SAMPLE RESPONSE PAPER (ACADEMIC READING)

Reading is one of the most important skills that must be taught to foreign language learners because it is the main factor for the other skills such as writing, speaking and listening. It has a very important role in our ordinary and academic lives. In many countries, people learn English to read books in English for their professions. The situation is same in most universities in Turkey. The language that is used in class is English and the students in these universities have to be good readers in order to be successful.

With this importance of reading skills, the ESL/EFL teachers shoulder one more responsibility which is called teaching reading skills. Teachers must be able to teach their students to read effectively. In my opinion, the number of reading lessons should be increased in schools. There must be academic reading lessons in high schools and the students must be ready to read academic content in English when they attend university. Nevertheless, ESL/EFL learners need to have control of basic patterns of the language in order to learn new items. Academic reading is a cover term for a variety of these patterns that bring together advance reading, study skills, vocabulary building, and even writing activities such as note taking, summarizing, and underlining. In this way, we can consider it as a huge process shaped by the readers according to their needs and purposes.

There are some models of the process of reading, which are bottom-up reading, top-down reading, and interactive model. Bottom-up reading is assumed to be outdated, an older model in which matching of the sounds and letters takes place. It starts with the smallest unit single letters then builds up phrases and words. Some students who rely on bottom-up processing fail to predict the main idea of the text because these students focus on the detail and cannot understand the text completely. I think, trying to understand every units of text gets us away from the importance of getting the main idea. The other model is top-down reading. It states that people don’t separate letters one by one but match their past experiences and background knowledge with the information in the text. The last model is interactive model which contains both bottom-up and top-down processes together. I think interactive model is much more useful contrary to the other two models.

It is inevitable for readers to match their background knowledge with the information in the text they are reading. After reading one sentence, a reader predicts the other one and it proceeds. Moreover, in order to understand the meaning of the sentence, a person first must understand the word. Words are made of sounds and the brain pieces these sounds together to make words and sentences. In some schools, teachers want students to bring their English-Turkish dictionaries to the reading class. The teacher hands out a reading texts and makes students translate it into Turkish word-by-word. Students can translate the text but they don’t understand the passage, and this makes reading a boring activity for students. On the other hand, in some reading classes, after handing out a reading passage, the teacher wants students to read it quickly and then asks questions about the text. But the meaning of the text is not clear because reading quickly missing the details is not an effective way.

Because the importance of reading skill itself is not understood, teachers use reading as a vehicle while teaching grammar and vocabulary rather than a skill. But, reading skill is an important element of ESL/EFL instruction. Surely, to understand the passage, students must know the use of grammatical structures and they must know necessary vocabulary. So, reading courses should provide grammar and vocabulary teaching in special passages. We cannot work on these three skills apart from each other. In schools, there are lessons such as reading, grammar and listening that are taught independently. But, in my opinion, we can teach grammar in reading lesson. And, if there are no well-developed vocabularies, the process of reading will recrudesce. There is such a mutual relationship between reading and vocabulary that one is not possible without the other one. We should not ignore the necessity of vocabulary teaching and new vocabularies.

Another aspect of reading is cultural differences between readers. Readers or learners come from different cultural backgrounds and they have different beliefs and thoughts which reflect their own living and thinking. These differences reflect to their intention of reading. Teachers must take into consideration these differences. The teacher should use the authentic material which is appropriate for the learners’ culture. If the text is strange or unfamiliar, the students can be apathetic and reluctant to read the text. So, we need to be careful for that.

Despite the fact that the reading is mostly dependent on individual effort, we can’t ignore the role of teacher. Teacher’s role has significant place in terms of being a preceding model to the learner. They are appropriate models for the learners on how good readers behave. Teachers should respect the individual work time on reading and they should provide a silent environment for students. The most important role of teacher shouldn’t be forgotten. The teacher should introduce the topic and warm-up or ice-breaker activities which can be useful a lot to get attention of the learners. In addition to that, attention catching and interesting questions about the reading passage will make a lot of fun and advantage. With these techniques, academic reading job can be associated with the students’ daily lives. Furthermore, teacher is in the role of imparting a positive attitude about the activity of reading. That is, an introduction should take place in reading process by giving the idea that reading is useful for the learners because of new ideas, fantasy and wonderment they can obtain through reading.

For success, purposes must be certain and students must have some purposes to read instead of doing it as a homework. Teachers should make students want to access information. They must motivate students to read and reading must be a vehicle to learn. First, they should make them understand the excitement of reading, then they should provide them a good reading environment. Once, the students want to read to learn, they find it easier and fun. But, when teachers give them a list of books to read in a limited time for better grades, it can be nightmare for them. They must be free to choose the type of the book to have fun while reading so that they can live the book. For example, I don’t like reading a book on a computer because I can’t touch and feel it. As I mentioned before, teachers should teach students to read to learn. While reading, as the phrase goes, students must discuss with the book and the author. They should take notes on the pages. If they have questions about what the author writes, they must put question marks on it and they must look for the answer in other books. When I was in high school, my Turkish teacher was doing all these reading strategies. I saw his book and it was scrabbled. There was no blank page in it. There were question marks near some sentences. And he wrote his own ideas near the sentences. He was writing while reading. He recommended us to do the same while reading to take advantage of the book.

In many lessons, students are given a reading passage and they are asked questions about the text. It may seem a normal lesson but it is not a reading lesson. In reading lesson, teacher must teach how to read effectively and they must be a model for students. It was same when we were in high school. We had ten lessons a week and three of them were reading lessons. But we did not learn how to read effectively to understand the text we read. The teacher was distributing a reading passage, then he was asking questions about it. But he didn’t teach us how to analyze the text. Reading only theories of course is valueless unless we put it into practice. This can be provided by dividing a reading session into 3 stages, which are pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading, then reading task can be more effective.

In pre-reading phase, students are motivated and prepared for the reading passage. The teacher helps students to make predictions about the text. For this, we can use pictures, movies, field trips, role play, values clarification exercise and small discussions. It is a good way to elicit information and enhance the knowledge about subject. Word association tasks provide eliciting from the students’ ideas about the topic of the passage. So the learners do brainstorming about the subject. Also discussions are very important to activate and enhance the students’ knowledge. After everybody said their ideas, we can create a disputation atmosphere in the classroom. Another technique is text surveying or previewing. In this technique, the objective is to give a decision quickly for the structure of the piece and identify the key ideas. In While-reading Phase, teacher should direct the students to the main point. Teachers should ask some questions that help the students understand the specific content and get the structure of the text. The questions which are asked should evaluate three levels of understanding: the eliciting, the implicit and the applied. The first asks the things which are in the text explicitly, the second tasks for information can be inferred, and the third requires relating new ideas to previous knowledge or experiences. There are two sorts of guidance. One of them is “guide-o-rama” which is a series of statements, instructions or questions which indicates what information is important, how a paragraph or section is organized, and what is to be learned. The other guidance is “pattern study guide” which focuses the students’ attention on the ways of paragraph and provides the understanding of relationship among the contexts. The last stage is the post-reading phase which is intended to associate the things which are learned with new information to review the content, and to work on grammar and vocabulary items. We can put the students in pair or small groups to share their knowledge and ideas. In this stage, the students should integrate their knowledge which they have already with the new information. As an activity a writing assignment, debate, role-plays, and project work can be given at the end. But teacher should not use the same exercise types and techniques following the same lesson plan.

In conclusion, the place of the academic reading can’t be ignored in learning foreign language. It is an important part of our lessons as well as in English because the other skills are depend on it. If we guide our students perfectly in reading class, they will like the reading and they will be enthusiastic to read.