Interactive post - Reading activities focusing on writing used to teach Grade 11 students at Le Loi upper-secondary school.

CONTENTS
Page
A. INTRODUCTION
1
I. REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH
1
II. AIMS OF THE RESEARCH
1
III. SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD	
2
B. DISCUSSION
2
I. POST-READING STAGE
2
1. The importance of reading
2
2. General views on post-reading activities
2
3. The Post-/After Reading Stage
3
4. The importance of post-reading activities.
4
5. What students gain from post-reading activities.
5
6. Interactive post-reading activities
5
II. POST-READING ACTIVITIES FOCUSING ON SPEAKING
6
1. Post-reading activities focusing on writing.
6
2. Demonstration of activities usually used in teaching English 11 at Le Loi upper-secondary school.
8
III. APPLYING THE RESEARCH IN TEACHING ENGLISH 10
12
IV. RESULT AFTER APPLYING THE RESEARCH IN TEACHING
18
C. CONCLUSION
18
I. CONCLUSION
18
II. RECOMMENDATIONS
18
D. REFERENCE BOOKS
20
A. INTRODUCTION
It is widely recognized that reading is one of the most important skills for English as a foreign language students to master. The ability to read and comprehend what one reads is crucial to success in our educational system. For academic success, for English language learning, or to expand students’ knowledge of language, cultures and the world, reading comprehension has always played a central role in the curricula of the schools in this study. At present, reading comprehension is not the product of word recognition skills, grammar or world experience as separate entities, but it is considered a highly interactive process between the reader and the text, one that enables “the construction of meaning by making inferences and interpretations”. The post-reading stage of a reading lesson is often confused with the closing of a lesson. However, having new information from the whilst-reading stage should bring about a change such as the students would know more, or think or feel differently from before. Teachers should help students connect the new information they are now familiar with and their lives. This article reintroduces the importance of the post-reading stage and some workable, meaningful activities. Interactive activities are chosen so that students not only process their knowledge obtained from the text but also communicate this new knowledge to peers. 
I. REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH
In Vietnam, in recent years teaching methods have been more and more improved. There have been a lot of activities organized in order to enhance the effectiveness and help students be more active and self-confident in learning English in general and reading skills in particular [1]. Many universities and upper-secondary schools, including Le Loi upper-secondary school apply post reading activities which can be seen as one of the most effective way to develop students‘ reading competence. It is stated that post-reading activities encourage student to reflect upon what they have read. For the information to stay with the students, they need to go beyond simply reading it to using it. Until now, there have been a lot of researches done in the area of post reading activities. In 2000, Alderson wrote Assessing reading with the aim of analyzing the effectiveness of reading activities[4], including post reading activities. Sasson (n.d) wrote post-reading activities – how teachers can end the lesson effectively to give some advice so that teachers can apply when implementing post-reading activities. However, there is a gap between the theory and the practice. At upper-secondary schools in general, the advantages of post-reading activities have not been fully made use of. In addition, teachers and students encounter some difficulties related to the students‘ level, time, etc; as a result, the implementation of these activities has not been effective. All mentioned above, I have decided to suggest post-reading activities I have ever taught my grade 11 students at my school.
II. AIMS OF THE RESEARCH
- To introduce how to teach reading skills and post-reading part.
- To show ways of teaching post-reading part.
- To show how post-reading activities can be designed for teaching English in grade 10 at Le Loi upper-secondary school.
- To draw out what the learners understand the reading texts and apply them to their daily life through post-reading activities.
III. SCOPE, OBJECT AND RESEARCHING METHOD
- Scope : Researching in the process of teaching English 11 at Le Loi upper-secondary school.
- Object: This subject is concerned with ways of organizing post-reading activities in the class. 
- Researching method: Reading reference books , discussing with other teachers, applying in teaching, observing and drawing out experiences.
B. DISCUSSION
The importance of reading
Reading is an activity of inferring meaning out of written symbols with the collaborative work of cognitive behaviors and psycho-motor skills (Demirel, 1992). Reading is described as the process of perception in terms of written and published words with the help of senses, comprehension of these after building meaningful connections; intellectual and spiritual acquisition, active and communicative involvement with the written and published symbols, reception consisting of a number of perceptive and cognitive processes, an interpretation and also a reaction. According to Alderson (1984), most scholars would suppose that reading is one of the most important skills for educational and professional success [3]. In highlighting the importance of reading comprehension Rivers (1981) stated that ― reading is the most important activity in any language class, not only as a source of information and pleasurable activity but also as a means of consolidating and extending one‘s which are knowledge of the language.
As Karakas (2002) pointed that the real objective of reading is fast and right grasp of the meaning. Especially, reading at high speed along with full comprehension is a critical factor affecting the success of the students. Students who can read at a high speed, understand what is being read, have a rich verbal repertoire and have a good master of the language, learn more easily and have higher rates of success . The level of reading can be designated by asking questions about the reading text being read and evaluating the related answers in verbal or written way [2].
