William Cope
Nithin Kalorth
Jako Olivier
Ida Brandão
Mitchell PetersMultimodal Literacies MOOC’s Updates
Section 9: Making Meaning by Reading
In this update and the next, we examine written language, beginning in this update with a discussion of different approaches to learning about the connections between the sounds of speaking and the written representation of these sounds. Here, we explore approaches to reading, or making sense from written meanings.
To explore these issues further, read the supporting material on the Literacies website.
Comment Below: Why is reading so controversial? What's behind the difference in approach?
Make an Update: Analyse an approach to reading or reading program that you have encountered, or used, or would like to find out more about. Use the concepts introduced in this section to explore the pedagogy that underlies this approach or program.
Reading is a complex process due to the multi-faceted nature of texts and the variety of ways people interpret and make meaning from them. Reading involves more than just decoding words; it includes understanding cultural, contextual, and situational cues that shape how information is perceived.
The complexity also arises from the different “designs” or approaches to reading, which depend on the purposes of reading, the reader’s background knowledge, and the medium of the text. For instance, reading in print requires different strategies compared to digital reading, where hyperlinked texts or multimedia elements add layers of interactivity and complexity. This leads to a difference in approach: traditional reading might emphasize comprehension and analysis of static text, whereas digital reading often demands navigation skills, selective reading, and even non-linear exploration.
Intensive reading exercise I tried in my practice-teaching session
As per Z. Ali, S.T. Palpanadan, et al., intensive reading is the process of conducting a thorough analysis of the grammatical or lexical elements in a text using skills such as skimming, scanning, and reading for specific information. This analytical approach has also been addressed in the second video lecture of this module, where a meaning-first approach to decoding phonics is adopted to keep learners engaged. I remember teaching a reading lesson to my students during one of my practice teaching sessions at college where I had divided my lesson into the usual three stages - pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading.
For my pre-reading segment, I had used the technique of 'Guess the story from the title' and tried to contextualize the chapter with respect to learners' lives before diving straight into the chapter. Once, learners were invested in the story, I distributed my reading but made it into a game where the story was written in an organised paragraph-wise manner. So there was an activity there for the learners to re-arrange the story in the correct order. the IR approach was thoroughly employed at this stage because they were skimming and scanning to make sense of the story in the correct sequential order.
Once the reading was over, I engaged in the traditional teacher-directed paragraph-wise explanation process and made use of abundant real-life, relatable examples to simplify the story and make it memorable for learners.
I think the pedagogical pursuit behind reading activities like this is a) to convey the meaning or message to learners, b) to teach them some targeted language elements like vocabulary items, or grammatical elements such as adjectives, active voice, passive voice, etc. Different reading objectives require different approaches. In this particular lesson that I taught, the objective was to teach target vocabulary and to develop learners' skimming-scanning skills. I think my approach was effective but I look forward to exploring more such innovative reading approaches.
Sources:
https://m.busyteacher.org/15985-7-must-know-reading-strategies-esl-students.html
https://sfleducation.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40862-022-00155-4
In my opinion, reading is so controversial because the sounds of alphabets and alphabet themselves do not correspond. For example in English there are 26 alphabets which can be pronounced with 47 different sounds. This also happens in Thai, my native language. As a result, there are many approaches to teach reading. Some focus on the relationship between graphemes (symbols in writing) and phonemes (sounds of alphabets). Some focus on decoding (making sense of words from the context.
In my perspective, reading is a subject of controversy due to the lack of correspondence between the sounds of alphabets and the alphabets themselves. English consists of 26 alphabets that may be spoken using 47 distinct sounds. This phenomenon also occurs in Thai, my mother tongue. Consequently, there exist several methods for instructing reading. Some individuals prioritize the examination of the correlation between graphemes (written symbols) and phonemes (alphabet sounds). Some individuals prioritize the task of deciphering words based on contextual clues.
