Developing Reading Activities Essays

Developing Reading Activities Essays Developing Reading Activities Essay Developing Reading Activities Essay Reading is an activity which is interactive rather than passive. In a classroom set up it is usually directed by the teachers. Scholars such as Walker (2009) contend that of all the components of reading instruction, comprehension is the most difficult to teach. This is why different methods have been implored to make reading much more meaningful. The most common method is the ‘three phase approach’ which includes pre reading, while reading and after reading. The effectiveness of this approach in teaching comprehension to a ZJC class is to be examined in this write up. Most scholars have defined effectiveness as the impact as to which something is successful in producing the desired result. In this case the impact of the three phase approach in teaching comprehension is being examined. Reading has been defined by Goodman (1971) as a psycholinguistic guessing game in which the reader reconstructs, as well as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphi c display. Pre reading also known as the ‘before, warm up or into’, reading requires the teacher to provide background to the comprehension understudy in the classroom. Cheng (2000) articulates that previewing a text or comprehension with students arouses their interests. In a mixed ability class it is important for the teacher to give brief background about the author of that passage himself or ask pupils to state their previous knowledge about the author. However there is a danger in eliciting information about the author from the pupils themselves because some of them may not be knowing anything about the author. This is why Hayes and Tierney (1982) support that presenting the background knowledge related to the topic to be learned assists readers or learners in learning and understanding the text better. Therefore it is important for a teacher to give adequate information about the author of the passage so that both the strong and weak pupils can understand