Reading and Background Knowledge

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En provenance du cours de University of London

Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task Based Approach

147 notes

University of London

Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task Based Approach

147 notes

This course explores ways of teaching reading skills in English as Second and Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) using a task-based approach. You will be introduced to the concept of task and the key principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and learning. TBLT uses communicative tasks as the key unit for creating language learning activities. You will also examine the role of reading in real-life and in second and foreign language teaching and current thinking about the interface between TBLT and second language reading. You will explore how TBLT and teaching second language reading can be successfully integrated in practice through analysing task-based reading materials. The course culminates in creating task-based materials for teaching reading in your own language teaching contexts. After completing the course, you will be able to: 1. Explain the main components and tenets of a task-based approach to teaching language; 2. Explain the main issues involved in teaching reading; 3. Illustrate connections between TBLT approaches and the teaching of reading; 4. Integrate tasks into your own teaching; 5. Identify reading texts that are suitable for the construction of tasks; and 6. Construct reading tasks and sequences for use in your own classroom.

À partir de la leçon

What is Reading and What Does It Involve?

Welcome to module 2! In this module we examine reading from a number of angles. We start by examining the cognitive element of reading. The second angle we examine reading from is reading as a communicative activity, and its links with communicative language teaching. We then look at reading as a strategic activity, and at the links between reading and background knowledge, and look at the way in which background knowledge is needed in order to understand three specific texts. We end by discussing ways of developing reading fluency.

Reading and Background Knowledge8:02

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr Amos Paran
Reader in Second Language Education
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Andrea Révész
Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics
UCL Institute of Education
Dr Myrrh Domingo
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literacies
UCL Institute of Education

[MUSIC]

One area that has received a great deal of attention from teachers and researchers is

the role of background knowledge in reading and in reading comprehension.

Clearly, if you know something about a topic, you're going to understand a text

about this topic more easily than if it is a topic you know nothing about.

I understand texts about choral singing much more easily

than I know texts about football, for example.

Some scholars connect this to the idea of a schema, which Carrell and

Eisterhold call previously acquired knowledge structures.

And which Grabe defines as related sets of knowledge

linked together in an established frame.

The idea is that schemers, or

schemata, are activated with we read, and help us interpret the text.

They are said to help readers make inferences about what they are reading,

and for an example, facilitate summarizing a text.

They are said to help both in the comprehension of information, and

in remembering that information.

I'd like to illustrate this with two examples.

The first one is the text you will see now.

You may wish to pause the video, read the text, decide what it is about, and go on.

You are probably perplexed by this, however if I told you that this

was about doing the laundry, suddenly everything would fall into place.

When participants in an experiment heard this text, but were not told what it was

about, they were confused and did not remember anything about it.

Those participants who were told that this was about washing clothes understood and

were able to remember a great deal.

Clearly, in this case, the schemer helped them organize the input.

Another well known example is the text you will see now.

Again, read this text and think what it is about.

It turns out that people interpret this text differently according to their

previous experience.

Some people interpret this as being about playing cards.

Others interpret this as four friends making music together.

One of them plays the recorder.

Which one did you think of?

These examples suggest that our interpretation of the text is governed not

only by the text itself, but also by our own knowledge of the topic and

the schemata that we were able to use in order to organize

the incoming information.

An interesting study that showed how background knowledge can interfere with

our understanding of a text is the study by Steffensen and Joag-Dev.

They asked two groups of participants to read two texts.

Each text was a letter about a wedding.

One letter was about a typical wedding in the United States, and

the other letter was about a typical Indian wedding.

The two groups who read the letters were 20 participants from India, and

20 participants from the United States.

The participants were given the texts, and after reading each letter,

they were asked to write down what they recalled, what they remembered from it.

Steffensen and Joag-Dev found that each group read the passage about its

own country more quickly and remembered more of it.

What is also interesting, is that each group made many more

distortions in their retelling of the story of the other culture.

So the Indian readers distorted the US letter when they reported it.

And the United States participants distorted the Indian letter

when they reported it.

For example, in the Indian wedding, there was a description of two separate events,

a wedding feast and then a reception.

The US readers collapsed these two events into one.

They did not realize that there was a difference between these two events.

Today, however, the importance of background knowledge is not as emphasized

amongst reading researchers as it was in the past.

There are a number of issues that arise with it.

Firstly, background knowledge is purely theorized and

can fall into different categories.

Graba suggests that it can be subdivided into general knowledge of the world,

cultural knowledge, topical knowledge, and specialist expertise knowledge.

Another important point is that background knowledge interacts with other areas,

such as language proficiency, motivation, and the purpose for reading.

I would also suggest that it's easy to construct a test in such a way

that background knowledge is needed to answer specific questions on the text.

That's why I've always learned the Steffensen and

Joag-Dev study that I referred to earlier.

It looks at the elaborations that readers make and

it allows for each reader's background knowledge to intrude as in when.

But in cases of naturalistic reading,

where a reader is reading a general text rather than a specialist text,

background knowledge is less likely to intrude on comprehension.

And the extent to which it can lead the reader to the wrong conclusion is much

smaller than was thought in the past.

And after all, we don't normally come across texts like the laundry text,

which avoids any specific clue to what the text is about.

And we also don't come across texts like the playing text.

With such a high percentage of words have more than one meaning and

where these meanings belong to two different and very distinct schemata.

So it's not clear what these texts and

what these experiments tell us about normal reading.

What is probably more important in our everyday reading,

is the ability of the reader to monitor their comprehension.

To identify what they haven't understood.

To identify the possible causes of this misunderstanding.

And to take action to counteract or compensate for this.

A good example of this is reported by Steffensen and Joag-dev.

One of the US readers realized that the description of the wedding feast

did not conform to his expectations of such an event

because the wedding feast was held in shifts.

Importantly, this reader did not hold onto his background knowledge of a wedding.

He was unable to make sense of that part of the text and

he indicated this very clearly in his recall protocol.

At this point, I would like you to read three texts and

think whether you can find examples of background knowledge in them.

Think also, whether a reader who did not have this background knowledge

would have difficulty in understanding the text.

The three texts are the Glass Ceiling, which is taken from the Evening Standard.

Flying Like a Bird, which is taken from an in-flight magazine.

And the Oscars should reward talent regardless of color or creed,

taken from The Big Issue.

Make notes about which pieces of background knowledge are referred to

in each text.

And I will talk about my own take on the role of background knowledge in

these texts in the next video.

[MUSIC]

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