Reflection on Teaching Reading

From Alice’s sharing, I learned that “teaching reading is to teaching students how to understand it.” Although I understand this concept, it is difficult for me to put this notion into practice. But, fortunately, Alice provided us some tips or techniques such as the use of “fish bone” or mapping to teach reading comprehension. When completing the figure of “fish bone,” students can construct the meaning of the story or article by analyzing the content. The top-down process of teaching reading is aimed to develop student as active readers, rather than merely listening to the teacher explaining the reading message. Besides the reading materials given, students can complete the fish bone with their own experience and in the following activity write their own stories. The integration of reading and writing skills facilitates students’ development of English proficiency more quickly.

As for group five’s presentation, I can hardly recall all the details. What I remembered is that each student read out one sentence of the article and after that the teacher explained the content of the article. The disadvantage of this way to teach reading is that students only paid attention to the particular sentence they were participate for. This was not the real purpose of reading. I agreed with Alice’s advice that the teacher could give time for students to read the article silently even though they might face some challenge or difficulty in the process of reading. To solve the problem of reading difficulty to certain students, some training of reading strategies is necessary. For example, the teacher can introduce how to skim and scan, how to look for key words, and how to take notes or highlight. I think students will benefit a lot from using these reading strategies.