Sunday, March 6, 2016

From Intensive to Extensive Reading by Dr. Day

For your further information, watch this video!



The video is the presentation video about intensive and extensive reading by Dr. Richard Day. Here, I will share some points that I got from the video, started from his belief of reading. He believes that reading is a number of interactive processes, interactive means there is two ways when we read and the two ways is between the reader and the story. Every readers will create, build or construct different meaning of the same text when they read, it depends on their knowledge (knowledge of the world, the author, the topic, the language), as we know that people have different knowledge and background, thus there is no really-true meaning. He also stated that reading is magic and fun, I'm sure that you understand with the words "magic and fun", our imagination is 'on' when we read.

On the video, he gave a simple way how do we learn to read. He says that we learn to read by reading.
"the more reading we do, the better readers are students become. The more    opportunities we give our students to engage in reading, the better readers they  become."

He talked about reading strategies and skills, but firstly he focused on strategies. He doesn't agree of the use of grammar translation method in teaching reading because he believes that translation and reading is very different. Students do not read but students just learn to translate. Students just focus on translating word by word to find its meaning not to find the meaning or the main idea of the passage, theywill not understand the passage. Dr. Day differenciates the meaning of skills and strategies. Strategies are things that we do to help us do something, like what should we do? what will we do? strategies are planned, then when we do the strategies or the planned things automatically without thinking, they become skills. So he suggested us not to teach reading skills to our students but teach reading strategies to make them become skills for the readers, they will take the conscious behaviour and make it automatic behaviour. There are two points in strategy; Comprehension and Fluency. He makes a different of comprehension and fluency, comprehension strategies are the process to help us get meaning from the text there are several basic activities of comprehension strategy :

  1. Finding main ideas in paragraphs
  2. Recognizing the point of view
  3. Recognizing the refference words
  4. Identifying the meaning from the context
Fluency strategis that helps students move away from word by word but not reading slowly. There are also several activities:
  1. Sanning
  2. Predicting the topic
  3. Skimming for main idea
  4. Recognizing signal words
Dr. Day suggested us to moving away from comprehension and fluency

From the explantion, I got the point that comprehention is intensive and fluency is extensive. Extensive reading involves students in large quantities of material in new language. The goal often goes beyond learning to read and may improve stidents' overall language proficiency and their attitudes toward English and mtivation for learning. It can be blended into any language course and program regardless of the focus or methodology.
Dr. Day stated two benefits of extensive reading :
  1. Better readers
  2. Increased vocabulary knowledge
There are some extensive reading activities :
  1. Timed repeated reading
  2. Re-reading
  3. Predicting
  4. Thinking about the story
  5. Listen to the recording

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