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Why so serious about reading ?
Why so serious about reading ?
I believe that literacy skills do not receive sufficient attention from English teachers in Taiwan. In PD workshops we frequently hear about how our FET mission is to enhance motivation and provide opportunities for students to use English in actual communication. Yet, many people overlook the fact that communication happens through written media as much or perhaps more often than face-to-face communication, and they also overlook the fact that reading can be intrinsically motivating. Moreover, when the students grow up and enter the workplace, they will more frequently communicate with written English than spoken English. As it turns out, Taiwanese elementary students' literacy skills often lag far behind communication skills, and between reading and writing, reading is the weakest of the literacy skills.
Therefore, I am always looking for ways to engage students in reading activities. Using Reading A to Z is one way. (Please refer to the RAZ page on this website for further discussion). However, only the top 30% of the student body can successfully read without extensive, contextually relevant illustrations. The majority of students when faced with a paragraph of pure text still cognitively power down to "safe mode", which is skimming and scanning for key words to haphazardly formulate a schema that may or may not accurately reflect the actual text passage. You may have noticed this phenomenon, too, that listening or speaking scores far outshine reading scores.
One solution is to gamify reading with platforms like Kahoot and Blooket, etc. These games can only support very short texts, so the passages that are used for the game can wean students into reading with short texts, and also wean them off dependence on illustrations. Students can develop an ability to quickly read after playing with randomized item order. Hopefully reading skills can be sharpened so that when students encounter longer texts they can make some headway and not tune out immediately.
Kahoot reading courses
Kahoot reading courses
I have a selection of 10 Kahoot games in a Reading Practice course. These games are not tied to any particular textbook content. The illustrated Kahoots have "slides" which present the illustration and text. Teachers can stay on these slides to provide instruction/ pre-reading strategies, etc. Then commence game play. Kahoots with slides have a set question order. Other Kahoots have pure text and no illustrations. These may be played and re-played with random question order. (And always randomize answers).
Kahoot RAZ Reading course
Kahoot RAZ Reading course
I have a selection of Kahoots which quiz Reading A to Z readers. If you have a RAZ account, read one of those books together with the students, and then follow-up with game play.
Reading Comprehension: Understanding Sequence
Reading Comprehension: Understanding Sequence
We found that our students still require more practice with 2 types of reading processes: integrating parts into a coherent whole, and understanding overall implications. Essentially our students are still challenged with the interactive reading process of simultaneously attending to bottom-up details and top-down meaning. Our students are adept at extracting information (skimming and scanning) to identify Who, What, When, Where , but they have difficulty following a coherent plot. Therefore, they fail to comprehend why things happen and the implications of a single event on subsequent events. I have added these exercises to help them understand plot and sequence.
These Kahoot games use puzzle-type questions where players are tasked with sliding 4 steps into the correct order. The 2 Pete the Cat games play Youtube read-alouds as presentation slides before the game starts. These games present the questions in a set order. The last game about understanding sequence presents how-to guides of common activities that need to be put in order. This Kahoot can be set for random question order.
Easiest of the story sequencing exercises. Try this one first.
Easiest of the story sequencing exercises. Try this one first.
This story may challenge players to understand new vocabulary through context.
This story may challenge players to understand new vocabulary through context.
Questions are comprised of 4-step How-to's. Players put the steps in the correct order. Some questions are more challenging than others, since players must understand new vocabulary by applying background knowledge.
Questions are comprised of 4-step How-to's. Players put the steps in the correct order. Some questions are more challenging than others, since players must understand new vocabulary by applying background knowledge.
Blookets
Blookets
Some of the reading practice Kahoots are amenable to the Blooket gaming format, so I made a few of those, too. One disadvantage of Blookets is that students are always in self-paced game mode, unlike Kahoot that lets teachers instruct with slides and control the transition to the next question. This means that the Blooket has to entice the student into reading, or make them learn how to read without them realizing they are learning. I opted for cloze blanks, but only clozing out a single word. This way the students are constantly bombarded with the same text, but challenged with a different blank, giving them opportunities to re-read. The Blooket game parameters discourage random guessing, so after several plays of mentally piecing the text together, it is hoped that students will be able to read the short passage with comprehension. Games labeled as "short passages" present the text and question and then provide multiple choice answer options like a regular game. Short passages have no illustrations.
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