Good afternoon explorers!
If you remember, some weeks ago we were
reviewing in class the most significant reading strategies such as critical
reading strategy, reading comprehension strategy or making predictions among
others.
These reading strategies are so important in
Clil because they work the main aspects of this educational approach, but first
of all I am going to talk about some of these strategies.
-
Critical reading strategy is a strategy in which children
have to guess the main character of the book looking at the cover, so they use
their schema to make a clear
understanding at what they think the book is talking about. They also have to
wonder on something that appears inside the book, then, they try to find the
answer making connections with pictures and reading. They use their critical thinking in order to understand what they are reading. Students generate and answer questions as they
read a story to facilitate deep thinking
and comprehension.
-
Making predictions children determine what they think will
happen in the text. For that, they use the title, the text and illustrations.
So, the main objective of this reading strategy
is to encourage the students to improve their comprehension through
predictions. The teacher enhances curiosity in children making gestures and
sounds in order to predict what is going to happen. Making predictions we activate children´s learning and
incorporate higher thinking skills.
-
Mind pictures: Promoting Comprehension
through Visualization is a
strategy in which visualizing events from a story extends
students' understanding of what they are reading and helps them retell
important events and characters. It is a kind of scaffolding for them to understand better the text and also to
remember it. This strategy promotes also communication
because they have to share their opinions with classmates.
-
Engaging in Reading students
retell a story after engaging in a shared reading activity. This strategy work
on their thinking skills from lower
order (lots) to higher order (hots).
Moreover, retelling the story they activate previous knowledge and by sharing it into a poster they work cooperative learning.
These are some of the reading strategies
that we have learnt in class and they are so important in Clil for many reasons
because as you can see they activate children´s learning incorporating high
order thinking skills working deeper thinking and comprehension. Also, these
strategies are accompanied by scaffolding such us visual scaffolding (graphics,
tables, charts…) and verbal scaffolding. Moreover, they promote communication sharing
opinions with others and it aids students in the socialization process
because group activities promote student interaction and facilitate working
with the language and content.
By
making predictions, students must give the teacher evidence of learning which
also activates active learning.
For
children that have reading difficulties, these kinds of strategies could help
them to understand texts and we can encourage reading in children, because as
we have seen by reading we can make plenty of activities to work both content
and language integrated learning which is the meaning of Clil.
Hi Nuria!
ResponderEliminarI like your post; in fact, I am working with this topic for my next post because I think it has a great importance for working with reading skills.
Reading strategies are a key point in what reading itself concerns and we can develop some of them on their own or we can find a great amount of them in different resources web pages on Internet or even in YouTube playlist as the ones we saw in class that day. For this reason, we do not have any excuse to use them in our near practise period or even in our own class.
As your post states, there are different kinds of strategies and each of them works on specific skills related to reading and we can use them with different purposes.
The very first of them is to MOTIVATE. Children will feel involved in the story with the different activities making them focus their attention in the part that we want to work on. Another aspect that these strategies are helpful for is COMPREHENSION. Many children do not show interest in reading because they do not understand what they are reading and a loss of attention and concentration is more likely to happen. For this reason, the strategy that you propose about Visualization and Mind Picture is great to prevent this to happen.
In my opinion, motivation for reading and comprehension of what I am reading are the first key points for children to start loving reading.
Cris G
Good morning Nuria,
ResponderEliminarFirstly, I must say that dealing with this issue has been a very good choice, since in most of the cases represents one of the main problems for teachers and students in schools. Besides, I would like to say that it is a matter of tremendous importance, since as you say in your post, if we implement these strategies in the classroom and we are able to catch children’s attention, we will be able to develop a great variety of cognitive aspects through reading.
Moreover and regarding to the strategies that you chose, they have seemed to me extremely interesting, especially the last two. In fact, I believe that if we implement these two strategies as one, the students could achieve important breakthroughs in terms of reading comprehension, development of metacognition in peer learning through the communication and cooperative work.
Last but not least, I would like to add my personal case. When I was a child, I have suffered the absence of these reading strategies in traditional teaching and this led me to have many problems regarding to reading comprehension and fluency. Therefore, I believe that the practical implementation of these strategies is absolutely necessary, for the benefit of students.
Great post Nuri ;)