1. Isabela Villas Boas
Marta Diniz de Rezende

2. Rationale
• Texts are many times “pretexts” for
the teaching of grammar and
vocabulary
“O texto não é pretexto”:
O texto não é pretexto para nada. Ou melhor, não deve ser.
Um texto existe apenas na medida em que se constitui ponto
de encontro entre dois sujeitos: o que o escreve e o que o lê;
escritor e leitor, reunidos pelo ato radicalmente solitário da
leitura. (Marisa Lajolo1985, p. 52).
•Communicative language teaching – emphasis
on top-down reading

4. Reading requires COMPREHENSION of
TEXTS.
But what‟s a TEXT?
And what‟s
COMPREHENSION?

6. TEXT: a communicative
unit

7. Text Genre: A conventional, culturally
recognized grouping of texts based
on properties other than lexical or
grammatical features. It is based on
external, non-linguistic criteria
such as intended audience,
purpose, and activity type.
Text type: Based on the internal, linguistic
characteristics of texts themselves.
(Biber, 1988, pp. 70)

8. “Genres are forms of life, ways
of being. They are frames for
social action, the place where
meaning is constructed.”
(Bazerman, 2006)

9. Do you recognize these texts?
 Once upon a time, ....
 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
 The purpose of this .... is to ....
 First, pour...
 A fiften-year old male was
arrested last night while he
was ...
 Love, ...
 BTW, plz ... LOL
 It was found that, among the subjects
studied, 89%...

10. Types of comprehension processing
Bottom Up Top Down
 Data-driven  Concept-driven
 The starting point is the text  The starting point is within
itself. the mind of the listener or
 The reader attends to reader.
individual words and  We do not logically work
structures in the text, from through all possible
these gradually building up interpretations of a text. We
an interpretation of the use background knowledge
whole. to select the most likely
 Comprehension is the interpretation.
process of using linguistic  Comprehension is a
knowledge to decipher the process of making sense of
little black marks in the text. a text in the most cost-
effective way.

11. Another feature to fall by the wayside is the „butterfly‟ for the
left little finger. The left-hand E flat with its ungrateful pivoting
is no one‟s favourite key. So, with those passages in mind
with E flat and A flat in close succession, the touches for
these notes are mounted cheek by jowl and pivoted
sympathetically (though on different joints, as is normal)...
Finally, the lower tier of touches duplicates others for the right
little finger...

12. TRAIN DERAILED
Plicks are believed to have caused the dolling of a two-car
diesel passenger train yesterday. The train, with 24 biners on
board, hit a metal object and ratteol 100 yards of track before
stopping four pars from Middlesbrough. Three people were
taken to hospital, one slightly ropeed, the others finding from
shock.

13. -There‟s the doorbell.
-I‟m in the shower.

14. Schemas
Integrated chunks of knowledge stored in
long-term memory; mental frameworks we
hold as individuals, and which we bring with
us when we read or listen to a text.
Sir Frederic Bartlett and
THE WAR OF THE
GHOSTS.

15. - It is possible to understand every word of a text and
not know what it‟s about.
- It is possible not to understand some parts of a text,
yet still know what it‟s about.
- It is possible to understand a message even when
there is no evidence for your interpretation in the
actual words on the page.
- Different people will take different information out of
a text.

16. - Comprehension and acquisition are not
synonymous.
- L2 learners need to attend to form for linguistic
development.
- L2 learners are unable to develop a targetlike
linguistic system on their own, solely through
exposure to comprehensible input.

17. - Due to limited cognitive processing capacity, early-
stage L2 learners are only able to perform one type of
processing at a time. An exclusively meaning-based
approach generates some comprehension but little
intake, and hence little acquisition.
- Acquisition entails form-meaning mapping.

18. Reading is a process of
constructing meaning
from text. Readers use
background knowledge
and linguistic cues
from the graphophonic,
syntactic, and semantic
Freeman and Freeman (2009)
systems as they read.

19. READING FOR COMPREHENSION
DUAL
APPROACH
Han and D´Angelo (2009)
READING FOR ACQUISITION

20. What Proficient Readers Do
* They identify the most important themes
and ideas in the text and use them to focus
their reading and thinking.
* They ask questions.
* They create mental pictures of what they
read.
* They sythesize what they have read.
* They use a variety of “fix-up strategies” to
repair comprehension when it falters.

21. Successful L2 Readers Behaviors
(Brief pair work)
They hold positive self-images of themselves
as readers.
They read broad phrases and skip
unimportant words.
They search for cognates.
They transfer information across their two
languages.
They reflect on the meaning of the
text in either the L1 or L2.

