ii) Encourage students to respond to the content of a reading text, not just to the language
Of course, it is important to study reading texts for the way they use language, how many paragraphs they contain and how many times they use relative clauses. But the meaning, the message of the text, is much more important. Teachers should help students understand that the main reason to read is for them. The y have to have their own purpose to read and reading must make sense, they have to find ways of doing something about it. They should be encouraged either to reread or to continue reading to gain meaning. But they must realize that the meaning is not in the teacher, but in the interaction between the reader and author. Students should be encouraged to ask themselves repeatedly, “Does this make sense to me?” Students should be encouraged to reject and to be intolerant of reading materials that do not make sense.
iii) Encourage students to guess or predict
Readers’ guesses or predictions are based on the cumulative information and syntactic structure they have been learning as they have been reading. Therefore, their guesses are more often than not appropriate to the materials. Students have to realize that risk taking in reading is appropriate; that using context to decide what words mean is a proficient reading strategy and that they have the language sense to make appropriate guesses which can fit both the grammatical and semantic sense of what they are reading.
iv) Match the task to the topic
Once a decision has been taken about what kind of reading text the students are going to read, teachers need to choose good reading tasks—the right kind of questions and useful puzzles, etc. Asking boring and inappropriate questions can undermine the most interesting text; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and challenging tasks. Working in groups, the English teacher and students take turns asking each other questions following the reading. The teacher may ask, “ What is the significance of the character’s age?” These questions require inferences based on details from the reading text.
Section Two------How to teach writing (Developing correctness in students’ writing)
“Students learn to write by writing, and they learn to write correctly by writing, revising, and proofreading their own work”---with some help or direction from the teacher when it is necessary. They do not learn to write correctly by studying about writing or doing isolated workbook exercises unrelated to their own writing. So, the most important technique a teacher can use to guide students toward grammatically correct writing is to let them write, let them write things related to their own experiences. There is no limit to the kinds of text the teacher can ask students to write. Teachers’ decisions, though, should based on how much language the students know, what their interests are.
“Do I read a paper and ignore all punctuation, what good is that for students?
浅谈老水手的心理历程——《苦舟子咏》读后感
语言知识是外语教学的立脚点