FULL RESEARCH PAPER-ATIYE BIHTER SAKIN

Running Head: ASKING STUDENTS TO READ IN CLASS 1

Asking Students to Read in Class: Applying New Ideas in

Teaching Reading

Atiye Bihter Sakin

Süleyman Şah University

15.01.2014

ASKING STUDENTS TO READ IN CLASS2

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to increase the amount of

reading time of twenty two intermediate students in class. Six

students at a preparatory school of Suleyman Sah University,

Istanbul individually participated in a structured interview

which focused on their possible reasons for not being able to

read articles till the end in class. The qualitative data has

revealed that these students have similar common reasons for

not being able to give their full attention to their reading

activities in class. The reasons were identified as; having

large amount of unknown words in the texts, boring and

uninteresting topics of the texts, long texts and not having

prior knowledge about the topics of the texts. These possible

reasons have led to new innovations and students have

demonstrated a high level of concentration. It is clear that

without discovering learners’ needs, it is not possible to

attract their attention and motivate them to read. However,

teachers should decide what serves best for the reading

purposes of their particular student groups, and thus design

materials accordingly.


Keywords: EFL reading, learners’ needs, increase time of

reading, motivation, design materials.


Asking Students to Read in Class: Applying New Ideas in

Teaching Reading

Introduction

Literature Review

Many empirical studies have shown that reading is one of

the major elements of developing academic knowledge and there

are contributing factors to facilitate reading skills.

Motivation is the initiator and the power that provides

continuance of reading process. It is clear that without being

aware of learners’ needs, it is impossible to keep their

attention and willingness to read. Guthrie and Humenick (2004)

stated that if a match is established between students’ needs

or interests and teaching materials, it is more likely to have

better and much more motivated students.

In this regard, William G. Brozo, E Sutton Flynt (2008)

suggested six evidence-based principles which include

instructional practices in the content areas that are

motivating and engaging. These practices can be listed as the

following: elevating self- efficacy, engendering interest in

new learning which means to arouse interest in the new content,


and connecting outside with inside school literacy by making

connections between lesson topics and their everyday practices

like e-mailing and participating in chat rooms or blogs. The

other suggestions made by Flynt and Brozo (2008) are making

abundance of interesting texts available, expanding choices and

options by allowing students more input into the texts and not

restricting them to answer in one way and lastly structuring

collaboration for motivation. For Guthrie (2008) student

motivation increases when there is collaboration between

teacher and student. This provides social motivation and might

cause more intrinsically motivated readers.

Huang suggests that (2006) it is necessary to provide

convenient consultation to answer student questions. One-on-one

consultation provides a kind of facilitation focusing on

individual needs and results in more autonomous learning.

Coaching students through consultation gives them confidence.

Other implications drawn by Huang is taking their learning

needs into consideration by having key points highlighted,

limiting the amount of new vocabulary, and using less

complicated sentence structures, clear organization and layout.


Lastly, teachers are suggested to provide authentic English

texts if the content is cognitively demanding.

Huang and her two friends Cheng and Chern (2006) emphasize

the importance of pre-reading materials in motivation and

understanding content-based reading texts. They attempted to

design some pre-reading materials to see how much they can be

facilitative to motivate learners and help them understand what

they read. They also emphasized the need for learner

characteristics so that more facilitation for EAP reading can

be provided. According to the result of their study, teachers

should decide what serves best for the learning purposes of

their particular student groups, and thus design materials

accordingly. In other words, it is suggested that what

motivates one student may not motivate another. Intellectually

challenging materials may attract learners with high academic

motivation and EFL proficiency, but the same materials might

not be interesting and useful to attract attention of learners

with lower academic motivation and EFL proficiency.

Research Question


It seems that on a journey of learning a second language

reading is an indispensable skill to be improved and

particularly learners who want to maintain their higher

academic pursuit in their majors are expected to read long

texts and analyze them during the class time in order to

improve their reading skills. On the other hand, having

difficulty in reading longer texts, keeping attention to the

end of the reading might be one of the major problems that

students encounter during their learning process in a class.

Little, however, is known about the possible solutions to these

problems mentioned above. Accordingly, a vitally important

question rises. This study addressed the following question:

Can teachers help students read longer academic content-based

texts in class with full concentration by applying new

innovations in the style of teaching a reading class?

Methodology

Participants and Setting

Initially, this action research took place at a

preparatory school of one of the private universities in

Istanbul. The aim of the school is to prepare students for the


proficiency exam which requires at least upper intermediate

level of English achievement so that the students are able to

maintain their higher academic pursuit in their own majors. In

this regard, students are required to improve their reading

skills and vocabulary knowledge especially together with class

reading activities by providing content-based texts through

some textbooks in English. The program in this institution

offers classes to improve students’ four skills in English and

I was the one who taught the academic content-based reading

book in one of the intermediate classes. This study was a two-

month research with six participants selected from one of the

intermediate classes including both male and female students

and an instructor as an interviewee in the first place. Lastly,

it includes the observation notes of the researcher and the

colleague as an observer and the reflection papers of twenty

two students of the class.

