basic skills of reading and recalling information. 2.3. Types of Reading Tests The most common use of assessment involves the written test administered at a given intervals throughout the course. Such examinations usually follow either an open- response or limited-response format. First of all, the teacher should include more types of all, the teacher should include more types of items, not just open-ended or limited response exercises. He should test what students expect to be tested on. The teacher should also avoid items that depend on correctly answering other items, for the weak students not to be exposed to total failure. The ordering of items is also important. Easy 9 tasks placed before difficult ones usually generate a high degree of self-confidence. Last, but not least, clear instructions are an essential condition for reliable tests. There is a multitude of items which can be used in written tests, most of them following the same procedures described in the previous chapter. First of all there is the distinction between limited and open-ended items. Designing open-ended items (which require students to formulate their own answers) is much easier than coming up with limited-choice items; but a test consisting only of open-ended questions will take much longer to grade and will imply more teacher subjectivity. Open-ended items can allow students to demonstrate their understanding more extensively, they can prove far more opportunity for creative thinking than limited-choice and they can reduce cheating, which makes them preferable for testing large classes. However, limited-choice items have the advantage of allowing faster feedback, though they reveal less about students’ strengths and weaknesses. Different types of cloze tests provide both the teacher and the students, information about the reading skills they have acquired. There are important differences between using cloze for teaching and using it for testing. One key difference is that in testing, particularly with standardized tests, a good item is one that only 50% of the students answer correctly. Often, if there are a lot of high scores on a test, the test is considered a poor one. However, in teaching we want to build student’s confidence and not to see how much they know. Instead, we want to help them learn more, therefore we may want to design exercises in which students get most of the answers right. And the cloze test can be fun, like solving a puzzle, but a puzzle is not much fun if the player cannot put most of the pieces together. To help students feel more confident about their reading ability the teacher can design cloze exercises with extra clues in them. The standard cloze procedure uses single blanks of equal length for each deleted word. Some ways to provide extra clues are true- false cloze, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, using letter blanks, and providing the first letter of the deleted words. Another advantage of adding extra clues, in addition to increasing the students’ success, is that it makes the teacher’s job easier. Students often answer cloze passages with words that are not the words from the original text but which are nevertheless acceptable in the context. The problem is deciding which answers are acceptable and Next >