اسم الطالب:نور الدين سلامة
اسم المشرف: البروفسور حنا طوشية
Trashing Reading Comprehension to ESL/EFL Learners
Research conductes over the last three decades
has changed our view of reading as a mere process of decoding.As Carrel and and Eisterhold state EFL/ESL reading theory has been influenced during the past decades by Goodman (from the mid-to late1970s) who views reading as a “guessing game" in which the "reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer." (1983, p. 554) As Grabe describes
Godman's perception of reading which is seen as an active process of comprehending (where] students need to be taught strategies to read more efficiently (e. g., guess from context,define expectations, make inferences about the text, skim ahead to fill in the context, etc. (1991, p. 377) Paran opposes Godman's view of reading as an “activity involving constant that are later rejected or confirmed. This means that one does not read all the sentences in the same way, but one relies on a number ofwords-or cues-to get an idea of what kind of sentence(eg.an explanation) is likely to follow(1996,p.25).
Zhang (1993) explaints that afflarbach compares comprehension process to hypothesis testing (or draft-and-revision) where the reader arrives at the main idea after revising, the initial
hypothesis, provided the reader has adequate background knowledge, Moreover, research and practice in TESOL was greatly influenced by Stephen Krashen's hypotheses on language acquisition, and particularly the effect of "the Schema Theory"on studies dealing with reading comprehension. Today, a growing body of empirical research attests to the role of schemata in EFL/ESL reading comprehension. Most of the research was made on reading comprehension of the first language. However, insights were adapted to suit SL reading comprehension studies. Most important of all, specific attention is given to interactive approaches to reading, which argue that reading comprehension is a combination of identification and interpretation skills.Grabe (1991) lists the five most important areas of current research which are still prominent : shema theory, language skills and automaticity, vocabulary development, comprehension strategiy training , and reading-writing relations(p.375) Automaticity may be defined as “occurring when the reader not consciously controlling the process, and using little processing capacity. (ibid, p. 379- 380).
In this paper, I will discuss briefly the tenets of reading comprehension, the cognitive tasks involved in reading as well as the various activities teachers use in teaching reading comprehension. Current research believes _ that lack of automaticity in Tower-level processing" (i.e. automatic lexical access through bottom-up process) leads to poor-skilled reading.
Consequently, most current versions of interactive approaches to reading have taken a strong bottom-up orientation to the processing of lower-level linguistic structure through extensive _research of eye movement. Researchers believe that I most words are recognized before higher level (non-automatic) context information can he used to influence lexical acces.(ibid:385).