Related+Questions+and+Answers+on+Teaching+Vocabulary

=WEEK 6B – Teaching Reading - The Importance of Grammar and Vocabulary in Reading =  Butler-Pascoe, M.E. & Wiburg, K.M (2003). //Technology and Teaching English Language Learners//. Pearson Education, Inc. Chapter 5: //Using Technology to Teach Readubg Skills//, pages 114 to 137:

1. What is Reading? .The reading process involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between the two. Reading is what happens when people look at a text a text and assign meaning to the written symbol in text. The text and the reader are the two physical entities necessary for the reading process to begin.

2. Describe brifely the 3 basic models of how reading occurs: (a) **Bottom - Up Model:** reading is primarily a decoding process in which the reader matches written symbols with their aural equivalents. Readers first identify the written letters ( graphemes ) with the matching sounds ( phonemes ) and then blend the sounds and letters together to identiy the words. (b) **Top - Down Model:** Psycholinguistic model, reading is a "psycholinguistic guessing game" in which the reader recieved input from the text, makes predictions, tests and confirms or revises those predictions, and so forth as he or she reads. Efficient readers read quickly, test their hypotheses as they read, and reread material only when they are unable to confirm their predictions. (c) **Interactive Model:** Reading focus on 2 different concepts of interaction. The first is the interaction between teh reader and the text. The reader draws on both his or her background knowledge and information from the printed text in order to create meaning. The text cannot just be decoded but rather requires the reader to comprehen that there is interaction with the experiences and knowledge he or she brings to that text. The second interaction is between the two sets of different kinds of cognitive skills that Grabe (1991) twens identification and interpretation. The identification skills are lower-level skills that allow the reader to quickly and unconsciously indentify letters, words, and grammatical structures.

3. What are schemata? There are three main types that defines what schemata is, first __'Formal schemata'__ which includes prior knowledge of rhetorical structures and conventions such as the different types of expository organizational patterns - cause and effect, comparison and contrast, and chronological order, and so on. The second __'Content Schemata'__ refers to background knowledge of the subject of the text, an area that frequently is problematic for second langauge readers who often lack the culturally based content schemata of teh English text and thirdly, the __'linguistic schemata'__ which refers to knowledge used to recognize words and determine their syntax in a asentence.

4. What are the characteristics of Fluent Reading? There are a variety of strategies that helps characterize what fluent reading needs which is adjusting reading speed, scanning, skimming ahead, predicting, gathering information to comprhend the text. The fluent reader possesses confidence in his or her reading ability and has a definite purpose for readin, thereby providing motivation for the reading activity. (a) Automatic Perceptual / Identification skills Allows the reader to identify letters and words without being consciously aware of the process, such automaticity requires very little use of the reader's processing capacity, allowing the mind to then attend to other matters. (b) Structursl Skills ( Grammar ) and Knowledge Grammatical structures provide readers significant informaion about the content of the reading passage, readers rely on their structural knowldge of capital letters and direct and indirect objects and their lexical knowledge of "read" to correctly comprehend the sentence. (c) How can technology assist in developing structural skills? Several multimedia software include a grammar component as part of their more comprhensive programs that focus on other skills. For example; the english your way programe, presents grammar usage exercises within a comprehension approach that features practical English in everday situations. The Rosetta stone, one of the earliest multimedia Egnliush programs, presents words., phrases, and sentences in a structurally sequences manner so that students recieve intensive practice with different grammatical forms, but it does so without the benefit of expanded discourse or social context. (d) Vocabulary Development: Give 3 reasons why vocabulary is so vital to reading comprehension: (e) How does technology assiste in vocabulary development? The many pictures, animation, and other contextual cues provided by interactive CD-ROM books assist in this strategy, for example Just grandma and Me and Arthur's teacher Trouble from the Broadbund Living Books Series are excellent reading materials for young ESLs, because of the scaffolding provided by their well-organised scenes that coresspond to the story plot. Students have access to special features such as "stickers" of objects that match the outlines of objects missing from the picture on the screen. Each sticker to build word/object recognition, whiel using a click-drag maneuver, students "fill in" the missing objects with the matching stickers.
 * First** Grabe (1991) notes taht estimates fo rthe number of words required of fluent reading in a 1st langauge range from 10,000 - 100,000 whereas the number typically cited for 2nd language reading is usually much lower at 2000 - 7000, the readers in a 2nd language need to have vocabulary more similar in number to that of a native speaker, if they are expected to read with a fluency approaching that of first language readers.
 * Second** readers need to know a large %age of teh words in any given text in order to comprehend the meaning of the reading or to guess the meaning of words unfamiliar to them.
 * Third** vocabulary id not acquired in quick doses, but rather is a process of incremental learning and sonstant reinforcements. Additionally, it is not sufficient to know just onw meaning of the word in a particular context; instas, the reader needs to know other aspects of the word such as its grammatical properties and alternative meanings in different contexts. Reading assits in vocabulary development by providing sufficient repetition of new words in multiple contexts.