X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018

To begin with, we should note what is called reading comprehension. To put it in a nutshell – it is understanding of the text being read. It means being able to extract from it as much required information as possible. For example, we may apply different reading strategies when we look at a notice board to looking for an advertisement for a particular type of flat and when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal. Though locating the relevant advertisement on the board and understanding the new information contained in the article shows that the reading purpose in each case has been successful fulfilled. In the first case, a skillful reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he or she needs. In the second case, it is not enough to understand the gist of the text and more detailed comprehension is required.

For this reason one needs to consider the following ideas. What, why and how do we read?

The first question- what do people read? It is not very difficult to guess that the answer is in the world which surrounds us: we can read anything which is written, but if we divide it into text-types, we will get a list like this:

1) Novels, short stories, tales, other literary texts and passages (essays, diaries, anecdotes, biographies); 2) Plays; 3) Poems, limericks, nursery rhymes; 4) Letters, postcards, telegrams, notes;5) Newspapers and magazines (headlines, articles, editorials, letters to the editor, stop press, classified ads, weather forecasts, radio/ TV/theatre programmes); 6) Specialized articles, reports, reviews, essays, business letters, summaries, precis, accounts, pamphlets (political and other); 7) Handbooks, textbooks, guidebooks; 8) Recipes; 9) Advertisements, travel brochures, catalogues; 10) Puzzles, problems, rules for games; 11) Instructions (warnings), directions (How to use…), notices, rules and regulations, posters, signs (road signs), forms (application forms, landing cards), graffiti, menus, price lists, tickets; 12) Comics strips, cartoons, legends ( of maps, pictures); 13) Statistics, diagrams, flow / pie charts, time-tables, maps;telephone directories, dictionaries, phrasebooks.

The second question – why do we read? The answer for it is much shorter. We can rear either for pleasure or for information.

The third question – how do we read? One distinguishes at least four main ways for reading:

Skimming reading : quickly running one’s eyes over a text to get the gist of it

Scanning reading: quickly going through a text to find a particular piece of information

Extensive reading: reading longer texts, usually for one’s own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, it involves global understanding

Intensive reading: reading shorter texts, to extract specific information. This is more an accuracy activity which involves reading for detail

Here one should note that the above mentioned ways of reading can’t be called mutually exclusive. For example, people often skim through a passage to see what it is about before deciding whether it is worth scanning a particular paragraph for the information they need.

Some experts also distinguish some more ways of reading - according to the given classification or to another one.

Reading involves a variety of skills. The main of them are listed by John Munby in his “Communicative Syllabus Design”:

Recognizing the script of a language

Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items

Understanding explicitly stated information

Understanding information when not explicitly stated

Understanding conceptual meaning

Understanding the communicative value (function) of sentences and utterances

Understanding relations within the sentence

Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices

Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices

Interpreting text by going outside it

Recognizing indicators in discourse

Identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse

Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details

Extracting salient points from a text

Basic reference skills

Skimming

Scanning to locate specifically required information

Transcoding information to diagrammatic display

Now we shall discuss the reasons for students to read authentic texts.

The first reason. It may seem paradoxically, but a simplified text may be even more difficult to read, then the original one because the system of references, repetition and redundancy as well as the discourse indicators one relies on when reading are often removed or significantly altered. Some difficult words or structures may be replaced, the passage rewritten to make its rhetorical organization more explicit, a “simplified account” ( conveying the information in one’s own words) may be given.

The second reason. Getting the students accustomed to reading authentic texts from the very beginning does not necessarily mean a much more difficult task on their part. The difficulty of reading exercise depends on the activity which is required of the students rather than on the text itself.

The third reason. Authenticity means than nothing of the original text is changed and also that its presentation and layout are retained. By standardizing the presentation of texts in a textbook, one not only reduces the interest and motivation, but one actually increases difficulty for the students. One should at least try to keep the text as authentic as possible in order to help the student anticipate meaning by using juxtaposition and non-linguistic clues.

Bibliography:

Developing Reading. Skills. F. Grellet. ©Cambridge University Press

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