Article 1: Using texts constructively: what are texts for?

By: Michael Swan

Text use may seem a dull topic after all the exciting matters that other guest writers have
dealt with recently. However, language learning is, after all, learning language, not just doing
fun things with it. And texts – by which I mean the relatively short spoken and written
passages that come in textbooks and other teaching materials – can, if they are used
properly, play an important part in the learning process. So here goes.
Three kinds of input

Let's start by looking at the overall structure of language learning. It is useful to identify three
kinds of useful input: extensive, intensive and analysed. Children learning their mother
tongues receive massive extensive input from the cloud of language that surrounds them,
some of it roughly attuned to their level of development, much of it not. They also receive
substantial intensive input – small samples of language such as nursery rhymes, stories,
songs, the daily mealtime and bedtime scripts, and so on, which are repeated, assimilated,
memorised, probably unconsciously analysed, and/or used as templates for future
production. And children receive analysed input: explicit information about language.
Although they are not generally told very much about grammar and pronunciation, they
constantly demand explanations of vocabulary: ‘What’s a …?’; ‘What’s that?’; ‘What does …
mean?’
Second-language learners are no different in principle from small children in these respects.
They, too, need extensive input – exposure to quantities of spoken and written language,
authentic or not too tidied up, for their unconscious acquisition processes to work on. (For
evidence for the effectiveness of extensive reading, see for example Day and Bamford 1998,
or Alan Maley's survey of the research in his December 2009 guest article.) Equally, learners
need intensive engagement with small samples of language which they can internalise,
process, make their own and use as bases for their own production (Cook 2000). And since
most instructed second-language learners have only a fraction of the input that is available to
child first-language learners, the deliberate teaching of grammatical as well as lexical
regularities – analysed input – helps to compensate for the inadequacy of naturalistic
exposure for at least some aspects of language.
Three kinds of output

Input is only half the story. People generally seem to learn best what they use most. Children
produce quantities of extensive output, chattering away as they activate what they have
taken in. They also recycle the intensive input they have received, repeating their stories,
nursery rhymes and so on, and speaking their lines in the recurrent daily scripts of childhood
life. And some children, at least, seem to produce certain kinds of analysed output, naming
things or rehearsing and trying out variations on structures that they have been exposed to,
like more formal language learners doing ‘pattern practice’ (Weir 1970).
Adults, too, need opportunities to produce all three kinds of output. They must have the
chance to engage in extensive, ‘free’ speech and writing; they must be able to systematically
recycle the intensive input that they have more or less internalised (and thus complete the
process of internalisation); and they need to practise the analysed patterns and language
items that have been presented to them, so that they have some chance of carrying them
over into spontaneous fluent production.

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A properly-balanced language-teaching programme, then, will have these three ingredients –
extensive, intensive and analysed – at both input and output stages. While all the ingredients
are important, the proportions in a given teaching programme will naturally vary according to
the learners' needs, their level, and the availability of each element both in and out of class.
What can texts do?

So where do textbook texts – relatively short continuous pieces of spoken or written

language – come into all this? Clearly they can contribute in various ways to the three-part
process outlined above. They can provide material for practice in receptive skills, and thus
facilitate access to extensive input. They can act as springboards for discussion, role play, or
other kinds of extensive output work. They can support analysed input by contextualising
new language items. A further role – and a very important one – is to provide the intensive
input that all learners need: short samples of appropriately selected language which are
carefully attended to and partly internalised, and which can then serve as a basis for
controlled production.
What do texts usually do?

