1.Teaching reading as a communicative receptive activity, main types of reading.

Reading is a receptive speech activity and one of communicative aims in teaching-learning foreign
languages. Reading ability will best be developed in association with writing, listening, and speaking
activity.

The autonomous reader Is a flexible reader who applies a variety of reading strategies depending on the
reading purpose and who knows when his/her comprehension is adequate for that purpose, whether
skimming to get a general idea of the text, scanning for specific points or reading for detailed
comprehension.

The promotion of efficient reading can be assisted by suitable tasks which reflect the Interactive nature of
reading and help learners to develop good reading strategies. Learners should be made to be aware of how
discourse is organised, and encouraged to process the text in meaningful ‘chunks’ rather than word by
word.

It Is important to provide learners with opportunities to read complete texts rather than only short
extracts, that they can develop enough context to facilitate comprehension and to become familiar with a
writer's style.

As well as being a source of pleasure and information, written texts are also an important means of
presenting new vocabulary in context. It is not simply a question of testing learners’ receptive knowledge
but f devising activities to activate and reinforce useful lexis from a text.

The main types of reading include:

1. Skimming: Quickly scanning text to get the main idea.

2. Scanning: Searching for specific information in a text.

3. Close Reading: Analyzing a text deeply, focusing on details and nuances.

4. Critical Reading: Evaluating the text’s credibility, arguments, and implications.

5. Recreational Reading:Reading for pleasure, entertainment, or relaxation.

6. Technical Reading: Engaging with specialized texts, often in professional or academic contexts.

7. Speed Reading: Techniques to increase reading speed while maintaining comprehension.

2. Strategies for reading comprehension

For most second language learners who are already literate in a previous language, reading comprehension
is primarily a matter of developing appropriate, efficient comprehension strategies.

Following strategies can be practically applied to our classroom techniques:

1. Identify the purpose in reading

Efficient reading consists of clearly identifying the purpose in reading something. By doing so, you know
what you’re looking for and can weed out potential distracting information.

2. Use grapheme rules and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding

3. Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension.

If you are teaching beginning level students, this particular strategy will not apply. Your intermediate to
advanced level students need not be speed readers, but you can help them to increase efficiency by
teaching a few silent reading rules:

 You don’t need to “pronounce” each word to yourself.

 Try to visually perceive more than one word at a time, preferably phrases.
 Unless a word is absolutely crucial to global understanding, skip over it and try to infer its meaning
through its context.

4. Skimming and scanning

Perhaps the two most valuable reading strategies for learners as well as native speakers are skimming (to
get the general idea of the text) and scanning (to get or to extract certain specific information from the
text).

5. Semantic mapping or clustering

The strategy of semantic mapping or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, helps the reader to provide
some order to the chaos.

6. Guessing

This is an extremely broad category. Learners can :

 guess the meaning of a word

 guess a grammatical relationship
 guess a discourse relationship
 guess about a cultural reference
 guess the main content of the massage or information.

7. Vocabulary analysis

One way for learners to immediately recognize a word is to analyze it in terms of what they know about it.
Several techniques are useful here:

 look for prefixes that may give clues

 look for suffixes that may indicate what part of speech it is
 look for roots that are familiar
 look for grammatical contexts that may signal information
 look at the semantic context (topic) for clues.
3. Types of classroom reading performance

Reading and writing are often called literacy skills. The teaching and learning of these skills are closely
connected with each other: one enforces the other.

There are 2 ways of reading

1. aloud or oral
2. silent

Intensive Reading

Silent reading may be subcategorized into intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading, analogous to
intensive listening, is usually a classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or
semantic details of a passage. Intensive reading calls students’ attention to grammatical forms, discourse
markers, and other surface structure details. Intensive reading also may be a totally content-related
reading initiated because of subject-matter difficulty.

Extensive Reading

Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a text. All kinds of pleasure reading is
extensive. Technical, scientific, and professional reading can also be extensive. At other times, perhaps
after students have done some pre-reading

Activity, skimmed for the gist, and scanned for some key details, extensive reading is quite simply a
relatively rapid and efficient process of reading a text for global or general meaning.

