Foundations in English Language Teaching

5.1 The Pillars of Literacy: Reading and Writing

Reading and writing are often termed literacy skills and are cornerstones of language proficiency, particularly in academic and professional settings.

Why Teach Reading and Writing?

• Reading as Input: Reading provides rich, contextualized exposure to vocabulary, grammar, discourse structures, and cultural information. It allows learners to process language at their own pace, unlike the fleeting nature of spoken language.
• Writing as Output & Consolidation: Writing allows learners to actively construct language, organize their thoughts logically, and focus on accuracy. The act of writing helps consolidate vocabulary and grammar knowledge and develops critical thinking skills.
• Reciprocal Reinforcement: Strong reading skills often support better writing, as learners internalize language patterns and styles through reading. Conversely, writing practice can enhance reading comprehension by deepening understanding of text structure and language use.

Integrating Reading and Writing

While sometimes taught separately, integrating reading and writing often leads to more effective learning. For example, learners might read a model text before writing a similar piece, or write a summary or response after reading an article. This integration mirrors how these skills are often used in real life.

5.2 Developing Reading Skills

Reading is not a single skill but a complex process involving various strategies depending on the purpose and text.

Types of Reading & Associated Skills

• Extensive Reading (Reading for Pleasure/Fluency):
  • Purpose: General understanding, enjoyment, vocabulary growth, building reading speed.
  • Materials: Graded readers, novels, magazines, websites (chosen by the learner, often slightly below their intensive reading level).
  • Skills: Reading quickly, focusing on overall meaning, tolerating some unknown words.
  • Classroom Application: Setting up class libraries, encouraging reading logs, book clubs.
• Intensive Reading (Reading for Detail/Analysis):
  • Purpose: Close examination of shorter texts to understand specific details, language features (vocabulary, grammar), or text structure.
  • Materials: Short articles, textbook passages, poems, emails.
  • Skills: Reading carefully, analyzing language, understanding complex sentences, identifying main ideas and supporting details.
  • Classroom Application: Comprehension questions, vocabulary/grammar analysis, text annotation.
• Skimming:
  • Purpose: Reading quickly to get the main idea or overall gist of a text.
  • Technique: Reading headings, subheadings, topic sentences, introduction, conclusion.
  • Application: Deciding if a text is relevant, getting a quick overview before reading intensively.
• Scanning:
  • Purpose: Reading quickly to find specific pieces of information (e.g., names, dates, numbers, keywords).
  • Technique: Letting eyes float over the text looking only for the target information, ignoring the rest.
  • Application: Finding a phone number in a directory, locating a specific date in an article.

Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension

Effective readers use various strategies before, during, and after reading:

• Before Reading (Pre-Reading):
  • Activating Prior Knowledge: What do learners already know about the topic?
  • Predicting: What might the text be about based on title, headings, pictures?
  • Setting a Purpose: Why are we reading this text? What information do we need?
  • Pre-teaching Key Vocabulary: Introducing essential words needed for comprehension.
• During Reading (While-Reading):
  • Monitoring Comprehension: Are learners understanding? Encouraging self-questioning.
  • Guessing Meaning from Context: Using surrounding words to infer unknown vocabulary.
  • Visualizing: Creating mental images of the text content.
  • Making Connections: Linking text content to personal experiences or other texts.
  • Annotating/Note-taking: Highlighting key points, writing summaries in margins.
• After Reading (Post-Reading):
  • Summarizing: Recounting the main ideas in their own words.
  • Responding: Discussing opinions, reacting to the text.
  • Analyzing: Examining text structure, author's purpose, language use.
  • Follow-up Tasks: Linking reading to speaking or writing activities.

5.3 Approaches to Teaching Writing

Teaching writing involves helping learners express ideas clearly, coherently, and accurately in written form.

