The teaching techniques in a reading comprehensive lesson

 A. PROPOSITION
    Nowadays English has affirmed the role and the importance in schools, so raising the quality of teaching is the most important issue. Reform teaching programme is applied, a wide range of problems of English teaching methodology also arise. The question is: How can the students comprehend the whole knowledge and use it competently?
   Learning English is merely to learn a language . Wanting to use this language skillfully, learners need to practice four basic skills: Listening - Speaking - Reading - Writing. Reading skill plays the important role because it decides whether the students understand the contents they have just read or not. As early as in 6th grade, students were acquainted with short, easy to understand texts . The higher the program gets, the more rigorous training skills are required. If teachers do not have good teaching methods, they will not convey all the content of the lessons. On the other hand the content of the reading texts is often long and contains a lot of new words which are easy to make students discouraged.
         To meet the demand, each teacher needs to find the best method which is suitable for real situations and their students.
          Being a teacher of English, with the desire to bring my knowledge to convey to my students, and find out my own teaching method, I would like to present to the educational scientific council this year the theme: "The teaching techniques in a reading comprehensive lesson" in lower secondary school.
B. Solutions
I. THEORITICAL BASES.
1. The importance of teaching reading skills:
     Reading is an important and neccessary skill in language teaching and learning in all grades. In foreign language classes students read to get information, to check the events to find the answers to questions or clarify a particular issue ... If students cannot read, they will not receive and remember data and information permanently.
      Everyday the students store information through letters, through learning from text books, from the advertisements, instructions, manual machines, equipment, news through newspapers, TV ... leaning to read means learners practise to recognize the letters and meaning of the information being read.
        It is more convenient for Vietnamese people to learn English than some other ethnic groups such as Chinese, Thai, Russian, Arabic people ... Since the system Vietnamese and English are almost the same, just some very little different alphabet Z, W, J, F ... Depending on the purpose of the lesson, the teacher can teach reading in several diffrent ways:
 - The reader turns to read out loud (often applied in the beginner class and young people)
 - The teacher reads, students read in books.
 - Students read silently
 - In classes for beginners, students must be familiar with the combination of letters in the new writing system and based on the information given to understand the semantics of the words, phrases, clauses and the English sentences.
    The reading aloud a sentence or a text in English is a hard job for Vietnamese because English is not spelled as easily as Vietnamese. In addition, there are many other factors also affect the reading aloud such as stresses, and intonation details because these factors can influence the expression of the meaning of words and sentences.
     In foreign language classes, reading is usually organized to consolidate the previous practice activities as listening and speaking activities.
     The reading in class under that method is often forced, because teachers often give the students exercises to perform. To teach reading more effectively and in a more communicative way, teachers must have the preparations and make students feel the need to read.
      The reading texts should be accurated about language, rich and diverse in genre, with content relevant and enriching life experiences of students, causing excitement for reading not boring. Directions perform exercises need to notice the reading techniques and discuss the expansion of the reading subject.
  2. A number of factors affect the teaching: [1]
   According to some experts, such as Colvin & Root (1981); Havernson & Haynes (1982); Mege (1977); Thornis (1970) ... teachers need to pay attention to the requirements that affect the success of teaching reading skill to beginners, such as:
 - The ability to concentrate in a minimum time of students.
 - Ability to read and understand the instructions.
 - Ability to read by yourself and read with others.
 - Ability to co-operate with their classmates.
 - Ability to name each item in the picture.
 - Ability to read from left to right and read from top to bottom.
 - Ability to organize, classify (same / different).
 - Ability to present the skills of function as ingenuity, clumsiness.
 - Ability to read a long paragraph .
 - Ability to distinguish from left to right, from top to bottom.
 - Ability to understand and shape symbols.
 - The ability to read the expression through gestures, facial expressions, body.
 - The ability to realize the idea from a picture expressing a real object.
 - Ability to recognize sound symbols and images.
 - Ability to recognize that the speech can be written.
 - Ability to recognize affirmative setences and questions that students have heard.
 - Ability to recognize and speak basic intonation patterns.
 - The ability to recognize the significance due to two-dimensional objects shown (books, paintings, photos ...)
These capabilities can be achieved through the process of training reading and writing that students perform. The fact that students can get results quickly or slowly depend on the background knowledge that they have already learnt in their mother tongue, their health and acuity.
There are also 8 other factors which affect the learning reading skill in a foreign language such as:
 - Students who do not have certain secondary education ,they will find difficulty
in transfering knowledge and generalization. Therefore they need to be guided carefully reading to increase attention .
 - Students often react in negative way to pages that are printed densely.
 - Students tend to concentrate the effort to decode the new words , while limited attention to the interpretation of texts.
 - Teachers can anticipate that students will have difficulty in reading and understanding the contents of text if text is not familiar with them.
 - Experience speaking of students are used to decode texts according to age and life experiences of the students for learning languages.
