What to Do When They Don’t
Understand: Teaching Reading Skills
Candace Cone, Carolyn Fay,
Cynthia Filer
The University of Virginia
For ACTFL 1996
(“Practical Implications
of Recent Research in Reading.” Foreign Language Annals 17, iv
(1984) 285-96.)
1. Preteaching/Preparation Stage: Activates
students’ knowledge about a particular topic or style of text to help them
understand what they read: brainstorming; looking at visuals in a text;
hypothesizing what text might be about based on title.
2. Skimming/Scanning Stages: These are two
distinct processes, but which are interrelated. Skimming activities have
students read to get the main idea of a text, while scanning activities have
students locate specific information in a text. Often skimming can lead right into scanning.
3. Decoding/Intensive Reading Stage: When
students are “learning to read” rather than “reading to learn” it is helpful
for them to do decoding exercises. Students learn to guess the meanings of
unknown words or phrases from the context, but also from the syntax.
Strategies include:
•determining
the grammatical role of aword or phrase
•seeing
if a word or phrase is used elsewhere
in a clearer context or comparaison.
•using
students’ general knowledge or of the specific context of the text to deduce
possible meanings.
4. Comprehension Stage: verfies that
students meet the specific goals of the instructor.
5. Transferable/Integrating Skills: allows
students to apply reading skills to other texts or situations.