In this post, I am going to focus on some reading strategies that can help us in a CLIL lesson. I just choose some of the strategies, actually I pick those ones that I think that are easier to implement in a lesson with English as a second language. All these strategies are using scaffolding technics as activate pre-knowledge, schemata, discourse frames, contextualizing or think-pair-share.
.png)
Question Chart: Improving Reading Comprehension through
Questioning
This strategy consists of asking questions the children about a book but just giving little clues, like showing the cover, telling some attributes about the main character or reading a few pages of the book. The questions can be formulated by the teacher or the students, by wondering what is going to happen next. Once they find the answer in the book, they have to reason the answer with the support of the book.
In this process the pupils have to make
predictions, activating their own schema with their previous
knowledge/experiences.
We can give discourse frames to facilitate
the questions for example why, what, when, where, who and how.
Story
Bits: Retelling Stories to Build Strategies in Real Reading and Real Writing
Here the students have to guess what is the story about just looking at the cover. This is a warm up to activate their schema. After that, the teacher reads the whole story, so it is time to start with the activities.
First activity is a brainstorm in pairs
about what happened in the story following this order; beginning, middle and
end.
In the second activity every student has to
re-write the story in one page. As there is not enough room in one page they should
summarize it.
Finally the students share the story with
the rest of the classroom.
VIDEO
Interactive
Story Retelling: Encouraging Retelling with Picture Supports
We can this strategy to encourage the children to retell the story with pictures supports. The firs step is to involve all the students in the story. It is easy if we give a picture of any character of the story to each pupil, so when I am telling the story and a new character appears, the student with the picture sticks it on the blackboard. Now the students can re-tell the story with the help of all the visuals we have been using (pictures).
Finally we give all the pictures used in
the story to each student so they can use it to re-tell the story to a
classmate or even at home.
Engaging
in Reading
We need to choose an already known story for the kids and after re-telling to them, ask questions about what happened at the beginning of the story, in the middle and to the end.
Once we have refreshed the story, the
students have to choose their favourite part of the story and draw a picture,
as next day they will have to write a little story about what is happening in
their picture and share with the rest.
Building
Reading Comprehension: Five Senses Story Reading
This strategy consist of using the five senses to activate and connect the previous knowledge of the students with the story. The pupils have to predict was going to happen in the next page, but this prediction is made through the senses as we should ask the pupils questions related to both, the story and the senses. For example, you make a noise related to the story and ask, what is that noise?
Sentence
Starters: Making Text-to-Self Connections
When we support the students with these sentence starters (reminds me of, etc.), we are helping them to activate the schema of their previous knowledge and experiences which help them to understand the story better. It is very important to have into account that the schema is different in everyone.
Wow! Well done, Eduardo. You're doing a great job with this blog, not only raising awareness on key issues but also expanding the elements seen in class with more materials and resources. Just a word of caution, you sometimes mix strategies, and resources. For example, 'activating prior-knowledge' is a scaffolding technique which can be done using different resources, for example, an KWL chart. However, Schemata is not a scaffolding technique, is a concept. Also, Discourse Frames (Writing Frames?) are also scaffolding resources. By the way, you can find great writing grames here: http://www.skillsforlifenetwork.com/?mod=1&dok=574
ResponderEliminarHello Eduardo!:)
ResponderEliminarI have found your post as very interesting and useful! I am glad you gave us ideas how to work with the children and develop their reading skills and also other. I also consider reading as one of the very important parts in learning while we work on our second language knowledge. It can have many advantages for learner to read, like to broaden a vocabulary, to see many of new sentence structures or to find out how we can use language to make it more interesting for listener or writer.
Mostly I like ideas where the students can be supported by any visual materials or even by teacher, because many of them would be very good at what are they doing, but sometimes they just need a little support or a drive to move. I also think there is lot of students at this age, who are visual learners, what means they learn mostly through some visual material or whatever they can see or imagine.
I like also very much the idea of the activity: Five Senses Story Reading, where we try to activate all of their senses. This is very appropriate for younger learners, who are still very playful and not ashamed to perform anything.
There is only one thing which I would add to this great post, and it is that most of the activities I would use in that way the students will compete. I have seen and experienced that the most of the students are very competitive and I see it conducts them to produce more effort in activities, but anyhow thank you so much for ideas you provided in this post, you gave me many ideas. ;)
See ya
Lenka