 - Reasoning ability, talk and understand because the conceptions such as words, phrases,sentences, sound and other conceptions have a positive impact on the success of the initial study.
 - The level of understanding the types of documents, depend on the age and experience of students for national cultures that is being learned.
 - Students study foreign languages ​​,they need to explane the involved
metaphors in writing, the idioms, and the cultural information of the languages ​​which the peoples have learned more than the students learn their native language.
II. PRACTICAL BASES
1. The reality of the teaching reading comprehension lessons in English at secondary schools.
      Although English has become an official subject at school, the promotion of its benefits has not been taken much interest. Partly due to the limited facilities and teaching aids, but mostly due to the quality of teaching is not high, so it cannot attract the charm to learn of students. This expresses in reading lessons. Students always refuse to read a text which is full of new words. On the other hand, most students are only interested in the meanings of words without pay attention to the content of the reading texts. As a result they can not answer correctly questions about the reading. Therefore the quality teaching decreases, does not satisfy the requirements of the programs.
        In addition, the role of the teacher can not mention the quality of teaching has improved or not, teaching methods are renovated to suit each lesson, each student . In the old textbooks, reading skill is trained simultaneously with the skills of listening, speaking and writing, new words and new structures in each reading lesson with familiar topics which students have already known ,teachers only make up the questions and ask students to answer . After the English textbooks were compiled again, reading skill is trained separately, innovation in teaching methods has been focused and compelled . Many new topics are mentioned, the number of words increases. Students feel overwhelmed, so the old method is no longer suitable. Therefore, the teacher plays a key role in this : how to teach to both meet real life requirements and improve the quality of their learning.
     III- IMPLEMENTATION MEASURES
        Techniques used in each stage of a reading comprehensive lesson:
  In teaching we can divide teaching reading into the following stages:
1. Pre – Reading stage:
   In this stage, teachers should introduce extensively about topics which they are going to read, remind the information relating to students’ experiences through a number of activities such as: give prediction questions and help students predict the content of the text . If the text is a conversation, the teacher may mention the place, the number of participants, and the relationship between people in the dialogue. (family members, friends, acquaintances .. .). If it is an excerpt of a story, teacher can ask one or some students to remind the main events before.
    In some textbooks there are usually pictures along with texts, teachers should use these pictures to draw students’ attention to the content of the text by helping them to predict ideas and language that will be used in this lesson.
- teacher usually mentions a few suggestive questions in this stage. The questions should follow the order of events or developments theoretical of readings. These questions present the basic structures of the reading and the means help students to predict the content of the reading, then read the text more naturally.
     Sometimes, teachers can ask students to skim the reading to have some general notion of information in the text. By such activities : teachers can inspire students "desire to read" and make students interested in the new topics.
      Activities in this stage may vary according to the real situation of each school and student level. The teacher can make one or two activities in this period.
      Example 1: English 8 - Unit 9: A first - aid course [2]
       Teacher: You are going to read a text about first - aid, look at the pictures (the illustrative pictures hang on the board)
       Can you guess what happened to the people in each picture? what do you call these in English?
        Can you give first - aid instructions for each case? If not, ask teacher to explain it to you then have a class discussion about it.
       Example 2 : English 8 - Unit 10: Recycling [3]
                                                section: Read
        Teacher: You are going to read a text about recycling. Imagine That there are millions ton of rubbish eliminated in our environment each day. 
       How can they damage our lives if they are not recycled?
       What kind of rubbish can we recycled?
       What kind of rubbish can we reuse or reduce?
The following words may help: car tires, bottles, glass, drink cans, compost, refill, break up, melt. Use dictionary or ask your teacher about the new words.
    - Students mark in the column "right" or "wrong" some given information :
     Read the statements and tick True or False.
 English 8 - Unit 11: Travelling around Vietnam [4]
 True False
Nha Trang is the seaside resort. ....... ........
Đa Lat is recognized as a world Heritage Site by Unesco. ....... ........
You can visit tribal villages in Sapa . ........ ........
There are flights from Da lat to Hanoi everyday. ........ ........
Ha Long Bay is known as the city of Enternal Spring. ........ ........
    - Students guess and fill in some words, the appropriate language in the blanks of a given passage:
     Example: English 8 - Unit 4: Our Past [5]
Little Pea’s father is............... . After his wife ...................He married again.
The step mother was very....................to Little Pea. She had to do chores all day. Her father was very upset. He soon ...................of the broken heart . In the fall, the village held its harvest...................... the Prince wanted to................his wife from the village Little Pea didn’t have new clothes . A fairy appeared and 
magically changed Little Pea’s rags into....................As running to the festival, she dropped her................The Prince found her shoe and wanted to........... her
      - Students discussed before and give personal opinions on the subject of the essay.
    Example: You are going to read a text about the ways to learn language. Look at the pictures. How do the people learn languages? Which is the best way to learn language?
     - Predicting the meaning of some words or look up them in the dictionary.