Unfortunately, this aspect of text use is often neglected or ineffectively put into practice. A
language-teaching text may simply be seen as something to be ‘gone through’ in one way or
another, without any clear definition of the outcomes envisaged. (Text-work is an awfully
convenient way of filling up a language lesson, and teachers often feel that any text-based
activity is bound to be beneficial. This is not necessarily the case.) One approach to ‘going
through’ is the traditional pseudo-intensive lesson where the teacher uses a text as the basis
for a kind of free-association fireworks display. He or she comments on one word, expression
or structure after another, elicits synonyms and antonyms, pursues ideas sparked off by the
text, perhaps gets the students to read aloud or translate bits, and so on and so on.
Meanwhile the students write down hundreds of pieces of information in those overfilled
notebooks that someone once memorably called ‘word cemeteries’. When the end of the
'lesson' is approaching, students may answer some so-called ‘comprehension questions’. (As
Mario Rinvolucri asked in his November 2008 guest article, what exactly are these for? If you
have spent an hour working on a text with your class and still need to find out whether they
understand it, perhaps there's something wrong.). Students then go away to write a
homework on a topic distantly related (or even not at all related) to that of the text. This kind
of activity tends to fall between two stools: the text is too short to contribute much to learners'
extensive experience of language, but the work done on it is not really intensive either. At the
end of the cycle the students have been given much too much input, have engaged with it
too superficially to assimilate much of it, and have used (and therefore consolidated) little or
none of it. They have been taught – inefficiently – one lot of language, and then asked to
produce a substantially different lot.
Another approach which has been fashionable in recent decades is to use a written text to
teach 'reading skills'. The text is typically accompanied by a battery of exercises which
require students to predict, skim, scan, identify main ideas, match topics to paragraphs, sort
out shuffled texts, and so on. There is an implicit assumption that even perfectly competent
mother-tongue readers actually need to learn to process text all over again in a new
language. For a critique of this view, see Walter and Swan 2008. Here again, students may
spend substantial time working through a text without any very identifiable payoff in terms of
increased language knowledge or genuine skills development.
While texts can undoubtedly be valuable in various ways, I believe they are best used with a
clear purpose in mind, and a reasonable certainty that they will help to achieve this purpose.
In a second article I will focus on the intensive input-output cycle referred to above, which I
believe is centrally important, and I will consider ways in which texts can be exploited
efficiently to support this aspect of language learning.

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References
Cook, G. 2000. Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Day, R. & Bamford, J. 1998. Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walter, C. & Swan, M. 2008. 'Teaching reading skills: mostly a waste of time?' in IATEFL
2008: Exeter Conference Selections.
Weir, R. H. 1970. Language in the Crib. The Hague: Mouton.
This article was first published in January 2011

Article 2: Theories of reading

This article is in two parts. The first part will look at some of the shifts and trends in theories
relating to reading. The second part will examine tips and guidelines for implementing a
theory of reading which will help to develop our learners' abilities.

Author: Shahin Vaezi Ph.D. Assistant professor, University of Science and Technology, Iran

 The traditional view

 The cognitive view

 The metacognitive view

 Conclusion

Just like teaching methodology, reading theories have had their shifts and transitions.
Starting from the traditional view which focused on the printed form of a text and moving to
the cognitive view that enhanced the role of background knowledge in addition to what
appeared on the printed page, they ultimately culminated in the metacognitive view which is
now in vogue. It is based on the control and manipulation that a reader can have on the act
of comprehending a text.

The traditional view

According to Dole et al. (1991), in the traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a
set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability.
Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they
read.

 Readers are passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text
and the reader has to reproduce meaning.

 According to Nunan (1991), reading in this view is basically a matter of decoding a

series of written symbols into their aural equivalents in the quest for making sense of
the text. He referred to this process as the 'bottom-up' view of reading.

 McCarthy (1999) has called this view 'outside-in' processing, referring to the idea
that meaning exists in the printed page and is interpreted by the reader then taken in.

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 This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and
defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language,
mainly words and structure.

Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on
structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is also
necessary for comprehension to take place. To counteract over-reliance on form in the
traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced.

The cognitive view

The 'top-down' model is in direct opposition to the 'bottom-up' model. According to Nunan
(1991) and Dubin and Bycina (1991), the psycholinguistic model of reading and the top-down
model are in exact concordance.

 Goodman (1967; cited in Paran, 1996) presented reading as a psycholinguistic

guessing game, a process in which readers sample the text, make hypotheses,
confirm or reject them, make new hypotheses, and so forth. Here, the reader rather
than the text is at the heart of the reading process.

 The schema theory of reading also fits within the cognitively based view of reading.
Rumelhart (1977) has described schemata as "building blocks of cognition" which
are used in the process of interpreting sensory data, in retrieving information from
memory, in organising goals and subgoals, in allocating resources, and in guiding the
flow of the processing system.

