Teaching Reading and Writing
These Brown chapters give us many strategies,
characteristics, and principals for teaching reading and writing to second language
learners. As we saw last week in teaching listening and speaking to second
language learners, there were many similarities between reading and writing but
also many important differences between the two. Reading and writing share some
of the same characteristics, but are applied differently. We process the two
skills differently and it is important for teachers to tap that into their
students and provide enough support to facilitate the second language learners.
Both skills have the same characteristics; performance, production/processing
time, distance, orthography, complexity, vocabulary and formality. The
difference between reading and writing for all of these characteristics is the
fact that writers form and produce their own language for other readers to process
and digest. This can be a frightening task for some students and they may feel vulnerable
when others read their work. As future teachers we have to be there to support
and teach our students that it is a positive thing to express themselves
through writing and that they will become better writers and readers for doing
so.
These chapters touch on some principals and strategies for
both reading and writing. Some of the principals I thought were helpful in teaching
English to a second language learner was again to use intrinsic motivation,
include bottom up and top down techniques to keep reiterating the fundamentals,
tap into the students schema, connect reading and writing and provide as much
authentic language as possible whether it is assigning a writing or reading.
Assessing reading and writing are two different tasks. For
assessing reading a teacher can either have the student read out loud or have a
closed (multiplication, fill in the blank, etc.) type of test. Writing is much
different in assessing. There is much more to assess in writing because there
are so many variables and different things to incorporate. Teachers can use
checklists on content, organization, discourse, syntax, vocabulary and
mechanics to assess writing.
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