Data collection

Data collection consisted of classroom observations, field

notes and structured interviews with an instructor who taught

in the same class and the same structured interview with the


students randomly selected from the class. In the first place,

structured interviews were provided to act as a guide to a

solution. Six of the students from the class were randomly

selected and interviewed about the reasons of not being able to

read the texts till the end, and welcomed their suggestions

about the problem. Some questions directed to the participants

were like these: “Are you able to finish reading articles to

the end during the class?” or “Do you find the topics of the

articles in the book interesting?”

In addition to the interview with the students, the same

questions were directed to one of the instructor who taught in

the same class to get some further information on possible

reasons of the students’ not being able to read till the end of

the text.

In the second round of the study, during all innovations

were being introduced to the students, the classroom was

observed and taken some notes right after the class by the

researcher. Moreover, the instructor who taught in the same

class was invited to one of the lessons and asked her to take

some notes about the involvement of the students at every stage


of the lesson. Finally, the twenty two students were asked to

write their opinions about the classes of this four-week

period.

Data Analysis

Answers of the six students and the instructor to the

questions which were directed in the interview were analyzed by

coding. Moreover, in order to observe the reaction of the

students’ toward the activities, field notes which were taken

right after the classes were evaluated and compared with the

notes taken by the observer instructor during the application

of the innovations. In the end, opinions of the six

participants about the innovations were analyzed and coded.

Procedure

These findings about why the students did not manage to

keep their attention to finish reading enabled me to come up

with some solutions. Basing my research on the earlier findings

from the literature review and the suggestions of my students

and colleagues; I decided to make some innovations in the way I

was teaching that reading class. The activities that were

adapted from this research include the following:


Innovation 1: Activate my students’ prior knowledge about

the topic of the article and arouse interest using

visuals.

I did this by preparing some realia by using the

internet to design some pre- reading materials, and shared

them in class via smart board. I directed some questions

to students to check what they had already known and

provided some information to arouse interest in the new

content. To illustrate, the topic of the article was a

history of telling time. I asked about their opinions if

they agree either of these ideas or not: life without

clocks would be terrible or life without clocks would be

beautiful. I also asked about the reasons why they agreed

or not. I searched on the internet and found types of

clocks (a sundial, an obelisk, an hourglass, a pendulum

etc.) through the history. Showing these pictures of

different clocks, I wanted them to guess what they were

and how people could measure time with them.

Innovation 2: Using the smart board in the class.


I pre-taught eight to ten new and important unknown

words before they started reading. Therefore, I tried to

make them more confident while reading the article.

Innovation 3: Grouping students.

I observed that usually in reading classes, students

deal with text by themselves. Seeing this difficulty, I

made students read the article on their own, and then

divided them into five groups so that there were four

people in each group to analyze the text.

Innovation 4: Let the competition begin!

I announced the competition to all my students that

would last till the end of the lesson. After we got the

final scores we would choose the best group of the day,

and also I promised to give each group extra participation

grade, providing they could answer at least five questions

correctly.

Innovation 5: Deep into reading.

I told my students that I was going to play the audio

track of the article for the second reading. Therefore,

they had a chance of both reading and hearing the same

article. While listening by pausing after each paragraph,


I directed some questions regarding the text. In this way,

each group was directed two questions in the end. The aim

of the activity was to raise collaboration in class and,

to increase the duration of the motivation to keep them

focused on the article. Also, I developed a kind of

rivalry in the process because each group could get 1

point if they managed to answer correctly.

Innovation 6: Preparing a question.

After finishing the article, I assigned all

paragraphs of the article to each group and asked them to

prepare a question about their own paragraph. I gave them

some time to write their questions on the board and I made

necessary corrections together with the class. I did not

mind the small grammatical mistakes. If the meaning was

clear I gave one point to each group who succeeded in

writing a meaningful question.

Innovation 7: Answering their friends’ questions.

For the last step I got my students to answer the

questions which had been already written on the board.

However, this time I wanted them to write their answers on


a piece of paper as a group. Later, I collected them to

check, and I gave one point for each correct answer.

Innovation 8: Other minor changes in the reading style.

I sometimes changed the way of the reading style. For

instance, I made the students listen to the article first

and paused the recording suddenly, then asked one of the

students of that group to go on reading loudly. If the

student were able to continue without hesitation I gave

that group one point. Also as a second reading, I let them

read silently on their own and then they started preparing

their questions together with their friends in the group.

Results

According to the results of the structured interview about

the possible reasons of not being able read till the end of the

reading texts, four students out of six stated that they were

not able to finish reading the text till the end. On the other

hand, two of them told that they were able to finish reading

the text even if they got bored, yet they could not understand

the text fully. Moreover, a few of the students were not

interested in the topic of the reading texts while others found

the texts interesting but difficult. Also, half of the students


were reluctant to read because of the large amount of unknown

words but other half of the students mentioned that the texts

in the book were boring and they were not interested in the

topics. More than half of them also added that if they had had

prior knowledge about the topic of the reading text, they could

have kept reading to the end. Final and the common finding

about all these students was that the reading texts were too

long to finish at a time.

