Teaching Reading and Writing

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.