UNIT 5 : READING

Reading is one of the receptive skills because it instead of making learners produce something they have to answer it. Furthermore, it is presented by a written text which most of the time is too long and also contains discourse. (Ring, 1996) establishes that discourse also shows functions of sentences and are divided in sentence types; such as, declarative or interrogative. Another important point about this skill is that it involves coherence and cohesion. According to (Gordon, 2011) coherence is how writing is understood and cohesion refers to the connections that are found in a text as transition words.      

On the other hand, I could also learn that it has seven subskills that allow learners to read in distinct ways according to the purpose of a task. They are reading for specific information (scanning), reading for gist (skimming), reading for detail, inferring, predicting, deducing meaning from context and understanding text structure. Moreover, it includes two ways of reading (extensive and intensive). Extensive is also called reading for pleasure and contains long pieces of text. Intensive are activities to make students focus in the language that is used in a text.

In addition, I could notice that there are different text types   that can help leaners to become good readers. Some examples are articles, stories, letters, leaflets and postcards. However, as they are too difficult to use in the class it is necessary to apply specific activities to develop each subskill.  According to (Department of Education, 2016) the best activities are making students read books with easy vocabulary or reading stories in the class.

In brief, I believe that reading skill is a complex process to be managed within a classroom but I agree with the activities that were mentioned by the author because they will be useful to develop not only the leaners’ knowledge but also their critical thinking.

REFERENCES:

Department of Education. (2016). 25 Activities for Reading and Writing Fun. Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/25-activities-reading-and-writing-fun

Gordon, L. (2011). What is Cohesion & Coherence? . Retrieved from http://gordonscruton.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-is-cohesion-coherence-cambridge.html

Ring, J. (1996). The Discourse Functions of Sentences. Retrieved from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/discours.htm