According to Eskey (1988) in advanced levels of second language the ability to read the written language at a reasonable rate and with good comprehension has long been recognized to be as oral skills if not more important.
General views on post-reading activities
Definitions of post-reading activities
As language learning involves the acquisition of thousands of words, teachers and learners alike would like to know how vocabulary learning can be fostered, especially in EFL settings where learners frequently acquire impoverished lexicons, despite years of formal study. Research indicates that reading is important but not sufficient for second-language vocabulary learning, and that it should be supplemented by post-reading activities to enhance students' vocabulary knowledge [2].
Post reading activities play an important role in language teaching and learning. There are many reasons for its being important. Firstly, learners come across it a lot in their daily lives. Secondly, since the students in this research are preparatory learners who are learning English for academic purposes, that means students learn English for the examination. Therefore, without understanding the texts, they cannot learn anything; as a result, cannot be successful in the exams. Since post reading is an important skill in language learning, it is necessary to define it. According to Chastain (1998), post-reading activities help readers to clarify any unclear meaning where the focus is on the meaning not on the grammatical or lexical aspects of the text. Ur (1996) discusses summary as a kind of post-reading activity where the readers are asked to summarize the content in a sentence or two. It is also possible to give this post-reading activity in the mother tongue. Karakas (2002) proposes that the readers interpret the text and illustrate the relationship between the questions and their answers by using activities such as summarizing, question and answer, and drawing conclusions and it is possible to catch the missing parts of the mental picture through thinking aloud, discussion and summarizing. "Post-reading" (after, follow-up, beyond reading) exercises first check students' comprehension and then lead students to a deeper analysis of the text, when warranted (Alderson, 2000) [4].
The primary goal of post-reading activity is to make sure that satisfactory comprehension was taken place. If the person is looking for a number in a telephone directory, she or he should be very selective. She/he should scan the directory for the number needed. On the contrary, a researcher needs to read an article in detail to get the main ideas of the writer and to learn more about the subject. Nevertheless, it can still be argued that any reading is selective. Wallace (1992) shares the same idea by saying, ―Just as we filter spoken messages in deciding what to attend to, so do we filter written messages. And even when we commit ourselves to a full reading, that reading will still be selective, some parts being read with greater care than others.
The Post-/After Reading Stage
When the during-/whilst- reading stage is completed, the students are expected to have obtained new information from the text. This should bring about a change of some kind such as they would know more, or think or feel differently from before. Therefore, we ask, So what? , which leads to the connection between the new information the students are now familiar with and their lives[5]. According to Nuttall (1996: 164) when intensive work in a during-/whilst reading stage is completed, general comprehension must be intended to. At this stage, the students should be able to evaluate the text as a whole to respond to it from a more or less personal point of view. They may be asked to agree or disagree with the author or the characters in the text; relate the content to their own experience; connect the content with other work in the same field; discuss characters, incidents, ideas, feelings; or predict what can happen afterwards.
Common post reading activities are: creating stories or end of stories, producing posters, reconstructing texts, and questioning the text or views of the writer.
The importance of post-reading activities.
Post-reading activities are simply activi- ties done after during-reading activities are completed. At this stage the students are in a temporary change of state or condition, that is, they now know something they did not know before. They know some new vo- cabulary items, some new sentence struc- tures, some new idiomatic expressions, and they have new knowledge about a certain topic. However, it is definitely not the right time for the class to just call it a day . How many times do we see lesson plans with good pre-reading activities and well- planned during reading activities, but brief, classic post-reading activities such as write the answers on a piece of paper , translate paragraph 2 , write a sentence for each of the new words found in the text , using a similar pattern, write about your house ?
Something must be done to help the students use what they now know so that these new things will become more than just knowledge. In a post-reading stage students are not studying about the language of the text and they are not comprehending the text, either. At the post-reading stage students are supposed to apply what they possess [13].
Post-reading activities are expected to encourage students to reflect upon what they have read. The purposes of the activities are for the students to use the familiar text as basis for specific language study, to allow the students to respond to the text creatively and to get the students to focus more deeply on the information in the text. For the new information to stay with them, the students need to go beyond simply reading the information to using it. Follow- ing up in the post-reading stage is critical to both comprehension, which is instruction sensitive, and obtaining and working on new information, which takes the students to their real life situation [6]. Well-designed after-reading activities usually require the learners to return to the text several times and to reread it to check on particular information of language use. Students, individually or in groups, should have ample time to share and discuss the work they have completed. This enables the students to tie up loose ends, answer any remaining ques- tions, and to understand the interrelation- ships of topics covered. When readers are called on to communicate the ideas they have read, it is then that they learn to conceptualize and discover what meaning the text has to them. Although teachers should be careful to spend just some time in the pre-reading stage, they are actually expected to spend more time in the post- reading stage with several activities. A two- fold purpose is involved here, namely: students need to (1) recycle what they have obtained from the text and (2) go beyond the text and enter the real world, equipped with the newlyobtained information.