In teaching a foreign language both ways should be developed from the very beginning. Skimming consists
of quickly running one’s eyes across a whole text to get the gist. Skimming gives readers the advantage of
being able to predict the

Purpose of the passage, the main topic or message. The main goal of skimming reading is to get the
general understanding of the text.

Scanning is one of the “most valuable” categories of reading, the purpose of which is quickly searching for
some particular piece or pieces of information in a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look for
names or dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details. The
main goal of scanning reading is to extract certain specific information without reading through the whole
text.
4. Pre-reading and post-reading activities

Before reading: Plan for the reading task

• Set a purpose or decide in advance what to read for

• Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed
• Determine whether to enter the text from the top down or from the bottom up

Learners may be prepared for the text in various ways depending on the type of text and the level of the
learners.

Some possibilities:

• Necessary or helpful background information is provided or recalled

• A shortened and/or simplified version of the text is provided.
• Learners reorder a list of jumbled sentences or join up split sentences which contain the main
points from the text.
• A broadly-similar type of text which introduces key vocabulary and expressions is studied
beforehand.
• A listening text on the same topic is presented, e.g. a news item from the radio or television is
played before reading about the same event in a newspaper article.
• A diagrammatic representation which summarises the text is studied and discussed.
• Learners study a few general questions on the text which activate what they already know about
the subject and suggest the kind of new information which might be presented in the text.
• Learners are given the theme of the text. In a brainstorming activity, they try to anticipate some of
the main points and offer their own ideas in a prereading discussion.
• A number of statements are made about the theme. Learners are asked to say whether they agree
or disagree with them and to give their reasons.
• Key words are supplied and learners try to guess what the text might be about.

Pre-reading activities are most important at lower levels of language proficiency and at earlier stages of
reading instruction. As students become more proficient at using reading strategies, you will be able to
reduce the amount of guided pre-reading and allow students to do these activities themselves.

After reading: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use:

• Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area

• Evaluate overall progress in reading and in particular types of reading tasks
• Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
• Modify strategies if necessary

Learners react in a personal way to the text, relating it to their own opinions, feelings and experience in
activities which may involve discussion and the creation of new texts. A few possibilities are summarised
below and some of these are illustrated in examples.

Learners could

• express their views on the subject of the text and relate it to their own experience and that of their
classmates
• discuss and justify their different interpretations of a text
• create new texts
• create a similar text modelled on the one just read
• undertake a project on the theme of the text
• illustrate a story or their feelings about a text
• recreate the text
5. While-Reading Activities

During reading: Monitor Comprehension.

- Verify predictions and check for inaccuracies.

- Determine key information.
- Reread for clarity.
- Ask for help when needed.

*Summary*:

Skills include deducing meaning, questioning, recognizing, matching, ordering, following instructions,
comparing, note-taking, completing, and decision-making/problem-solving.

*Deducing Meaning*:

Use context, word formation, and prior knowledge to understand text. It may be helpful if learners
occasionally note the strategies they use, so that, they can later examine and evaluate them.

*Questioning*:

The most popular question types found in course books are multiple choice, true/false, and "wh-"
questions. They help guide understanding and test comprehension. Wh-questions may simply deal with
facts in the text (e.g. Who said...? What was the girl's name?) or may be open-ended and allow learners to
offer their own interpretations of the text (e.g. Why do you think that N....? What do you think might have
happened that caused...? What would you have done if you had been N?) Open-ended questions of this
kind can be particularly useful in a brainstorming session where all learners' views are accepted and noted
without comment. This type of questioning facilitates not only individual interpretation of the text but also
encourages learner. Learners can create questions for peers to promote interaction and deeper
understanding. The teacher models good questioning techniques and may ask any of five types of
questions, using the acronym FIVE.

