Reading Skills in the Malaysian Primary School English

7/30/2019 Reading Skills in the Malaysian Primary School English

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Reading skills in the

Malaysian Primary School

English Language

Curriculum

Selecting, Adapting, and Producing Activitiesand Materials for developing Reading Aloud

and Reading Comprehension Skills

Suitability OfContent

Exploitability Readability

Raafah Azkia bt Abdullah Ripain. TESL 2


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1)Suitability of content

The most important aspect of choosing stories to be read to the

students is attractive.

Stories that the students interested to.

Select stories that have an interesting plot (story line), frequent

dialogue, some suspense and/or adventure, suitable emotional

content for the age and background of children.

For e.g

-Stories about heroic people, family trips, pets, hobbies etc.


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How???

Find out what types of books students read in their first

language.

Check which books are most borrowed from library.

Be alert of the topics/stories that students talk among

them.

Informal discussions with their parents, and peers.

Ask their suggestions and opinions.


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2)Exploitability

The most important criteria after interest.

Also known as facilitation of learning.

The focus of a reading lesson is how the language is used for

conveying content for a purpose-for communication.

Our ultimate goal of teaching reading is to ensure students are

able to extract the content from the language and use it for

different context.


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Stimulating real-life purposes

Authentic texts can be motivating as students can see

the language is used for real-life purposes.

Authentic materials mean exposure to real languageand its use in its own community (Widdowson, 1990)

For e.g

Newspapers, magazines, comics, movies, brochures,

etc.


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3)Readability

Readability is the ease in which the text can be read and

understood.

It also concerns with the problem of matching between reader

and text.

A fluent reader is likely to be bored by simple repetitive text.

A poor reader will soon become discouraged by texts which

he/she finds too difficult to be read fluently.


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Readability also refers to the reading level of a

book.

This level should not be considered not only by

teachers, parents, and librarians when selecting

books for children but also by children themselves.

Readability formulas provide a rough measure of a

range of difficulty of books based on the number

of difficulty words and the average sentence

length.


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Structural difficulty

The complexity of words and sentence length must be

in relation to the reading ability of the reader.

For year 1-3, select books that contain many sight

words and shorter sentence.

For year 4-6, select books that have longer sentence,

more complex words-introduce new words.


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Ways to check the readability of

books.

1) Using five-finger-test

-select a page in a book and counting on the fingers

of one hand the number of unknown words.

-If there are five or more unknown words ( not

including in the word-list), the book may be too

difficult to be used for reading aloud.


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2) Readability index

A software for assessing readability of text for children.

This a way of assessing a text by giving it a kind of

score.

R1 will give teachers a yardstick to measure the

readability of the texts.


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Thank you

Documents

Reading Skills in the Malaysian Primary School English