Day 4: Reading Matters

One of the ideas that this article emphasizes is the reading of texts with a focus on deciphering context.  This is one of the strategies that I used in reading first in my L2 and then in my L3 in order to understand information from the texts that I read.  As an L2 reader I always looked for contextual clues that could help me predict the meanings of words that I was not familiar with.  This at times became frustrating, as the article also points out, but as I became a more proficient reader, I developed better skills in predicting meaning from contextual clues.  In my L3, deciphering meaning became easier, as I had wider background knowledge from my L1 and L2 to pull from in order to make links with my L3.  The article offers some good ideas for choosing texts and setting the stage for student learning, such as designing reading tasks that allow the students to infer meaning by making predictions from relevant information and text construction.  However, I would have found it useful if it addressed step by step the issue of how a reading lesson should be structured, what elements it should include (e.g, pre-reading, post-reading, and extension tasks), which tasks are best to help students assimilate textual information, and how to increase student motivation or interest.