• F-factual questions i.e. those that are directly answered in the story, e.g. "What was the girl's
name?"
• I - inference questions, ie. those where the learners have to think about the story or make a guess if
they are making predictions about a section not yet read, e.g. "Why do you think the boys were
afraid to go to the cemetery?"
• V- vocabulary questions, i.e. those which reveal knowledge or lack of it about the words in the
story, e.g. "What does the word 'cemetery' mean?"
• E experience questions, i.e. those that help learners draw on their own background with the
subject, e.g. "Have you ever had a sick friend?"

*Recognizing*:

• .Identify text type, purpose, genre, main ideas, tone, and author’s intention.
• .Analyze relationships and coherence within the text.

*Matching*:

- Match statements or actions with corresponding paragraphs.

- Check comprehension based on the purpose of reading.
*Ordering*:

• Reorder jumbled paragraphs, sentences, or sequences to understand the text better.

*Following Instructions*:

• Trace routes, mark places, or follow complex processes as described in the text.

*Comparing*:

- Compare texts with differing viewpoints or additional information.

- Highlight main information and analyze the purpose and attitude of each text.

*Note-taking*:

- Note main ideas, arguments, and specific points.

- Focus on text organization and main information.

*Completing*:

- Expand headlines, finish sentences, fill gaps, correct mistakes, complete maps or diagrams,
and solve crosswords based on the text.

*Decision-Making/Problem-Solving*:

- Use text as a stimulus for making decisions or solving problems, e.g., choosing a holiday
based on a travel brochure.
6.Principles for designing interactive reading techniques

1. In an interactive curriculum, make sure that you don't overlook the importance of specific instruction
in reading skills.

ESL students who are literate in their own language sometimes are "left to their own devices" when it
comes to teaching them reading skills. We like to assume that they will simply learn good reading by
absorption.

It is important to make sure that students have ample time for extensive reading. Sustained silent
reading allows students to develop a sense of fluency.

2. Techniques should be intrinsically motivating.

One very popular and intrinsically motivating approach to reading instruction is called the Language
Experience Approach (LEA). Developed initially for use in native language instruction of children, the
LEA has now found its way into numerous ESL classes for both children and adults.

The essence of this approach lies in students' self-generation of reading material. Instead of being
handed some standard textbook, they create their own.

3. Techniques should utilize authentic language and contexts.

By now the importance of authentic language should be more than clear. But in teaching reading, one
issue that has invited a bit of controversy is the advisability of what are called "simplified texts," in
which an otherwise authentic text is edited to keep language within the proficiency level of a set of
students. In order to make a decision on this issue, it is important

 to distinguish between simple texts and simplified texts,

 to understand sources of complexity in reading material.

4. Encourage the development of reading strategies (mentioned above).

5. Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques.

6. Build in some evaluative aspect to your techniques.

It is as important in reading as it is in listening to be able to accurately assess students' comprehension

and development of skills.
7. Writing as a productive communicative activity, Microskills for writing.

*Writing as a Communicative Skill*

Writing is essential for sending, storing, and retrieving messages via written symbols. It originated in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, pre-Columbian America, and possibly India, with the earliest evidence being the
cuneiform script from Mesopotamia around 3500 BC. Modern writing systems vary, including morphemic
and word representations (Chinese), syllabic representations (Hebrew), and alphabetic representations
(English, Russian, Armenian).

In foreign language classrooms, writing can be more enjoyable and meaningful than some artificial
speaking activities. Good writing tasks provide useful language practice and stimulate creative and
personal expression. Writing isn't just for error correction but is a purposeful activity for communicating
with specific readers, including peers, teachers, and the target language community.

Unlike speech, writing requires better organization and precision, as writers cannot immediately check for
understanding. Writing allows time for reflection and revision, contrasting with the immediacy of spoken
communication. Developing good writing skills requires extensive reading and listening for input, along
with regular writing practice for skill development and expression.

Writing practice can be controlled or guided with models, matrices, and key points, or freer with more
responsibility on learners for content and organization. Writing is a process involving planning, drafting,
writing, and editing, where mistakes indicate learning. Interactive writing activities, such as group
discussions and collaborative drafting, enhance learning. Trends in teaching writing often align with those
in teaching listening and speaking skills.