In addition to the interview with the students, according

to the results of the same interview with the colleague who

taught in the same class, nearly same reasons were raised.

Apart from the similarity, she mentioned some psychological

problems such as attention deficit and hyperactivity and

personal problems of the students.

Based on the field-notes of the researcher during the

innovations, there was a noticeable change in the behavior of

the students in the class. They seemed that visual material

used in activating learners’ prior knowledge, aroused their

interests to the topic of the reading texts. They looked eager

to understand pictures and comment on them. It can be observed


that the participation highly increased during the warm-up

session. Another observable behavior was the increase of

students’ involvement by getting them to write their own

questions and answering them as a group. It was obvious that

this made them end up with finishing the reading with full

concentration. Most importantly, they seemed happy to be

working as a group in a reading class.

These implications were also inspected the colleague who

observed the class. She reported that the students were trying

to read the article till the end to answer the questions which

were asked at the end of the lesson by their friends. Also,

pausing after each paragraph and directing questions to the

students kept them alert during the reading process. However,

she stated that there were a few students who had difficulty in

finding the answer of the questions, yet luckily, the friends

in the same group were assisting them to answer.

When it comes to the students’ views based on the

reflection paper about the new implementation after the four-

week period, nearly all of them stated that they were happy

with the new style of the lesson. To illustrate, sixteen


students pointed out that they were happy to finish the reading

text, and thus learn a lot about the content of the reading

texts. They also said that they learnt many unknown words in

this way. Moreover, they added that the topic of the texts were

not that much boring when they were able to concentrate and

understand it. More than half of the students expressed

that the teaching of these unknown words before starting to

read the text made them more confident and more involved in the

reading. According to the students’ comments, the best-loved

part of the lesson was the visuals and talking on the topic

before they started reading. Also, twelve students wrote that

dividing the long reading into parts while listening made it

easier to read. Six students were happy to read the text first

and then listen to it through the audio track for the second

time, on the other hand, the others preferred listening to the

text first and read it on their own. Moreover, fourteen

students wrote that they found useful to write their own

questions on the board and correct them together with the

class. Seven students also added that this activity made them

learn from their mistakes.

Discussion and Conclusion


This action research was useful as the reasons of

students’ not being able to the finish reading their texts

guided the researcher to design the type of her own activities.

In order to address the students’ needs and interests,

collecting accurate data is of high importance. With the help

of earlier findings, and the opinions of the colleagues and the

students, it became possible to make students read longer. In

addition, this study provided new insights into the way

teachers’ leading a reading class more efficiently.

It has been interpreted from the results that different

activities on the reading process had an impact on the

students’ attitude toward reading. By individualized

instruction and fulfilling the objectives of the reading class

students were able to read longer with more concentration. As

the learners stated that using visuals and directing questions

attracted their attention and then activated their prior

knowledge. It was also very helpful to manage to keep them

active by making students answer their own questions.

Moreover, small changes during the class made big

differences. For example; grouping them, putting some rivalry


into the process and providing flexibility in terms of minor

changes in the reading style. I felt that I was able to take

these suggestions of Flynt and Brozo (2008); expanding choices

and options by allowing students more input into the texts and

not restricting them to answer in one way and lastly

structuring collaboration for motivation.

However, teachers should always keep in mind that

classroom is dynamic and interactional. Therefore, we should be

aware of our students’ changing needs. Teachers can meet the

demands of dynamic class if they manage to connect inside class

issues with real life issues. In addition to this, student

motivation increases when there is collaboration between

teacher and student. As Flynt and Brozo (2008) suggested,

collaboration provides social motivation and might cause more

intrinsically motivated readers. Finally, this teacher research

was the fruit of this close collaboration to see more motivated

readers in my class.

The current study has made some contributions on

increasing motivation in reading classes and fostering more

student-centered reading activities. However, there are some


limitations such as the limited number of the participants and

it is lack of generalization. Findings in this action research

are relevant to specific class under investigation and its

students. It should not be forgotten that every class has its

own unique characteristics. While the innovations were

successful in the current study, it may produce different

results in other classrooms and contexts. Further empirical

studies, action research projects and classroom tasks are

needed so that it can be learned more about how instructors can

help students read with full concentration in class and afford

opportunities for teaching and learning in a variety of

contexts.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Assistant Prof. Erkan Karabacak for his

invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this article. I

would also like to thank Nur Karataş and Hümeyra Genç for their

insightful comments and suggestions. All errors are, of course,

my own.

Academic Biography


Atiye Bihter Sakin is an MA student in the Department of

English Language Teaching at Yeditepe University, Istanbul,

Turkey. She is an EFL teacher with 12 years of experience and

currently working as an EFL instructor at Suleyman Sah

University, Istanbul. Her research interests include teaching

efficacy, classroom management, language and writing

development of EFL learners. Correspondence concerning this

paper can be addressed to [email protected].


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