Communicative reading in ELT- Strategies & sample activities

1. June 28th, 2016
Sebahat Yılmaz

2.  Introduction
 What does CLT mean?
 Activity Types in CLT
 How do we read?
 Can reading be communicative?
 Strategies used for communicative reading
 Samples activities: NLL
 Suggestions
 Conclusion
 References

3. Telling my students "And now
we're going to practise
listening." elicits looks of
dread and fear, and
announcing reading practice
often elicits yawns, heads
descending to desks, or eyes
ascending heavenwards..
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/making-reading-communicative

4.  This session and the presentations aim to show a theoretical
frame and practical activities to implement Communicative
Language Teaching in Listening and Reading classes of
English.
 The theory taken as a guide was discussed during our article
discussion sessions and they were chosen from different
books, websites and journals.
 Following the discussions, some practical activities to be
implemented in language classes were considered and
included in the concurrent sessions.

5. an absence of grammar in a course?

6.  Which of the statements below do you think
characterizes CLT?
1. People learn a language best when using it to do things
rather than through studying how language works and
practicing rules.
2. People learn a language through communicating in it.
3. Errors are not important in speaking a language.
4. CLT is only concerned with teaching speaking.
5. Classroom activities should be meaningful and involve real
communication.
6. Both accuracy and fluency are goals in CLT.
7. Grammar is no longer important in language teaching.

7.  What is the goal of language teaching?
• To develop communicative competence .
 «communicative competence»
• How sentences are used in communication
• Implications for English as an international language
• Not necessarily based on native-speaker norms

8. Jacobs and Farrell (2003) suggest that the CLT has led
to major changes in approaches to language teaching.
One of these changes is the thinking skills:
 Language should serve as a means of developing
higher-order thinking skills, also known as critical
and creative thinking.
 In language teaching, this means that students do not
learn language for its own sake but in order to
develop and apply their thinking skills in situations
that go beyond the language classroom.

9.  Mechanical Practice
 Meaningful Practice
 Communicative Practice
 Many CLT course books take students from
mechanical, to meaningful, to communicative practice
(Richards, 2006, p.16).

10.  Opinion-sharing activities:
Activities in which students compare values, opinions, or
beliefs, such as a ranking task in which students list six
qualities in order of importance that they might consider in
choosing a date or spouse.

11.  Information-transfer activities: These require
learners to take information that is presented in one
form, and represent it in a different form.

12.  A sample for Information – Transfer Activities:
 In pairs: A and B.
 As describe the picture & Bs draw.

15. Groups of three: A-B-C
 Bs and Cs go out.
 T pulls up a picture on a slide or give a copy of it to As.
 As study a picture for 1min.
 T hides the picture.
 Bs come in
 As describe the picture to Bs and Bs take notes.
 Cs come in
 Looking at their notes, Bs describe the picture to Cs.
 Cs draw a picture based on these descriptions.

16.  According to CLT, second language learning is...
• Interaction between the learner and users of the language
• Collaborative creation of meaning
• Creating meaningful and purposeful interaction through
language
• Attending to the feedback
• Paying attention to the input
• Incorporating new forms into communicative competence
• Experimenting with different ways of saying things

18. Aim:
 The aim of this part is to consider a few approaches to
making classroom reading more communicative, by
which I mean integrating it with other skills work, so
that students can see its value.

19. Reading Skills
 In order to comprehend a passage, we employ various
skills depending on what we are reading. These skills
are: (Harmer, 2003, pp. 201-202)
1. Identifying the topic
2. Predicting and guessing
3. Reading for general understanding
4. Reading for specific information
5. Reading for detailed information

20.  Reading is one of receptive skills. In this section,
some reading strategies will be put forward.
1. Skimming and scanning
2. Top-down and bottom-up
3. Word-attack skills.:
a. Inference meaning of words through the
context
b. Inference meaning of words through
word-formation

22.  Is reading, therefore, since it
is often a solitary activity, a
non-communicative activity?
 Just as communicative as any
other form of language use
 Talking about what we have
read is a rich source of
classroom possibilities
(Howarth, 2006).

23.  YES!
 Purpose is to enhance language and reading
comprehension in an engaging, supported environment.

24. How is Communicative Reading Different from Typical
Reading?
 Differs from typical book reading
– Planned—specific book and objectives
– Read very slowly, allowing time to teach language and content
– Comprehension of language and content are monitored continually
– When construction of meaning breaks, teacher scaffolds source of
the breakdown.
– Students re-read the text with confidence and comprehension
(Brinkley, 2014).

25.  Classroom reading is not the same as real reading.
 To enable this we plan 'pre-reading', 'while-reading',
and 'post-reading' stages. These stages can help us
make reading more communicative.

26.  Pre-reading tasks often aim to raise the readers' knowledge of
what they are about to read (their schematic knowledge) as this
knowledge will help them to understand the text.
 Some approaches to use include:
◦ Tell your partner what you know about the topic
◦ Do a quiz in pairs to find out what you know about the topic
◦ Look at some pictures related to the topic
◦ Skimming the first paragraph for gist and then predicting.