*Writing as a Macroskill*

Writing, like listening, speaking, and reading, is a macroskill comprising several microskills:

- Produce English graphemes and orthographic patterns

- Write efficiently to suit the purpose
- Use an acceptable core of words and appropriate word order
- Apply correct grammatical systems (tense, agreement, pluralization)
- Express meanings in various grammatical forms
- Use cohesive devices in discourse
- Apply rhetorical forms and conventions of written discourse
- Accomplish communicative functions according to form and purpose
- Convey links between events and relations like main/supporting ideas, new/given information,
generalization, and exemplification
- Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
- Correctly convey culturally specific references
8. Principles for designing writing techniques.

Out of all characteristics of the written word, along with microskills and research issues, a number of
specific principles for designing writing techniques emerges.

1. *Incorporate Practices of "Good" Writers*

This first guideline is sweeping. But as you contemplate devising a technique that has a writing goal in it,
consider the various things that efficient writers do, and see if your technique includes some of these
practices. For example, good writers:

- Focus on a goal or main idea.

- Spend some time planning.
- Let first ideas flow easily.
- Follow a general organizational plan.
- Solicit and utilize feedback.
- Make as many revisions as needed.

2. *Account for Cultural/Literary Backgrounds*

- Avoid assuming students know English rhetorical conventions.

- Help students understand their native traditions and English rhetoric.

3. *Connect Reading and Writing*

- Students learn by reading and studying a variety of texts.

- Gain insights on writing and potential topics.

4. *Provide Authentic Writing*

Whether writing is real writing or for display, it can still be authentic to convey meaning. Publishing a class
newsletter, writing letters to people outside of class, writing a resume, writing advertisements-all these can
be seen as authentic writing.

5. Frame techniques in terms of prewriting, drafting, and revising stages. Process writing approaches tend
to be framed in three stages of writing. The prewriting stage encourages the generation of ideas, which can
happen in numerous ways:

1. reading a passage
2. skimming and/or scanning a passage
3. conducting some outside research.
4. brainstorming
5. listing
6. clustering
7. discussing a topic or question.
8. instructor-initiated questions and probes
9. freewriting.
9. Types of classroom writing performance

Let's consider the following major categories of classroom writing performance:

1. Imitative or writing down

At the beginning level of learning to write, students will simply "write down" English letters, words, and
possibly sentences in order to learn the conventions of the orthographic code. Some forms of dictation fall
into this category although dictations can serve to teach and test higher order processing as well.

Steps in dictation:

1. Teacher reads a paragraph at normal speed.

2. Teacher reads in short phrases with pauses for students to write.
3. Teacher reads the whole paragraph again for students to check.
4. Scoring focuses less on spelling/punctuation errors.

2. Intensive or Controlled

Writing used for learning/testing grammatical concepts. This intensive writing typically appears in
controlled, written grammar exercises. A common form of controlled writing is to present a paragraph to
students in which they have to alter a given structure throughout. (e.g., changing tenses).

Guided writing loosens the teacher's control but still offers a series of stimulators. For example, the
teacher might get students to tell a story just viewed on a video tape by asking them a series of questions.
Yet another form of controlled writing is a dicto-comp. Students rewrite a paragraph using key words
provided by the teacher.

3. Self-writing

A significant proportion of classroom writing may be devoted to self-writing or writing with only the self in
mind as an audience. The most salient (distinguish) instance of this category in classrooms is notetaking,
where students take notes during a lecture for the purpose of later recall. Other notetaking may be done in
the margins of books. and on odd scraps of paper. Diary or journal writing also falls into this category.

4. Display Writing

For all language students, short answer exercises, essay examinations, and even research reports will
involve an element of display. This is important for academically bound ESL students.

