Reading, Genre Awareness, and Task Design

Reading Skills and L1 Writing Development

Reading provided me with a better understanding of context clues. Whenever I approached an unfamiliar word I would reread the sentences before it and after to give me an idea of what that word means. Most of the time that strategy worked, but when it didn’t I would ask someone I thought would know or look up the word. After having a definition, I would then look at the synonyms to find a word I knew. This activity expanded my vocabulary and now I knew a different word or words that mean the same thing as other words that I already knew. Asking questions about unfamiliar words and doing my own research prepared me to understand what academic journals and similar texts were conveying before entering college. As I became a more developed reader, I would notice sentence structure and attempt a similar style in my writing. This is one of many reasons why I usually write very long, verbose sentences. I think that some of the reading skills I developed can assist multilingual students become proficient writers.

Without being knowledgeable of what I was doing, I was “building meaning” (p.97) and “developing cognitive and linguistic skills” (p.96). Much how I learned to read, I think that L2 writers could learn to become proficient writing students in the same way. Students must learn how to read for fun and be steadily exposed to more complex texts. This provides a way for them to build vocabulary by reading about something they enjoy and then write about it. It’s a way to get L2 students to develop their writing skills.

Encountered Genres

As a nonacademic reader I often find myself reading novels, news articles, and social media posts. All of these readings I do for enjoyment, but I’ll really read just about anything. Two of my favorite novels include Gal, an autobiography, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The news articles provide me with current events and I use that in my daily discussions with friends and family members and social media usually fuels my interest in a topic. Contrastingly, as an academic reader I’ve mainly encountered textbooks and academic articles which are structured very differently from their nonacademic counterparts.

Academic articles, in particular, are written for information to develop or disprove previous research within a specific discourse community. This usually requires the reader to be able to simplify overly complex wording or sentences into simpler ones to get to a direct meaning and, in most cases, analyze data. This is how developing meaning through context clues can influence reading and writing in academia. The vocabulary is often more complex in textbooks and journals because the audience is college students as opposed to the general public interested in science fiction books, comics, or articles on the presidential election. Therefore, college students have examples of what is generally expected of their writing in an academic setting.

Features of Instructional Materials

Instructional materials should be interesting, relevant, and at or slightly above the student’s level of comprehension. Students should be able to understand the assignment—whether it’s writing or reading—with some level of difficulty to foster learning, but not so much that they’re confused or become frustrated. Most readers find it difficult to read something that they have absolutely no interest in. Not all materials will be considered fun, but the lecture or following activity or assignment that supports the text could have a little something extra to make it not as boring as it could be. Instructional materials should also be up-to-date and relevant to the expected learning outcomes of the course. Good textbooks and software applications have the previously mentioned characteristics which are reflected through content understanding exercises such as quizzes, tests, or answering questions after the reading.

L2 Text Criteria

According to Ferris and Hedgcock (2014) in Figure 4.5, prototypical features of academic genres “should present arguments explicitly and define key terms, provide linguistic ‘signposts’…to inform readers of the direction of the argument, and texts must acknowledge intertextual relationships to support their arguments and encourage discussion” (117). An L2 composition or literature textbook should have these same qualities with the addition of appropriate word choice, sentence structure, and topics that reflect the level of L2 learner that is reading the text. An L2 text shouldn’t assume that the reader has the same schema as the reader of an L1 text and should be  written in a simple way that reflects that.

Augmenting Lessons

A composition teacher should augment the textbook with supplemental materials, tasks, and assignments as much is appropriate for class and individual student understanding. If a chapter is too complicated for the class, then it could be taught in a hands-on or lecture approach and avoid reading the text altogether or if it’s very simple or is a compliment to another chapter then it could be combined with or tacked onto the end of another lesson. Handouts, writing assignments, and additional reading could reinforce what a student was taught by providing practice instead of an instructor assuming that they understand.

Activities

Some in-class activities and exercises that could be productive to inexperienced writers include a popcorn style of writing a story where either the entire class or small groups participate in forming a short story and daily journal activities. I remember having a teacher that would pick a paragraph out of the local paper and have us identify different parts of the sentence and identify the type of sentence. Some of the identifiers were prepositional phrases, gerunds, adverbs, articles, adjectives, and complex compound sentences. Of course an activity like this assumes that the person's L1 is English, however, with daily repitition the activity became almost rudimentary, but by then I felt that I had mastered English. 

Out of class students could have a worksheet where they practice just writing to free their thoughts about the class or content learned. There would only be a grade for actually writing and forming cohesive and complete sentences at first. After a while spelling and grammar would be corrected.

References

Ferris, Dana R. and John S. Hedgcock. Teaching L2 Composition: Purpose, Process, and

Practice. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print