emilychen
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Reading skills
Among the six component skills and knowledge areas identified by Grabe (1991), which one(s) do you think you need the most in order to help you become an efficient reader in English? Explain your reasons and discuss how the computer can provide help to your reading development of that particular skill or knowledge area.
Groups 5-8 are required to answer this question.
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11/10/2004, 11:11 pm
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pigdodoo
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 Re: Reading skills
Content/World background knowledge:
If L2 learners are familiar with the topics of the article or if the context is based on the culture of L2 learners, it will be easier for L2 learners to understand what the articles are talking about. I think this web http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/quiz/index.html (this page is supposed for 7.2.6 Metacognitive Knowledge and Skills) can help me to get my goal. In those quizzes, we need to have background knowledge to know who or what the pictures are. If we have no idea, we can click Hint Button to read the article from the original section, which can improve my impression and help me more familiar with those articles.
Synthesis and Evaluation Skills:
Fluent readers must comprehend the text and make judgments. Usually, they have to predict what may come next in the context. http://www.planetozkids.com/Ace_Detectives/ can help to reinforce readers’ organization ability. From the “case clues,” readers just like detectives who have to know the truth. This web is funny, educational , and helpful.
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11/14/2004, 3:45 pm
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beautymrn
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 Re: Reading skills ~G.6~
As an advanced English reader, we think it is not so important for us to recognize vocabulary and grammar rules when reading anymore. Since we've learned English for quiet a long time, we are already advanced Englsih readers with several reading skills. As far as we're concerned, what we need most now is the sixth one, "Metacognitive Knowledge and Skills".
The knowledge/skills can help us recognize structural and rhetorical features without explicit teaching. With the knowledge/skills, we could organize and comprehand the text easier. We are able to adjust our reading rate, guessing meaning from word formation rules, prefiexes and suffixes, adjust our reading rate, take notes, and recognize main ideas of the texts.
The daily news quiz of New York Times provides articles in advanced level. When reading the articles, there are button of knowledge tools on the top which is optional. We could read the article first without using the tool and check our own comprehension of the text. It trains our metacognitive knowldege and skills. Then, we could use the tools to help us understand the text better.(optional) When doing the quiz, you could see how well you read it. There, the knowledge/skills helps us read efficiently.
We also think "Synthesis and Evaluation Skills" is an important one. It seems to us that with metacognitive knowledge and skills, we would eventually learn/grow synthesis and evaluation skills. We could make judgement about the information, the author's purpose and the usefulness of the text. These are exactly what we advanced English readers want to learn.
The "Adult Learning Activities" provides kinds of articles for you. They are not very difficult. After you read/listen it, they would give you few quizes to check your learning. The last three activities: "What Did You Learn?" "Write an Answer" and "Learn More at Other Websites" are very useful. When you doing the "what did you learn" quiz, the computer is checking if you learned the author's ideas. There will be and open question for "write an anser" to see if you could write the ideas on your own. After these two activities, if you're really interested in the topic, you could go to the last section the website provides.
With these two knowledge/skills, we could not only read rapidly and precisely, but also to come up with accurate comprehension, interpretation, and judgement of the text. Then we are enabled to be and effecient reader in English.
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11/14/2004, 10:07 pm
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louise17
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By Group 5 replying to Reading skills
Good day, my dear classmates:
We are Group 5. Hope we all “passed” the midterm exam. (Hopefully &**&)
In reading process, recognizing the main point is very important. When the learners read an article, what they want is the idea of the article. What this article is talk about. If readers don’t know what they are reading about, this means they are not using their brain to think. Readers have to think as they get the message in the article/discourse. Once the readers get the idea, they can easily paraphrasing and summarizing the main idea.
On-line practicing is a necessity in designing a website, especially a language learning website. Computer can use on-line practices, games or quizzes to help readers train their skill in recognizing the main point.
In our conclusion of this question, we think those skills we need the most are as following: vocabulary and structural knowledge, content / world background knowledge, and metacongnitive knowledge and skills.
Vocabulary is the basic element to build an essay, and the sentence structure is also important for us to understand the reading. As we are learning new words and building our word banks, we can get on the Internet to use abundant learning materials like ESL games in EnglishClub.com. We all like to learn through the interesting, attractive stuff. So, online games are the efficient way to obtain new words from the use of computers to assist our vocabulary developing.
Content / world background knowledge is the secondly important for us to read after we have our word banks. If we don’t have the background knowledge about the content that we read, we will know nothing about this article; and we also can’t get the picture of what it is all about. To know more about the subject matters and cultural contents of the texts, we can get on the news website like BBC Learning English, Discovery.com or CNN Student News and Worldview for ESL. There is much more cultural information from the news that happen all over the world. We need to learn to build our cultural and world concepts in our daily life. After all, the world background cannot appear in a day. Constantly reading different kinds of information online can save our time and money. We only click on it, and then we can get super more information from those news websites. It is an easy and useful way for readers to learn.
After reading a lot of articles, we can utilize what we’ve learned before as our reorganizations. We also can summarize or guess meanings from word formation rules, prefixes, and suffixes; and take note. Some of us like to read news from The New York Times in our free time. So, we also like the Daily News Quiz they offer to us. It’s a good way for me to re-study the news again. The news quizzes do not contain too much longer news, but just an abstract of news. We can skim that news on my own, and know what it is all about on today’s news. At least, it’s not so boring. And we can use our free time or lunch time to do those quizzes in addition to know more about new information from other countries.
In the website of New York Times Daily News Quiz, it provides chances for readers to test their ability on recognizing main idea in the news article. Each news article is short, so it takes less time for readers to get the main idea/point.
In addition, Reading Quizzes from English Zone. Com also offers this kinds of exercise. But, some article does not only focus on main point but on more detail information in the article. For example: Los Angeles Area Gets a New Spider.
Above is Group 5’s opinion, thank you for your kind reading.
Posted by Louise Kuo
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11/14/2004, 10:38 pm
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Rolf99
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Re: Reading skills
Group 8.
Charlotte, Rolf, Erica, Maureen, Fanny
In order to understand the texts written in English, knowing as much as possible English vocabulary is a basic and necessary requirement. As long as a L2 learner can understand at least over 50% of words in the article, he/she can guess the most meaning of the context. Therefore we think vocabulary and structural knowledge is important. However, vocabulary is not acquired in quick doses and what suppose we do then if we know only 50% or even less of words in the article? Content/world background knowledge in such circumstances plays an essential role which could greatly improve our comprehension of the article we read. Though the content/world background knowledge may sometimes not directly relate with the article we read, it still provides us a direction to associate and guess. These two skills are the basic but also the most important requirements. As long as L2 learners can be familiar with these two skills, they can achieve the goal of other component skills and knowledge areas identified by Grabe.
To improve the vocabulary and structural knowledge needs constant learning and reinforcement, but they always make learners feel bored and exhausted. Fortunately, the Internet could do us a big favor that we can check dictionary online such as the new Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary website (http://www.oup.com/elt/oald/) and some website also provide online games of vocabulary training, ex. ESL games in EnglishClub.com. For the aspect of content/world background knowledge, there are also lots of professional reference websites such as CNN Student News and Worldview for ESL and Discovery.com.
Nowadays with the technical aid, everyone can be an efficient ESL learner as long as we utilize the plenty resources well.
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11/15/2004, 5:47 am
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