5. Real Writing

While virtually every classroom writing task will have an element of display writing in it, nevertheless some
classroom writing aims at the genuine communication of messages to an audience in need of those
messages. Three subcategories. illustrate how reality can be injected:

- Academic: The Language Experience Approach gives groups of students opportunities to convey
genuine information to each other. Content- based instruction encourages the exchange of useful
information, and some of this learning uses the written word. Group problem-solving tasks,
especially those that relate to current issues and other personally relevant topics, may have a
writing component in which information is genuinely sought and conveyed.
- Vocational/Technical: Writing in occupational contexts, such as letters, instructions, and forms.
 - Personal: Informal writing like diaries, letters, and notes, promoting genuine information exchange.

10. Testing, main types of the tests

1.A definition of a “language test” is a tool for measuring language performance in learners fundamental
principle in language testing is “correspondence between language test performance and real world
language use”.

It is important to understand the difference between testing and teaching. In some ways the two are so
interwoven and interdependent that it is difficult to tease them apart.

Every instructional sequence, has a testing component to it, whether the tests themselves are formal or
informal. That is, teachers measure or judge learners' competence all the time and, ideally, learners
measure and judge themselves.

Pedagogically, it is very important to make the distinction between teaching and formal testing,
especially from the point of view of principles of intrinsic motivation. For optimal learning to take
place, students must have the freedom in the classroom to experiment, to try things out, to "test" their
own hypotheses about language without feeling that their overall competence is being "judged" in terms
of these trials and errors.

2. Generally we distinguish two main categories of tests:

You could test:

1. the students' progress over the course so far

2. their general level of English, without reference to any course

Traditional 'pen-and-paper' tests are usually made up of two types of questions:

1. discrete item tasks

2. integrative tasks
3. These can be marked in two ways:
4. objectively
5. subjectively

Let’s consider proficiency tests, progress or achievement tests, diagnostic tests and placement tests.

Proficiency tests measure learners’ language ability regardless of the training they may have had or
the vocabulary and topics they may have studied. Proficiency tests are not based on the contents of a
language course but rather on the general knowledge of the target language and culture.

Achievement tests Achievement tests are directly related to the language courses taught to the
examinees. The purpose of achievement tests is to judge upon the success of individual learners or
groups in achieving the objectives of the language course.

Diagnostic tests identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. They provide the teachers with the
information on what further teaching is necessary and what problems the students might have in
coping with the instruction demands.

Placement tests provide information that helps to place the students at the most suitable stage of the
teaching curriculum, bearing in mind their level of the language achieved so far.
Performance-based testing Instead of just offering paper-and-pen-cil single-answer tests of possibly
hundreds of discrete items, performance-based testing of typical school subjects involves:

 open-ended problems

 hands-on projects

 student portfolios

 experiments

 labs

 essay writing.

Interactive language teststhe language version of performance-based testing comes in the form of
various interactive language tests. Students are assessed in the process of creatively interacting with
people. This means that tests have to involve people in actually performing the behavior that we
want to measure.

11. Assessment, types of assessment

1.Assessment is used in the sense of the assessment of the proficiency of the language user. All language tests
are a form of assessment, but there are also many forms of assessment which would not be described as
tests.These may include the effectiveness of particular methods or materials, the kind and quality of discourse
actually produced in the programme, learner/teacher satisfaction, teaching effectiveness, etc.

There are three concepts that are traditionally seen as fundamental to any discussion of assessment:  validity
 reliability  feasibility

Validity is the concept with which the Framework is concerned. A test or assessment procedure can be said to
have validity to the degree that it can be demonstrated that what is actually ․

Reliability on the other hand, is a technical term. It is basically the extent to which the same rank order of
candidates is replicated in two separate administrations of the same assessment.

Feasibility is particularly an issue with performance testing. Assessors operate under time pressure. They are
only seeing a limited sample of performance and there are definite limits to the type and number of categories
they can handle as criteria.

2․Types of Assessment

Achievement assessment/proficiency assessment Achievement assessment is the assessment of the

achievement of specific objectives - assessment of what has been taught. It therefore relates to the
week's/term's work, the course-book, the syllabus. Achievement assessment is oriented to the course. It
represents an internal perspective.