 Rumelhart (1977) has also stated that if our schemata are incomplete and do not
provide an understanding of the incoming data from the text we will have problems
processing and understanding the text.

Cognitively based views of reading comprehension emphasize the interactive nature of

reading and the constructive nature of comprehension. Dole et al. (1991) have stated that,
besides knowledge brought to bear on the reading process, a set of flexible, adaptable
strategies are used to make sense of a text and to monitor ongoing understanding.

The metacognitive view

According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on "whether reading is a bottom-
up, language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process." It is also no
more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on both L1 and L2
readers. Research has gone even further to define the control readers execute on their ability
to understand a text. This control, Block (1992) has referred to as metacognition.

Metacognition involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Klein et al. (1991)
stated that strategic readers attempt the following while reading:

 Identifying the purpose of the reading before reading

 Identifying the form or type of the text before reading

 Thinking about the general character and features of the form or type of the text. For
instance, they try to locate a topic sentence and follow supporting details toward a
conclusion

 Projecting the author's purpose for writing the text (while reading it),

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 Choosing, scanning, or reading in detail

 Making continuous predictions about what will occur next, based on information
obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained within the previous
stages.

Moreover, they attempt to form a summary of what was read. Carrying out the previous steps
requires the reader to be able to classify, sequence, establish whole-part relationships,
compare and contrast, determine cause-effect, summarise, hypothesise and predict, infer,
and conclude.
Conclusion
In the second part of this article I will look at the guidelines which can also be used as
general ideas to aid students in reading and comprehending materials. These tips can be
viewed in three consecutive stages: before reading, during reading, and after reading. For
instance, before starting to read a text it is natural to think of the purpose of reading the text.
As an example of the during-reading techniques, re-reading for better comprehension can be
mentioned. And filling out forms and charts can be referred to as an after-reading activity.
These tasks and ideas can be used to enhance reading comprehension.
Part 2:

This article is the second of two parts. The first part looked at some of the shifts and trends in
theories relating to reading. This second part will examine tips and guidelines for
implementing a theory of reading which will help to develop our learners' abilities.

 Text characteristics

 Pre-reading tips

 During-reading tips

 After-reading tips

These tips can be viewed in three consecutive stages: before reading, during reading, and
after reading. For instance, before starting to read a text it is natural to think of the purpose of
reading the text. As an example of the during-reading techniques, re-reading for better
comprehension can be mentioned. And filling out forms and charts can be referred to as an
after-reading activity. These tasks and ideas can be used to enhance reading
comprehension.

Text characteristics

Good readers expect to understand what they are reading. Therefore, texts should contain
words and grammatical structures familiar to the learners (Van Duzer, 1999). In texts where
vocabulary is not familiar, teachers can introduce key vocabulary in pre-reading activities that
focus on language awareness, such as finding synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, or
associated words (Hood et al., 1996; cited in Van Duzer, 1999). The topics of texts chosen
should be in accordance with the age range, interests, sex, and background culture of the
students for whom they are intended. Pre-reading activities that introduce the text should
encourage learners to use their background knowledge (Eskey, 1997; cited in Van Duzer,
1999). Class members can brainstorm ideas about the meaning of a title or an illustration
and discuss what they know.

Pre-reading tips

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Before the actual act of reading a text begins, some points should be regarded in order to
make the process of reading more comprehensible. It is necessary to provide the necessary
background information to the reader to facilitate comprehension. In addition, as stated by
Lebauer (1998), pre-reading activities can lighten students' cognitive burden while reading
because prior discussions will have been incorporated.

 Teacher-directed pre-reading (Estes, 1999)

Some key vocabulary and ideas in the text are explained. In this approach the teacher
directly explains the information the students will need, including key concepts, important
vocabulary, and appropriate conceptual framework.

 Interactive approach (Estes, 1999)

In this method, the teacher leads a discussion in which he/she draws out the information
students already have and interjects additional information deemed necessary to an
understanding of the text to be read. Moreover, the teacher can make explicit links
between prior knowledge and important information in the text.

