Teaching and

assessing reading:
Intensive reading
(1)
🙢
Method of English
TME301/303
2023
 Aims for this week
🙢
🙣 Reflect on texts read
🙣 Build knowledge and gain skills regarding reading
strategies
🙣 Learn about the reading process
🙣 Discuss the different roles of a successful reader
🙣 Identify different reading questions and
understand their role in learning

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When do we learn to read?
🙢
🙣 Process begins as soon as an infant is read to
🙣 ‘how often this happens, or fails to happen, in the
first five years of childhood turns out to be one of
the best predictors of later reading’ (Wolf,
2007:20).
🙣 By kindergarten a gap of 32 million words already
separates some children in linguistically
impoverished homes from their more stimulated
peers (Wolf, 2007:20)
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 …when do we learn to read
🙢
🙣 Reading for pleasure not modeled (usually
associated with school & work)
🙣 Children with a rich repertoire of words and their
associations will experience a text/conversation
very differently from children who do not have
the same stored words and concepts
🙣 We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever
we read
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WHAT DO WE READ AND HOW DO WE READ?

🙢
Activity 1: Make list of all the texts you have read over the
last 2 weeks and think about why and how you read the text.

Text you’ve read Why you read it How you read it

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 WHAT DO WE READ AND HOW DO WE READ?

Text I’ve
read
Why I read it 🙢 How I read it

Social media Personal communication quickly

messages

PPT lecture notes In preparation for lecture Carefully, thoroughly

Academic texts Professional purposes Carefully, thoroughly, iteratively

Song lyrics Entertainment; soul food In time with the song

News reports Gain news and views Skimming, scanning, viewing, also
slower reading
Jokes For laughs Aloud (to someone)
Book chapter Engage with opinion Intensively, with a pencil
(essay)
Label on Gain vital information; health Carefully, slowly (and with difficulty –
medicine bottle related fine print!) 6
 Can you read this?

🙢
Thr hs bn a lt of dbat ovr th pst tn yrs abt th tchng of rding. Sme see rding as th mastry of
phncs, othrs as a procss of prdctn whrby the rder uss bckgrnd knwldge and knwledge of th
lngge systm to prdict mning.

Thees diffreing veiws haev infelunced the wya raeding has bene tuahgt. Appraochse haev
vareid betwene thoes who argeu that the taeching of phoincs is the msot imprtoant elmeent
of a raeding prorgam, and thoes who argeu fro a whoel-language appraohc in whchi
childnre laern to raed by perdicting maenngi.

But it shou_ be obvi_ to anyo_ readi_ thi_ th_ goo_ read_ use a rang_ of strateg_ to gai_
mean_ fro_ writ_ tex_.
 What was missing?
🙢
🙣 In the first text, almost all of the vowels were
omitted

🙣 In the second text all the letters of each word were

included, but they were scrambled

🙣 In the third text, only the beginning of each word

was included
 What kind of knowledge did you use?
🙢
🙣 First, phonics was helpful, but phonics alone
would not have enabled you to interpret the texts
🙣 Vowels/scrambled words/beginning of each word
🙣 Yet none of these things prevented you from
reading the texts—you were able to use other
kinds of information to read past the gaps in the
phonic information.
 What was needed?
🙣 Your background knowledge of the subject and your knowledge
🙢
of how English works played an important part in enabling you to
predict the words you were reading.
🙣 Goodman (1967) refers to three kinds of knowledge on which
readers draw to gain meaning from text:
🙣 semantic knowledge: knowledge of the world- carried in content
words- nouns, adjectives, verbs adverbs, knowledge of different
genres and cultural knowledge)
🙣 syntactic knowledge (knowledge of the structure of the
language)
🙣 graphophonic knowledge (knowledge of sound-letter
relationships). Learners need
schemata about
these kinds of
knowledge
 Reading strategies
🙢predicts that the missing word
The sun rises in the East and sets in the....
-(Your knowledge of the world
is West)
• This animal is a skyflo. This is another skyflo. There are two...
-(Your knowledge of how English works allows you to predict
skyflos, using other plural words as an analogy. The word is
a made-up one, so background knowledge doesn’t help
here!)
• The flag is red, black, and y...
-(Here graphophonic knowledge is important. The letter y
allows you to predict yellow. Without this cue you would
have guessed that the missing word was a colour, but not
which one.)
 Effective readers
🙢
• Draw on different kinds of knowledge depending on what they are reading
and how much they know about the topic.
• For example, if the last sentence had read, “The South Africa flag is red,
blue, black, white, green and ____,”
• Most South African readers would have been able to predict the final
word without any further cue.
• But readers from other countries, who may lack this knowledge, would
need more cues from the text itself.
• If you reflect on your own reading, you’ll be aware that you’re able to
read familiar material (e.g., an article on a topic about teaching) much
faster than unfamiliar material (e.g., an academic paper on a topic you
know nothing about).
 Effective readers
🙢
• When you are unable to bring personal knowledge and
understanding of a topic to a text, you are effectively robbed of
the ability to make use of a key resource for reading: what you
already know.