22. 
 READERS USE STRATEGIES AND STRATEGIES
CAN BE GOOD OR BAD.

23. Successful Strategy Unsuccessful Strategy
• Setting purposes for your reading • Thinking about something else
• Thinking about what you already know while reading
about the topic • Skipping parts you do not
• Thinking about what you do not know understand and not coming back to
about the topic make sense of them later
• Concentrating on getting the meaning • Reading as rapidly as possible
• Underlining important parts • Concentrating on figuring out what
the words are
• Asking questions while you read
• Making a list of every word you
• Asking questions about the parts you don‟t know
don‟t undestand
• Looking up all of the words that
• Using other information to figure out you do not know in a dictionary
what you do not understand
• Repeating the main idea over and
• Taking notes over
• Picturing information in your head
• Checking back through the text to see if
you remember it

24. What teachers do to help students
become better readers
 Activate schemata.
 Teach them strategies.
 Use pre-reading activities to have students
think about the topic, make their own
connections with it and establish a purpose
for reading.
 Draw attention to how the text is written.

25. Strategies
• Skim
• Scan
• Predict
• Check predictions
• Ask questions
• Underline
• Use a dictionary
• Take notes
• Paraphrase
• Reread
• Think about the text and its structure

26. A Successful
Reading Class
Pre-reading While-reading Post-reading
activities activities activities

27. Pre-reading activities
• Use the title, subtitles, and divisions within the
text to predict content and organization or
sequence of information.
• Brainstorm. Explore the pictures, graphs, etc.
• Use videos, simulations and experiments to
give students direct experiences to learn new
words.
• Help students identify purposes for reading
the text.

28. Pre-reading activities
• Teach the more complex language structures such
as idioms and figurative language as needed.
• Read over the comprehension questions to focus
attention on finding that information while reading.
• Construct semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of
concepts or words showing how they are related)
• Talk about the author's background, writing style,
and usual topics

29. While-reading activities
• Skim the text to get the purpose of the passage.
• Scan the text to get specific information, such as
names, dates, etc.
• Stop at the end of each paragraph to review and
check predictions.
• React to opinions expressed.
• Ask questions.
• Make notes.
• Underline important parts.
• Predict the next part of the text from various clues.
• Try to guess meaning from the context.

30. Post-reading activities
 Discuss the text
 Summarize the text
 Draw conclusions
 Apply the information to a new situation
“Post-Reading activities encourage
students to reflect upon what they
have read. For the information to stay
with the students, they need to go
beyond simply reading it to using it.”

33. It can be a means of increasing learners‟ knowledge of
language features and their control of reading strategies.
It can also improve their comprehension.
At its worst, intensive reading focuses on
comprehension of a particular text. However, if it is to
be done well, it should focus on items that will occur in
a wide range of text: “How does today‟s teaching make
tomorrow’s text easier?”
• Focus on items that occur with high frequency in
the language as a whole.
• Focus on strategies that can be used with most
texts.

34. Intensive work on reading can focus on the following aspects:
• Comprehension – understanding a particular text
• Regular and irregular sound-spelling relations – teaching
of phonics, spelling rules, reading aloud
• Vocabulary – Attention drawn to useful words
• Grammar – Difficult grammatical items can be explained and
analyzed
• Cohesion – pronoun reference, conjunction relationships
between sentences, different words to relate to the same idea
• Information structure – Certain texts contain certain kinds f
information (ex: newspaper reports – who, what, where, when)
• Genre features – how the text achieves its communicative
purpose through vocabulary, grammatical features, cohesive
features and information
• Strategies – guessing from context, using a dictionary,
simplifying difficult sentences, taking notes, etc.

35. It fits into the meaning-focused input and fluency
development strands of a course.
During extensive reading, learners should be interested
in what they are reading and should be reading with their
attention on the meaning of the text rather than on
learning the language features of the text.
In order to meet the conditions needed for learning from
extensive reading at a variety of levels of proficiency, it is
essential to make use of simplified texts.
Because learning through extensive reading is highly
incidental, it is important to have quantity of input with
substantial opportunities for vocabulary repetition.

36. It involves a high quantity of varied, self-selected, enjoyable
reading at a resonably fluent speed.
The quantity of input needs to be close to 500,000 running
words per year, which is equivalent to 25 graded readers a
year.
Extensive reading can only occur if 95 to 98 percent of
the running words in a text are already familiar to the
learner or are no burden to the learner.

37. About one quarter of the time in a well-balanced language
course should be spent on the strand of fluency
development helping learners become more fluent in using
the language they already know; that is, making the best
use of what they have already learned. This fluency
development needs to cover the four skills of listening,
speaking, reading and writing and needs to involve
substantial amounts of input and output.
Reasonable goal: read around 250 words per minute.

38. marta.d.rezende@gmail.com
isabela.villasboas@thomas.org.br

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