 Purpose of reading

It is also necessary for students to become aware of the purpose and goal for reading
a certain piece of written material. At the beginning stages this can be done by the
teacher, but as the reader becomes more mature this purpose, i.e. awareness-raising
strategy, can be left to the readers. For instance, the students may be guided to ask
themselves, "Why am I reading this text? What do I want to know or do after
reading?"

One of the most obvious, but unnoticed, points related to reading purpose is the
consideration of the different types of reading skills.

o Skimming: Reading rapidly for the main points

o Scanning: Reading rapidly to find a specific piece of information
o Extensive reading: Reading a longer text, often for pleasure with emphasis
on overall meaning
o Intensive reading: Reading a short text for detailed information

 The most frequently encountered reason as to why the four skills are all subsumed
into one – intensive reading – is that students studying a foreign language feel the
urge to look up every word they don't understand and to pinpoint on every structural
point they see unfamiliar. To make students aware of the different types of reading,
ask them about the types of reading they do in their first language.

 The type of text

The reader must become familiar with the fact that texts may take on different forms
and hold certain pieces of information in different places. Thus, it is necessary to
understand the layout of the material being read in order to focus more deeply on the
parts that are more densely compacted with information. Even paying attention to the
year of publication of a text, if applicable, may aid the reader in presuppositions about
the text as can glancing at the name of the author.
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Steinhofer (1996) stated that the tips mentioned in pre-reading will not take a very long time
to carry out. The purpose is to overcome the common urge to start reading a text closely
right away from the beginning.

During-reading tips

What follows are tips that encourage active reading. They consist of summarizing, reacting,
questioning, arguing, evaluating, and placing a text within one's own experience. These
processes may be the most complex to develop in a classroom setting, the reason being that
in English reading classes most attention is often paid to dictionaries, the text, and the
teacher. Interrupting this routine and encouraging students to dialogue with what they are
reading without coming between them and the text presents a challenge to the EFL teacher.
Duke and Pearson (2001) have stated that good readers are active readers. According to Ur
(1996), Vaezi (2001), and Fitzgerald (1995), they use the following strategies.

 Making predictions: The readers should be taught to be on the watch to predict what
is going to happen next in the text to be able to integrate and combine what has come
with what is to come.

 Making selections: Readers who are more proficient read selectively, continually
making decisions about their reading.

 Integrating prior knowledge: The schemata that have been activated in the pre-
reading section should be called upon to facilitate comprehension.

 Skipping insignificant parts: A good reader will concentrate on significant pieces of

information while skipping insignificant pieces.

 Re-reading: Readers should be encouraged to become sensitive to the effect of

reading on their comprehension.

 Making use of context or guessing: Readers should not be encouraged to define and
understand every single unknown word in a text. Instead they should learn to make
use of context to guess the meaning of unknown words.

 Breaking words into their component parts: To keep the process of comprehension
ongoing, efficient readers break words into their affixes or bases. These parts can
help readers guess the meaning of a word.

 Reading in chunks: To ensure reading speed, readers should get used to reading
groups of words together. This act will also enhance comprehension by focusing on
groups of meaning-conveying symbols simultaneously.

 Pausing: Good readers will pause at certain places while reading a text to absorb and
internalize the material being read and sort out information.

 Paraphrasing: While reading texts it may be necessary to paraphrase and interpret

texts subvocally in order to verify what was comprehended.

 Monitoring: Good readers monitor their understanding to evaluate whether the text, or
the reading of it, is meeting their goals.

After-reading tips

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It is necessary to state that post-reading activities almost always depend on the purpose of
reading and the type of information extracted from the text. Barnett (1988) has stated that
post-reading exercises first check students' comprehension and then lead students to a
deeper analysis of the text. In the real world the purpose of reading is not to memorize an
author's point of view or to summarize text content, but rather to see into another mind, or to
mesh new information into what one already knows. Group discussion will help students
focus on information they did not comprehend, or did comprehend correctly. Accordingly,
attention will be focused on processes that lead to comprehension or miscomprehension.
Generally speaking, post-reading can take the form of various activities as presented below:

 Discussing the text: Written/Oral

 Summarizing: Written/Oral

 Making questions: Written/Oral

 Answering questions: Written/Oral

 Filling in forms and charts

 Writing reading logs

 Completing a text

 Listening to or reading other related materials

 Role-playing