• This has considerable implications for second language learners,

who may not have the same cultural or world knowledge as the
writer of the text.

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 Roles of successful readers
(Luke and Freebody, 1990)
🙢
• Code-breaker

• Text participant

• Text user

• Text analyst
 Reader as Code Breaker
🙢
🙣 A code breaker engages in the “technology” of written script
🙣 They understand the sound-symbol relationships
🙣 They understand left-to-right directionality
🙣 They understand alphabet knowledge
🙣 But not sufficient for the successful reading of authentic texts
in real social contexts—and the importance of knowing the
code does not justify its teaching in contexts devoid of any
real meaning.
 Reader as a Text Participant
🙢
• Connects the text with the reader’s own background knowledge—
knowledge of the world, cultural knowledge, and knowledge of the
generic structure
• In a study consisting of Afro-American and White-American grade 8
students focused on reading a passage about “sounding,” a form of
verbal ritual insult predominantly found among black teenagers...
• The AA students correctly interpreted the text as being about verbal
play, the WA students interpreted it as being about a physical fight.
• Even though the WA decoding skills were as good and possibly
better than the AA students, the WA students were unable to “read”
the text in a way that matched the writer’s intentions.
 Reader as Text User

🙢
• A successful reader participates in reading as a social activity- at home, at
school and a range of social activity.
• The interactions that children have around literacy events construct their
understandings about how they are expected to read particular texts.
 Reader as Text Analyst
🙢
• Views texts as written by an author who has a particular ideology or set of
assumptions.
• Recognizing in the text what is assumed, not said, implied, or
unquestioned.
• Critical readers recognize that all texts represent a particular view of the
world and that readers are positioned in a certain way when they read it.
• Clear examples of this reader-positioning technique are media
advertisements that deliberately seek to manipulate the reader.
• Critical reading entails recognizing the many other ways in which texts of
all sorts are written out of a particular belief system or ideology and how,
though in more subtle ways than advertisements, and often less
intentionally, these texts may also be manipulative. (Cummins and Sayers
1995.)
 Reading strategies
🙢
1. Predicting: We sometimes look at headings and illustrations to
predict what a text might be about or to think of questions we
would like answered
2. Skimming: We sometimes run our eye over a text very quickly to
pick out headings and key words and get an overall sense of what
the text is about. We might do this before reading carefully, to
decide if we really want to read the text more carefully or to
orientate ourselves to the text.
3. Scanning: We sometimes run our eye over a text very quickly to
look for particular information e.g. to find a telephone number
in a directory, or to find out the time a TV programme starts in a
TV guide.
 Reading strategies
🙢
4. Reading quickly for relaxation – extensive reading: We sometimes
read a text quickly for enjoyment and relaxation – we don’t necessarily
read every word or we might skip out chunks that do not interest us.
5. Reading slowly for a close study of the meaning of a text –
intensive reading: We read more slowly and carefully when we want to
find out more detailed information from a text or when we are studying
how the writer has written the text to achieve certain purposes.
6. Dealing with unfamiliar words: We can look up the meaning of a
word in a dictionary but often we can work out the meaning of the word
from the context or from our knowledge of word stems and prefixes or
suffixes e.g. if we know the meaning of the prefix ‘un-‘ is ‘not’, then
we can work out that unhappy means ‘not happy’.
Reading exercises for intensive
reading should:
🙢
• Help learners to understand the text they are reading
• Help learners to develop good reading strategies
• Comprise: before- reading, during- reading and after-
reading activities
• Utilise 8 different categories of questions

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Before- reading activities
🙢
🙣 Activate learners prior knowledge
🙣 Build the field to make meaning of the text / Provide the
purpose and features of the text
🙣 Develop good reading strategies (prediction,
skimming)
 During-reading activities
🙢
🙣 Help learners understand the meaning of the text
🙣 Practice good reading strategies (scanning, reading
carefully and dealing with unfamiliar words)
🙣 Provide guiding questions
 After- reading activities
🙢
🙣 Help learners respond to the text (provide opinions,
critically analyse the text, relate to own lives and be
creative)
 8 levels of questions
🙢
1. Literal comprehension- recalling or recognising ideas that are explicitly stated
in the text.
2. Reorganisation- classifying into categories, summarising, collating information.
3. Inferential- using information in the text to fill gaps (likely motives, causes and
effects, predicting outcomes, interpreting figurative language)
4. Evaluation- making judgements (reality or fantasy, fact or opinion, validity,
appropriateness, values)
5. Appreciation- emotional response, relate to characters or incidents, reactions to
writer’s language use, response to imagery.
6. Critical- examining the underlying point of view of the writer
7. Experiential- relating it to their own experience and reality and beyond that, to
the world at large.
8. Creative- questions that set learners off thinking imaginatively and creatively in
response to the text.
 Summary
🙢
🙣 Purpose of intensive reading
🙣 Roles of reader
🙣 Reading strategies
🙣 Reading process- pre-reading, during- reading, after-
reading
🙣 8 levels of questioning in a reading comprehension
🙣 Think about which reading strategies and questions
you would place in each reading phase if you were to
design an intensive reading exercise…