Proficiency assessment on the other hand is assessment of what someone can do/knows in relation to the
application of the subject in the real world. It represents an external perspective. The advantage of an
achievement approach is that it is close to the learner's experience. The advantage of a proficiency approach is
that it helps everyone to see where they stand; results are transparent.

Norm-referencing is the placement of learners in rank order, their assessment and ranking in relation to their
peers.

Criterion-referencing is a reaction against norm-referencing in which the learner is assessed purely in terms
of his/her ability in the subject, irrespective of the ability of his/her peers. Norm-referencing can be
undertaken in relation to the class or the demographic cohort or the group of learners taking a test.

Mastery CR/continuum CR The mastery criterion-referencing approach is one in which a single 'minimum
competence standard' or 'cut-off point' is set to divide learners into 'masters' and 'non-masters', with no
degrees of quality in the achievement of the objective being recognized.

The continuum criterion-referencing approach is an approach in which an individual ability is referenced to

a defined continuum of all relevant degrees of ability in the area in question. There are in fact many
approaches to CR, but most of them can be identified as primarily a 'mastery learning' or 'continuum'
interpretation.

Continuous assessment is assessment by the teacher and possibly by the learner of class performances, pieces
of work and projects throughout the course, the final grade thus reflects the whole course/year/semester.
Fixed point assessment is when grades are awarded and decisions made on the basis of an examination or
other assessment which takes place on a particular day, usually the end of the course or before the beginning
of a course.

Formative assessment is an ongoing process of gathering information on the extent of learning, on strengths
and weaknesses, which the teacher can feed back into their course planning and the actual feedback they give
learners.

Summative assessment sums up attainment at the end of the course with a grade. It is not necessarily
proficiency assessment. Indeed, a lot of summative assessment is norm-referenced, fixed-point, achievement
assessment.

Direct assessment is assessing what the candidate is actually doing. For example, a small group are discussing
something, the assessor observes, compares with a criteria grid, matches the performances to the most
appropriate categories on the grid and gives an assessment.

Indirect assessment, on the other hand, uses a test, usually on paper, which often assesses enabling skills.
Direct assessment is effectively limited to speaking, writing and listening in interaction, since you can never
see receptive activity directly.
12․Use of high technologies in teaching/learning languages.

Today's classroom teachers must be prepared to provide technology-supported learning opportunities for
their students. Being prepared to use technology and knowing how thattechnology can support student
learning must become integral skills in every teacher'sprofessional repertoire

Teachers must be prepared to empower students with the advantage’s technology canbring. Schools and
classrooms, both real and virtual, must have teachers who are equipped withtechnology resources and skills
and who can effectively teach the necessary subject mattercontent while incorporating technology concepts
and skills.The following chart lists characteristics representing traditional approaches to learningand
corresponding strategies often associated with new learning environments for students.These new learning
environments should also be established in teacher preparation programmes.

Incorporating New Strategies

Traditional Learning Environments...............New Learning Environments

Teacher -centered instruction.......................Student - centered instruction

Single-sense stimulation...............................Multisensory stimulation

Single-path progression................................Multipath progression

Single media.................................................Multimedia

Isolated work................................................Collaborative work

Information delivery......................................Information exchange

Passive learning...........................................Active/exploratory/inquiry-based learning

Factual, knowledge-based learning.............Critical thinking and informed decision-making

Reactive response........................................Proactive/planned action

Isolated, artificial context..............................Authentic, real-world context

The new learning environments should prepare students to:

1. Access and exchange information in a variety of ways

2. Compile, organize, analyze, and synthesize information
3. Draw conclusions and make generalizations based on information gathered
4. Use information and select impropriate tools to solve problems
5. Know the content and be able to locate additional information asneeded
6. Become self-directed learners
7. Collaborate ad cooperate in team efforts
8. Interact with others in ethical and appropriate ways.

Teachers know that the wise use of technology can enrich learning environments and enable

students to achieve marketable skills. It is still critical that educators analyses the potential

benefits of technology for learning and employ it appropriately.