Product vs. Process Approaches

• Product Approach:
  • Focus: The final written text. Emphasis on accuracy, grammar, structure, and imitating model texts.
  • Typical Stages: Teacher provides a model, analyzes it with students, students write their own version, teacher evaluates the final product (often focusing on errors).
  • Pros: Provides clear models, emphasizes accuracy.
  • Cons: Can be demotivating, doesn't reflect how proficient writers actually write (which involves multiple drafts and revisions), may neglect idea generation and organization.
• Process Approach:
  • Focus: The stages involved in creating a written text. Emphasizes writing as a recursive process of thinking, drafting, and revising.
  • Typical Stages:
    1. Pre-writing/Planning: Brainstorming ideas, outlining, gathering information.
    2. Drafting: Getting ideas down on paper without excessive focus on perfection.
    3. Revising: Rethinking and reorganizing content, improving clarity, focus, and development of ideas (often involves peer feedback).
    4. Editing: Correcting errors in grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and mechanics.
    5. Publishing/Sharing: Presenting the final work.
  • Pros: More realistic, develops writing skills holistically, encourages learner autonomy and critical thinking, values ideas and communication.
  • Cons: Can be more time-consuming, requires careful management of feedback stages.
• Balanced Approach: Most modern teaching incorporates elements of both, recognizing the value of models (product) while emphasizing the stages of creation (process).

Key Elements in Teaching Writing

• Genre Awareness: Helping learners understand the conventions of different types of writing (e.g., emails, essays, reports, stories).
• Cohesion and Coherence: Teaching how to link ideas logically using cohesive devices (e.g., transition words like "however," "in addition"; pronouns; repetition) and ensuring the text makes sense overall.
• Audience and Purpose: Emphasizing the importance of considering who the writing is for and why it is being written.
• Feedback: Providing constructive feedback (from teacher and peers) focused not just on errors but also on content, organization, and clarity. Feedback should be timely and selective (not overwhelming).
• Scaffolding: Providing support structures (e.g., sentence starters, outlines, graphic organizers) to help learners manage complex writing tasks, especially at lower levels.

5.4 Integrating Reading and Writing

Combining these skills creates powerful learning opportunities:

• Reading as a Model for Writing: Analyze features of a text (e.g., structure of a persuasive essay, language used in formal emails) before learners write their own.
• Writing in Response to Reading: Summaries, critiques, personal responses, letters to the editor/author.
• Using Reading to Gather Information for Writing: Researching a topic through reading before writing a report or presentation.
• Jigsaw Reading and Writing: Different groups read different texts on a topic, then share information to collaboratively write a summary or report.

Practical Applications: Activities & Techniques

Reading Activities:

• Graphic Organizers: Using charts, tables, or diagrams to map out information from a text.
• True/False/Not Given: Checking detailed comprehension.
• Sequencing Events: Ordering paragraphs or events from a story.
• Matching Headings to Paragraphs: Practicing identifying main ideas.
• Reading Circles/Literature Circles: Small groups discuss a shared reading text.

Writing Activities:

• Process Writing Tasks: Guiding learners through brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revising, and editing for a specific genre.
• Collaborative Writing: Students work together to produce a single text (e.g., group story, class blog post).
• Guided Writing: Providing sentence starters, templates, or substitution tables.
• Journaling/Free Writing: Encouraging fluency and idea generation without immediate pressure for accuracy.
• Dictogloss (for Writing): Learners listen to a short text read multiple times and reconstruct it in writing, focusing on both content and language accuracy.

5.6 Module Summary and Key Takeaways

• Reading and writing are interconnected literacy skills crucial for language development.
• Effective reading involves using different strategies (skimming, scanning, intensive/extensive reading) based on purpose.
• Teaching reading comprehension involves activities before, during, and after reading.
• The process approach to writing (planning, drafting, revising, editing) develops writing skills more holistically than focusing only on the final product.
• Teaching writing involves genre awareness, cohesion/coherence, and providing constructive feedback.
• Integrating reading and writing tasks enhances learning in both areas.

5.7 Assessment and Reflection

5.8 Additional Resources & Further Exploration

• Books:
  • Teaching and Researching Reading – William Grabe & Fredricka L. Stoller
  • Teaching Second Language Writing – Dana Ferris & John Hedgcock
  • Writing Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching - Joy Reid
• Websites:
  • Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL): Extensive resources on writing, grammar, and citation (useful for higher levels).
  • ReadWriteThink: Lesson plans and resources for K-12, many adaptable for ELT.
  • ER Central: Resources and information on Extensive Reading.