27.  When reading in our L1 we are constantly using our schematic
and linguistic knowledge to predict content.
 In class, predictions can be based upon the following:
◦ A title
◦ Visuals
◦ Knowledge of the author
◦ A skim of the first paragraph
◦ A set of keywords from the text
◦ Reading the end, predicting the beginning.
◦ Reading the middle, predicting the beginning and the end.

32.  Although reading is often a solitary activity and the idea of
'reading in pairs' seems odd, reading can be collaborative.
 Approaches to use include:
 Running and Reading
 Slashed/ Cut up texts
 Using Websites

33.  This approach especially lends itself to scanning as the idea is to
encourage the students to read as quickly as possible in a race.
1. Divide the class into student A and student B pairs. Student A sits at
one end of the classroom.
2. Stick the text to be read on the wall at the other end of the room.
3. Give student A a list of questions.
4. Student A reads the first question to student B who has to run down
the classroom to find the answer in the text, and then run back to
dictate the answer to student A, who then tells B question 2 and so
on.
5. The first pair to answer all the questions wins.
Ask the students to swap roles halfway through so everyone gets a
chance to scan.

34.  This is a genuinely collaborative reading approach.
1. Photocopy a suitable text and cut it into four.
2. Seat students in fours. Give a piece of the text to each
student. They mustn't show their piece to the others.
3. Give each group a set of questions.
4. The group have to work collaboratively to answer the
questions since no one has the whole of the text.
5. Groups can compare answers when they have
finished.

36.  Jigsaw reading is an old favourite but effective.
1. Divide a text into two parts or find two (or three)
separate texts on the same topic.
2. Students A get one text and a related task, students B
get the other text and task.
3. Students A complete their tasks in a group. Students B
likewise. Compare answers in A & B groups.
4. Students get into A & B pairs and tell each other about
their tasks.

37.  Telling someone about what we have read is a very
natural reaction to a text.
 Some ideas to use include:
1. Discussions about the text
2. Summarising texts
3. Reviewing texts
4. Using a 'follow-up' speaking task related to the topic
5. Looking at the language of the text (e.g. collocations)
(Howarth, 2006).

39.  In groups, Ss draw a picture of an ideal
Montessori classroom, and then they present
their pictures to the class.

40.  Yun Zhang introduced an oral language
component into intensive reading classes
(English Teaching Forum number 1, 2009).
 The classroom activities he proposed are
adapted as follows:

41.  This activity is designed to let students act out
a story they read.
 The text selected for this activity should
contain a plot involving more than one person.
(at least two players and one director in each
group)
 The plot should be represented through
dialogues.
 To make the activity more interesting, students
are encouraged to use their imaginations and
make any changes to the plot and dialogues in
their performance.

43.  This activity requires students to engage in a
debate from an article or other source.
 A debate can deepen students’ understanding of
the issue discussed in the text. In addition, they
learn how to view and orally defend a topic from a
different perspective.

45.  This activity is more flexible than the
previous two. It is organised around texts
from different genres.
 This activity provides students with
opportunities to orally represent ideas from
the text they have read. It also helps them
learn to ask questions about different issues.

47. Choosing the text & the book
 Contains lesson objectives
 Genres
– Expository (intended to explain or describe something)
 – Narrative (describing events or telling a story)
 Interesting
 Has pictures that enhance the content
 Presents challenges to the readers
– Content
– Vocabulary
– Syntax and morphology
– Reading level
– Text Structure (Brinkley, 2014).

48. Choosing Objectives
 Depth vs. Breadth
-Deepen knowledge of a few target objectives
-Broaden understanding with more objectives
 Focus for the session (allowing for spontaneity)
– Vocabulary (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2003)
– Text Structure, i.e., expository text or narrative story structure
– Inference—reading between the lines
– Content—information
– Syntactic structures—complex sentences
 • Props
– Sticky notes on pages
– Cards to highlight vocabulary – Story board (Norris)

49.  Communicative reading is taught integratively with the
other language skills.
 Some classroom activities to teach communicative
reading are: read to act, read to debate, read to
interview.
 These classroom activities make the reading task more
interesting for the students.
 These activities stimulate the students to practise the
four language skills.

50.  Brinkley, S. (2014). Becoming the go-to person for communicative reading.
Lecture presented in Arizona State University.
 Jacobs, G. M., & Farrell, T. S. (2003). Understanding and Implementtng the
Clt (Communicative Language Teaching) Paradigm. RELC Journal, 34(1), 5-
30. doi:10.1177/003368820303400102
 Maley, A. (2010) Extensive reading: Why it is good for our students and for
us. Retrieved from https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/extensive-
reading-why-it-good-our-students…-us
 Norris, J. A. (1988, March). Using Communication Strategies to Enhance
Reading Acquisition. The Reading Teacher, 41(7), 668-673. Retrieved from
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20199892.pdf?_=1466926263716
 Richards, J. C. (2006). Communicative language teaching today. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
 Rustipa, K. (2010, December). Teaching Communicative Reading. Ragam
Jurnal Pengembangan Humaniora, 10(3), 125-130.
 https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/making-reading-communicative