Reading is one of the most important types of communicative-cognitive activity, which is aimed at extracting information from a written text. Since reading is carried out in written, fixed text, this makes it possible to return to it with a misunderstanding and allows more attention to be paid to the disclosure of content. The receptive nature of this type of speech activity leads to greater accessibility and greater ease compared to, for example, speaking.
Reading is considered in the school methodology as a goal and as a means of teaching a foreign language. The purpose of reading training: to teach how to extract information from what has been read (this reading is more to oneself). Students learn a lot of mental and linguistic difficulties when reading. As for learning the technique of reading, it is primarily reading aloud, reading for others. Reading technique is an indicator of reading comprehension.
Here are some ways to remove difficulties when reading texts in elementary school:
– it is necessary to formulate in children mechanisms of forecasting, conjecture, identification, learn to analyze, find language support in the text, use a dictionary if necessary.
– you should continue learning the skill of reading to yourself, built on the processes of internal speech, proceeding with hidden articulation.
– it is necessary to teach reading technique on well-mastered lexical and grammatical material.
The selection of texts in English for students in grades 5–7 pursues a complex of practical, educational, developmental and educational goals. The development of reading skills is aimed at understanding authentic and partially adapted texts of different genres, relying on appropriate explanations and comments, if necessary, using a bilingual dictionary.
To master reading successfully, you must:
– select texts in accordance with the age characteristics, speech and life experience of students, their interests;
– the texts should be distinguished by the entertaining and attractive plot, be accessible from the point of view of language difficulties, be relevant from the standpoint of universal values, contain a problem;
– provide texts with pre-text, text or post-text tasks (comments, annotations, recommendations).
Subjects and problems of texts form the necessary linguistic and speech skills.
In this case, it is worth mentioning the tasks facing the teacher in the process of teaching schoolchildren over the three stages of working with text:
– at the pretext stage, it is necessary to create the necessary level of students 'motivation, activate background knowledge of a linguistic, verbal and sociocultural nature, prepare students to adequately perceive the complex language and speech aspects of the text, draw students' attention to the important and significant content of the text, use tasks ahead of schedule character;
– at the text stage, it is necessary to control the degree of formation of various language skills and speech skills, to develop text interpretation skills;
– at the post-text stage, the text should be used as a linguistic, speech or content basis for the development of skills in oral and written speech;
– to develop among students information and communication skills related to the ability to systematize and synthesize information, as well as to teach students to interpret figurative-schematic information, compress text and highlight its main content, use the information received in project activities. (This stage is carried out when the text is used not only as a means of teaching reading in a foreign language, but also for developing productive skills in oral or written speech, i.e. for teaching speaking and writing).
Accordingly, in the lesson, assignments can be distributed individually, taking into account the interests and wishes of students, i.e. a differentiated approach is carried out in conditions of joint activity, which involves various organizational forms of work: individual, pair, collective, group. Here, discussions can take place, questions are asked in case of ambiguities, and an exchange of views on what has been read can also take place and a degree of understanding of the content of the text can be revealed. Thus, the lesson will be submitted to the text and assignments to it, which require qualified teacher assistance in the lesson. For independent reading at home, more simplified texts are selected, or it can be a preparatory text for the subsequent reading of the main text in the lesson.
As practice shows, interest in a foreign language decreases in students with years of study. If in the 5th grade students are very interested in studying this subject, the reason for this is its comparative novelty and the specifics of this stage of training, then by the end of the 7th grade, an additional search for motivation is necessary. This is due to the specific age and socially determined individual characteristics of schoolchildren, as well as the absence of situations of real communication, which must be made up by using authentic texts and authentic language materials, computer technology.
Since such work satisfies the cognitive and educational needs of students, it is necessary to orient the educational process towards the development of the personality of each student: his life experience, motives, interests, worldview, status in the group, and language opportunities. Given the individual characteristics of students, it is necessary to distinguish educational materials by volume, by complexity, considering the interests and inclinations of the child. According to the questionnaire in grades 5–7, children willingly and enthusiastically use the computer for reading, and for searching for information, and for games.
Most researchers consider modern teaching technologies as one of the ways to implement a personality-oriented approach in the classroom, where students act as active creative subjects of educational activities. It must be added that modern educational technologies include the following forms of a personality-oriented approach: training in collaboration, project technologies, student-centered learning, distance learning, the use of a language portfolio, tandem method, intensive teaching methods, and the use of technical means. Learning technologies will contribute to the development of communicative characteristics of the student’s personality, the enrichment of knowledge on the subject and the disclosure of the child’s creative abilities, i.e. creating a creative environment in the learning process.
Teaching a foreign language is unthinkable without the widespread use of various teaching methods and means, the purpose of which is to build students' knowledge through a personality-oriented approach to teaching, which allows increasing qualitatively the level of cognitive interest among students.
Difficulties in teaching a foreign language, first of all, the difficulty associated with the fact that when teaching foreign language reading in the students' speech memory there are no sufficiently strong auditory-speech motor images of linguistic material, which are available, for example, in primary school students when teaching to read in their native language. It is believed that this difficulty can be overcome if the so-called oral advancing is carried out.
The reading process is complicated by the need to master the system of graphic characters that are different from the graphic characters of the native language, and the formation of skills to correlate them with foreign sounds.
The subsequent transition to reading to oneself, which should be specially organized, and not take place spontaneously, is difficult.
A significant difficulty arises when in the texts unfamiliar lexical ones are encountered, and at the middle and senior levels of study there are also separate grammatical phenomena.
References:
- Klychnikova Z. I. Psychological features of teaching reading in a foreign language. — M., Enlightenment, 1973.
- Matkovskaya I. L. Overcoming difficulties in teaching reading in English in high school. M., 2000. – 82 p.
