Language Skills: Reading
- Pre-HL-reading strategiesConsidering their gaps in background knowledge (especially vocabulary and history/culture), heritage learners need to be prepared for most reading activities. There are a number of HL techniques (also common in L1 and FL classes) that the teacher can use to activate/enhance the students' prior knowledge, interest them in the reading, and set up their expectations. These include the following (cf. Grabe & Stoller 2001: 191):
- 1) Reviewing relevant information, either general or from previous readings
- 2) Presenting unfamiliar information that is crucial for the understanding of the reading (historical events, customs and traditions, prominent cultural figures, social life, etc.)
- 3) Previewing the text (looking at the title, subheadings, visuals, and sections) to predict the content of the reading
- 4) Introducing the topic of the reading and topic-related vocabulary by teacher-class questions and answers
- 5) Clarifying key words and concepts present in the reading.
Samaniego and Pino (2000: 41) also mention skimming (glancing rapidly over the whole reading or the first and last paragraph to get the main ideas of the text) and scanning (looking over the reading to search for specific information).
- Post-HL-reading strategies are aimed at improving the students' textual comprehension, inferring ideas from the text, and developing critical reading skills. They are similar to post-reading activities conducted in L1 and FL classes (cf. Omaggio Hadley 2001:206).
- 1) Reading comprehension techniques include: filling in the blanks with words from the text, matching definitions to words or actions to characters, providing definitions, synonyms, or antonyms to words/terms in the reading, paraphrasing statements from the reading, completing graphic organizers (outlines, timelines, graphs) with facts from the reading, summarizing the text, retelling the story from a different point of view.
- 2) Critical reading strategies include: verifying the predictions made before or during the reading, answering inference questions about the reading and justifying the answers, finding reasons for the characters' behavior, expressing personal opinions or critiquing the point(s) of view expressed in the reading, relating personal experiences or reactions to the reading, identifying and analyzing language features, comparing the reading with other texts on the same topic (as regards genre, register, organization of content, language features, point of view, etc.).
- 3) According to Samaniego and Pino (2000: 41), heritage students should also learn “literary analysis concepts at an early stage” in order to “know how to approach literature.”
(1) Campbell & Rosenthal (2000: 168) state that heritage learners “rarely have opportunities—Saturday and after-school programs notwithstanding—to gain literacy skills in their ancestral languages.”
(2) Grabe and Stoller (2002: 83) list the following common strategies used by skilled L1 readers: specifying a purpose for reading, planning what steps to take, previewing the text, predicting the content of the text, checking predictions, posing questions about the text and finding answers to them, connecting the text to background knowledge, summarizing information, making inferences, connecting one part of the text to another, paying attention to text structure, rereading, guessing the meaning of new words from the context, using discourse markers to see relationships, checking comprehension, identifying difficulties, taking steps to repair faulty comprehension, critiquing the author/text, judging how well objectives have been met, reflecting on what has been learned from the text.
Contributed by Georgiana Galateanu
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