Málfríður - 15.11.1988, Side 8

Jacqueline Friðriksdóttir:
Is reading caught and
not taught?
Jacqueline Friðriksdóttir hefur
verið námsstjóri í ensku síðan
1973. Hún lauk prófí í uppeldis-
og kennslufræðum frá Leeds
University 1960 og MA prófí í
enskri tungu og málvísindum frá
Lancaster University 1982.
Jacqueline kenndi á árunum
1960-1973 í menntaskólum í
Englandi og á Islandi, í háskóla í
Þýskalandi og tungumálaskóla á
íslandi. Frá 1973 hefur hún, auk
þess að gegna embætti náms-
stjóra, verið kennari við Æf-
inga- og tilraunaskóla Kennara-
háskóla íslands, Kennarahá-
skóla íslands og Háskóla íslands.
At all levels of the educational
system, teachers are aware that
there is something wrong with their
students’ reading strategies not only
in the foreign language but in the
mother tongue as well. Rightly so,
they complain that the students are
only looking at individual words,
not sentences, nor paragraphs, let
alone the whole text. They complain
bitterly that their students are not
capable of expressing opinions or
passing judgements on the ideas ex-
pressed by the writer. They are not
able to comment on the tone of the
text nor the style of the writer. They
have difficulty in picking out what is
relevant etc. The students are equal-
ly frustrated by having to spend
hours looking up words in a diction-
ary and at the end of all their effort
not being able to complete the task
at hand to the satisfaction of the
teacher, or what is worse, to their
own satisfaction. In this paper I in-
tend to examine some of the reasons
why so many of our students read
badly and to point out some tech-
niques which might help to improve
the situation.
Reading, in the foreign language,
has mainly been at the sentence lev-
el and with units smaller than a sen-
tence. At least up to recently, tech-
niques to develop overall under-
standing of the text, techniques to
improve reading speed and to devel-
op students’ skill of inference have
not been practised. Of course a de-
tailed understanding of the text is
often necessary, but understanding
the text in detail does not mean that
one begins with the details. Trans-
lation, though the ultimate test of a
reader’s understanding, does very
little and is often harmful in devel-
oping learners’ reading skills. What-
ever the reason for reading a text,
one should always begin by looking
at the text as a whole even if one
intends to study the text intensively.
When the students have understood
the gist of a text they can then move
to a more detailed understanding of
it.
To become a successful reader
one has got to have confidence in
one’s ability to read a foreign lan-
guage. It is, therefore, essential that
teachers create tasks which prove to
the students that they can under-
stand the gist of the text even though
they do not understand every word.
The text can be presented to the stu-
dents with the difficult nonessential
vocabulary or phrases blanked out.
Having worked on several texts
treated like this the students soon
learn to realize that not all words
need to be understood in order to
understand the gist of the text. It is
also essential that the teacher dem-
onstrates to students that the mean-
ing of unknown essential vocabulary
can often be worked out from con-
text. Blanking out words in a text,
whose meaning can be worked out
from context, proves to students
that not all unknown vocabulary
needs to be looked up in the diction-
ary.
Reading in the classroom has of-
ten very little to do with the authen-
tic reasons for reading, namely get-
ting something out of the writing:
facts, ideas or enjoyment, i.e. un-
derstanding the message that the
writer has expressed. The typical
text in a foreign language course
book is one that helps the teacher to
present or practise specific linguistic
items, vocabulary, structures and so
on. Of course, language improve-
ment is the central purpose of the
language learner, however, texts,
which have been designed specifi-
cally for language training, have ser-
ious limitations as materials for
practising the skill of reading. These
texts are often contrived and distort-
ed to contain certain language
items; they reflect the spoken rather
than written usage and are often
overexplicit. In fact some texts need
not be read at all, the information is
often provided by the illustrations,
and there is certainly no room for
inference if they deal with subjects
that the students know about. Stu-
dents cannot read these texts for in-
formation nor react to them and as
reading materials they are boring.
These characteristics of texts for the
teaching of foreign languages are
particularly found in textbooks at
the beginner’s stage of language
learning, and unfortunately they are
also to be found at other stages of
language learning. One needs to be
aware of this in order to find other
texts to supplement the course book
for the purpose of teaching reading.
In selecting suitable texts for the
reading lesson one has to consider
three points: the text must be at the
right level of difficulty, the content
must be of interest to the students,
and it must be possible to exploit the
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