      Example: English 6: Unit 16: Man and the Environment [6]
   These words are necessary for your understanding of the text on “Environment”. Are they similar to you? If not , look up their meanings in a good dictionary
 destroy gas waste burn
 trash coal pollute oil
        - Teachers can organize games (use of words related to the lesson such as Bingo, questioniares ...........)
          2. While- Reading Stage:
      In this stage, activities are organized to help students practice reading comprehension skill , some other reading skills that are combined in reading comprehension skills.
        The skills which are generally used in this stage are intensive reading and read extensive reading. Intensive reading means readers understand all content that they have read and can answer questions about specific information that is expressed through the text.
         Extensive reading means students read for main ideas of the text; they do not need to understand every word or every idea. Intensive reading helps students read extensive more effectively. On the other hand, extensive reading will also make students more confident when exposing to the exact texts.
         For long reading texts, teachers ask students to read extensively in a few paragraphs and read intensively in the other paragraphs. If we make students read a too long text intensively, they will lose their interest and there will not be enough time to train skimming skill.
         Readings in the old textbooks are usually compiled carefully, selectively and there is a limitation of language for the students to read intensively. However, in the new textbook, reading texts are diverse and precise. With extensive reading, students will understand main ideas of the reading text even though their English is not so good.
          In grade 8th,9th, we shouldn’t ask students read aloud the text because it is so difficult for them. A specific reading text has many new words which students do not know how to pronounce, the conversation may require an understanding of the structures, special intonation that students do not know. Reading a text which hasn’t been prepared in advance will make students feel less confident, hesitant, or mispronounce, which will affect other students. While reading aloud texts many students will pay attention to the pronounciation more than the meaning of the text, so that students can read well but understand little, even they do not understand what they are reading.
        First , the teacher should read the whole text or let students hear the tape which is read by native speakers, then has students read the text silently. Teachers will help students who have trouble while reading. Students should be asked to prepare before reading aloud texts so that their reading doesn’t take much time and inefficiently.
         Teachers also need to change reading techniques. In extensive reading, silent reading is very appropriate and effective. Teacher limits the reading time and then give some questions to check students’comprehension . Most of the literature discourse, discussion is written to read silently. only genres like poetry, children's songsand conversation are written to read aloud. Therefore, teachers should depend on the category of reading texts to apply suitable reading techniques. If we ask students to read aloud, they should be prepared in advance and we can make changes in a number of ways as follow:
  - For classes of beginning level, teachers read first , the class repeat sentence by sentence.
 - In mass classes, apart from repeating teachers, students can read after the tape. Repeating the tape is often harder than repeat the teachers because the voice in the tape is often more inaudible than the teacher’s voice.
 - The teacher read a passage, then the whole class reread.
 - A student read sentence by sentence after the teacher.
  - The class is divided into groups of two or more . Each group prepare a section, later a representative of each group will read a passage. In case the reading is a dialogue, groups cast and prepare. Teachers discusses with the group that have difficulty with pronunciation (stress, rhythm and intonation). Then each group will play the role to practice before the whole class .
     During the lesson teachers should raise a number of questions to guide students’ reading and check their understanding of the information in the text, and also to measure the level of students, so teachers can explain unclear details. The content of questions need to direct the attention of students. Teacher needs to read unknown sample before or while students are reading.
  Ex: Read and arrrange the paintings in the right order, complete the table and answer the questions.
    English 8: Unit 13:  Lesson: 3 Read
[7]
* Read and draw a picture to express the guide.
Example: Assignment: English 6: Unit 9: The body
Part A: Part of the body
Exercise: Draw the girl or the boy 
a. That is his head 
    That is his chest
    Those are his hands
    Those are his shoulders
Part B: Faces
b. United has an oval face
    She has black hair dragon
    She has brown eyes
    She has a small nose
    She has thin lips
* Read and record the information under another form. Read summarize the main idea of ​​the lesson.
3. Post-reading Stage:
During this stage students will participate in a number of activities to expand the exploitation of the text and develop some other skills besides reading skills. Exercise may include:
+) Fill a available table to help students focus in the main points of the reading, especially for you with many statistics and data.
Example: English 8: Unit 12: A vacation abroad
            Section: Read
After students read and answer questions, teachers can ask students to make a statistical table.
Places
What she did and saw
a. Hawaii
b. New york
c. Chicago
d. Mount Rushmore
e. San Francisco
Went swimming, visited Kilauea Volcano
+ Answer questions relating to individual experiences, emotions, attitudes and explain.
Example: English 8: Unit5: Study habit
              Lesson: Read
After finishing the reading teacher can ask some questions about vocabulary learning experience of students and ask them to answer.
How should you learn words?
What is necessary in learning words?
In your opinion, what is the best way to learn words?
Do you often learn words in one way or different ways?
+ Write a summary , a review basing on the information in the reading.
III. TESTING
       After a long time of anxiety about the method chosen, I do not know whether my students have made progress in their studies. Through the exam, they have o