3.1.3 Advanced reading skills
Once your students have built up confidence with the basics of reading, your next step is to help them develop proficiency in more advanced reading skills.
Summarizing: Summarizing is an extremely important skill because it helps your students bridge the gap between understanding the words they are reading and understanding the meaning that those words are trying to convey. The skill of summarizing requires students to understand enough of what they have read to explain what the text is about in their own words. To help your students learn how to do this, you may want to layer your summary instruction, having them read text in English but allowing them to summarize it in their native language. Eventually, though, you should move on to having the students summarize in English. Scaffolding your instruction like this will definitely help your students ease into true understanding of English texts.
Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details: While summarizing usually requires a student to understand the main idea of a text, it is still important to discuss this separately. Once students have summarized the text, you can ask questions that get to the main idea, for example, “What is the point that the writer is trying to make?” Such questions allow students to move from summarizing the entire text to pinpointing what is important. The next step can be to ask follow-up questions, such as “How do you know that is the point the writer is trying to make?” That requires a strong understanding of not only the overall meaning of the words in a text but also how the different ideas in a text relate to one another.
Sequencing: Sequencing asks students to take a step beyond summarizing the text. Whereas summarizing the text concerns itself with simply understanding what happened, sequencing requires students to label, categorize, and compartmentalize what happens in the text. Students look at textual features to try to identify the important aspects of the text, for example, the setting, the sequence of events, and the larger context of the text, identifying how all of the parts of the text fit within the whole.
Relating background knowledge: It is always helpful when working with students who are trying to learn a new language that you relate what they are learning to their background knowledge. There are a couple of different ways that you can do this. As we mentioned earlier, you can use cognates and your students’ native phonemes to help them understand English root words and sounds. Another way is to help your students connect thematically to the text, asking them to try to relate what is going on in the text to personal experiences they have had. While this won’t necessarily directly help them learn the language, it will help them make a stronger connection with it and therefore make it more accessible.
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