What students gain from post-reading activities.
At least six principles in foreign language teaching-learning by Brown (2007: 62-81) can be fulfilled. From recycling some language components in different ways through different language skills, automaticity is certainly on its way. Meaningful learning is carried out because at a post- reading stage students relate new informa- tion with their own life and experiences. Each student is asked to respond to parts of the text she or he has read. Because students are active in responding to the texts they have been, and the teacher puts himself in the background, students are empowered and to a certain extent, in control of the activities. This may lead to students autonomy. Willingness to communicate, which involve students willingness to take risks and being self-confident, is gained because they are supposed to be well-prepared to do the post-activities. When students are given different tasks, they have good opportuni- ties to use the language, orally as well as written. This puts them in a position where they can develop their interlanguage. Finally, post-reading activities are not interested in the right versus wrong answers to com- prehension questions anymore. Students do not have to prove they understand the voca- bulary and grammar of the text, anymore. Therefore, students are not only taught to achieve linguistic competence but also discourse and strategic competence, so communicative competence is also taken care of. We can conclude that from post- reading activities, the students are develop- ing themselves to achieve automaticity, meaningful learning, autonomy, willingness to communicate, interlanguage, and communicative competence.
Interactive post-reading activities
Reading comprehension should not be alienated from the other skills (Harmer, 2007: 267) [8]. In reality, for example, we tend to talk about what we have read, especially when the content is actual, interesting, unexpected, or simply strange and unbelievable.
Therefore, we may link reading and writing, for example, by summarizing, note-making, mentioning what has been read in a letter. We might link reading and listening by comparing what we have heard to read- ing a news report, comparing the song we heard from the radio to the song lyric down- loaded from the internet. Still, we might link reading and speaking by discussing what we have learned from a reading pas- sage and retelling stories.
There are many activities that will refine, enrich, and increase interest in the assigned topic of a text. However, the primary goal of the post reading phase is to further develop and clarify interpretations of the text, and to help students remember what they have individually created in their minds from the text. Good post-reading ac- tivities should be able to get the students to recycle some aspects from their whilst- reading activities; to go beyond the text; to share opinions, ideas, feelings; and to give reasons to communicate.
There are various kinds of interactive post-reading activities that relate reading to other language skills. The following activities are mostly taken from Bamford and Day (2004) and, after some adaptation, are proven to have worked well in my classes.
6.1 Interactive Post-reading Activities Focusing on Listening
6.2 Interactive Post-Reading Activities Focusing on Writing
6.3. Interactive Post-reading Activities Focusing on Speaking
6.4 Other Interactive Post-reading Activities
II. POST-READING ACTIVITIES FOCUSING ON WRITING
1. Post-reading activities focusing on writing.
Students are likely to understand more when they discuss with each other what they have learned, so they must have special opportunities to discuss and write their opinions, feelings, and conclusions, from their reading activity. Some of the ways to do this include the following activities.
1.1. Story Innovation
Story innovation is a form of scaffold writing in which the sentence and text patterns remain intact but the content is altered through the substitution of vocabulary to change the setting, characters, or action in a story. Story innovation is presented as a way to develop vocabulary knowledge through deep processing and to provide fluency practice. Teachers will also find story innovation useful for working with struggling readers or students learning English as a second language. It is a way to foster a nonthreatening, low-anxiety, and highly supportive learning environment. The authors describe the scenario in one classroom in which the students wrote a story innovation, and they provide a step-by-step process teachers can follow when implementing story innovation in the classroom [5].
1.2. Innovation on the ending
Students change the ending of a story. For example, after reading The Boy Who Cried Wolf , whose ending was a wolf really came and ate some of the boy’s sheep, a student wrote, The wolf ate the boy . So, the villagers lived peacefully and happily ever after. (By: Riza, 2010) [5]
1.3. Wanted posters
Students create wanted posters of a character in the text. For the Princess and the Pea , for example, the poster would be pictures of princesses and description of an ideal princess[5].
1.4. Story map
Students create story maps that can be used by others to rewrite the story. To make this activity more interactive and meaningful, a One Stay-Three Stray Cooperative Learning activity can be implemented so that learners learn from other groups can give and take information as well as inspiration from other groups [7].
1.5. Summary writing
Ask the students to work together with a partner. First, ask them to work together to identify the main points of the reading. Once they have successfully done this, the students can work individually to put these into sentences. Depending on the level of the class, you might need to teach them how to paraphrase or how to write in their own words [1]. 
1.6. Chain game
After the students have finished reading, tell them to go through the reading and try to remember some of the key points and details. If you are teaching a large class, split the students up into small groups of about five or six students. Ask the students to sit in a circle. Student 1 has to write down some information about the text. Student 2 then rewrite that information and adds something new. Then student three rewrite both pieces of information and adds their own. This process continues until the group runs out of ideas [1].
1.7. Conclusion
Giving students the opportunity to express their understanding of the reading, either in writing, discussio