My teacher used to say that successful people love reading, and with reading comes learning. According to Tarigan (1990:7 in Jaenal 2010), reading is a process that readers carry out in order to understand the author's idea or concept as it is conveyed through the use of words or written language. According to this module, there are a lot of approaches to reading. I can say that I am grateful to be privileged enough to learn how to read. I admit that I had a difficult time reading when I was younger; it was never simple for me, and the approach that I have encountered and used to this day that I found difficult when I was younger is the phonics approach; it is complicated because, in English, words can be the same but have a different meaning, sound the same but have a different meaning, and have more complex pronunciations. But as time passed, I learned to enjoy reading, particularly our design analysis and decoding approaches. Today, in my teenage years, I enjoy reading stories with different genres, documentation, and more that need critical thinking and understanding of patterns. I agree with the saying that with reading comes learning. As we read, it is as if we are observing things or places that we haven’t been to before. We see and understand the world more. Another approach stated by Mrs. Judy Araujo, M.Ed., CAGS, is the motivational approach. In my opinion, one of the most useful approaches to reading is this. Based on my experience, reading books and phrases that give encouragement, enjoyment, and advice makes me feel relaxed and relatable to others. The approach or reading program that I would like to find out more about is the concept of both ways of reading pedagogy. To become a more effective literate, I'd like to learn more about reading principles, approaches, and other topics.
Reference:
https://www.mrsjudyaraujo.com/different-approaches-to-reading-instruction/
http://ronymbonster.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-is-process-of-looking-at-series.html
Looking at your keen interest in reading, I urge you to read more and more additional reading texts and engage in self-analysis of those texts at different levels.
Best wishes!
I think Turkish language is harder than English in some ways but English also has some difficult parts. For exampale in Turkish we have Ş or Ç letters which don't exist in English. SH gives Ş sound and CH gives Ç sound in English. So our students can confused while learning English.
I have similar experience with my mother tongue Assamese. English has sounds like 'sh' and 'ch' which are alien to Assamese, making it difficult for L1 Assamese learners to produce the sounds accurately.
One of the problems of reading is not only not understanding the alphabet and sounds but also the poor vocabulary of a person. Because of this, the person who reads will not get what he read and will lose interest in reading.
I think Arabic language is harder than English language specially in phonemes and its relationship between graphemes
There are more vocal out put in the same letter in Arabic language than in English ones
The video material mentions about 26 alphabets and 47 phonemes (including diphthongs) in English language and the way phonemes are interchangeably chosen in different dialects, i mean the whole complexity. My mother tongue is Tamil and in this language there is a direct relationship from phoneme to grapheme but there are 247 graphemes. A word cannot be pronounced differently in pure classical tamil unless its done intentionally as in dialects. If at all the sound is transformed still the phoneme will exactly match the grapheme. So, my understanding is that this kind of theoretical understanding could change from one language to the other. This sounds bit controversial to me.
Controversy in reading comes in what type of text the reader reads. Bilingual readers like Filipino learners find it comfortable reading Tagalog or Cebuano (dialect) text. Reading English text is another experience. Finding meaning of unfamiliar English terms can be challenging and eventually discouraging especially when learners at home do not have a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word or don’t have a parent or significant someone to support the natural inquisitiveness of a child when reading. The resort of such reader can only guess such word according to his prior knowledge or experience of how that word sounds like to his own language or dialect. For example, a middle school learner was asked in a reading comprehension worksheet, “What is an Orangutan?” one learner answered that it was an orange juice by looking at the first two syllable ‘orang/e’ another say it was a vegetable because the last two syllables sounds like ‘vegetable’ in his dialect. The reader’s background makes a lot of difference in reading especially a bilingual learner. Reader’s comprehension depends on the available resources he has at home or at school.
As I was reading about the literacy approaches in english I was thinking about how different things are to syllabic languages, as it is the case of portuguese, my native language. No wonder why portuguese native speakers have so many difficulties when learning the sound in english. Everything is mixed up and we can't separate them in specific syllables. In portuguese we have 12 vocal phonemes and 19 consonantal phonemes, which make a total of 32 phonemes in opposition to english, which has 46 sounds, and each one sound very differently. Anyway, learning about the bothway reading pedagogy, that implies knowing not only the phonic representation of language and the graphic representation ( Kress really hits here) but also the meaning of language. Very bright classes. Thank you, professors.
They say that the English language is the most difficult language to learn because of complicated rules. The learners get confused because of the rules that are supposed to be followed in grammar, but then it says that there's always an exception in every rule. My only consolation to the learners is that, when you pass elementary English, that means you are halfway perfecting the language. Besides, if you get through to the most difficult language, how much difficult would it be learning another?