Reading Comprehension Our long term goal is to have students who do not stop reading when the reading class is over

Top-down reading instruction Reading begins with reader background knowledge of people, places, events, and activities Comprehension Top-down reading instruction

Bottom-up reading instruction Comprehension Knowledge of individual sounds, letters, and words Bottom-up reading instruction

Birch (2007) Hypothetical Model of the Reading Process (p. 3) Processing Strategies Knowledge Base Cognitive Processing Strategies Inferencing Predicting Problem-solving Constructing meaning World Knowledge People Places Events Activities TEXT Language Processing Strategies Chunking into phrases Accessing word meaning Word identification Letter recognition Language Knowledge Sentences Phrases Words Letters Sounds Birch (2007) Hypothetical Model of the Reading Process (p. 3)

Pre-reading or appetizer What are the main goals of pre-reading? How can we achieve these goals?

Suggested Strategies/ techniques Main Purpose/s Suggested Strategies/ techniques To activate background knowledge (both world an word knowledge) brainstorming through concept/mind maps To motivate the Ss or whet their appetites A short role play or pantomime related to the theme of the lesson Watching a related movie Showing some pictures To Set the context (i.e. Where and when is the listening occurring? who is talking to whom and about what?) Drawing students’ attention toward the picture or title of the lesson Tell your students what they are going to read and what the objective of the task is Note that Impact Page, Get Ready, and New Words and Expressions also serve the functions of pre-reading. Pre-teaching some of the key forms (i.e., words, phrases etc.) Researching (i.e., looking up a word in a dictionary, surfing the net etc.) prediction: Getting the students to predict the events in the text.

A mind map where Endangered animals names How who

Showing a related movie Worksheet Which animal are they talking about? Where does the animal live? How many of them are alive now? What does Ms. Ebtekat say? What does the ranger say about the animal?

While-reading or the main dish What are the main objectives of while listening? How can we achieve these objectives?

Suggested Strategies/ techniques Main Purpose/s Suggested Strategies/ techniques 1. To expose students to comprehensible input Get the students’ to transform the text into a list, flowchart, table, etc.   2. Comprehension offers opportunities for students to extract and construct meaning through interaction and involvement with written language Pair/Group work Running and reading Jigsaw reading 3. to contextualize target words and grammar of the lesson; also, previous forms are recycled. Divide the class into group; some should formulate questions, while the others should answer them.

A mind map to be completed

Post-reading or dessert What are the main goals of post-reading? How can we meet the objectives?

Main Purpose/s Suggested Strategies/ techniques To checking students’ comprehension Asking different types of questions such display, inference and opinion To focus on form (to draw students’ attention to some forms, especially those related to the theme of the lesson) For example, The teacher ask the students to find the words or phrases related to the topic/theme of the lesson. Evaluation (i.e., the students learn about their strength and weaknesses during listening. Also, the teacher can identify students’ listening problems) The teacher can ask students to talk/write about the problems they had during listening (problems with words, structure, accent, pronunciation, background knowledge, rate of speech) (This objective can be sought either through English or Persian.) To enhance learners awareness of helpful reading strategies Group/pair work: students share the ways or strategies they used to induce the gist of the lesson (e.g., paying attention to key words) Whole class: The teacher can collect the strategies the students share in group work and then complement them. (Refer to TG for a nice list of strategies) Summarizing texts