WEB-ресурс научно-практических конференций

Lebedev A.N., Fedoseyeva T.V.

Reading for information

This is an abstract of the article providing helpful information for teachers of English for specific purposes as to techniques for analyzing special subject areas, an overview of the linguistic information necessary to reading comprehension and methods for practicing reading comprehension skills

Reading may be defined as an act of information processing. This act of information processing may break down as a result of a galaxy of factors – an inadequate vocabulary, inability to handle grammatical structures, failure to recognize the logical connections between sentences, incorrect utilization of context and/or complete novelty of the material. It follows that the positive counterparts of the factors are requisites for the successful achievement of this act of information processing. That is, successful reading involves a large number of factors: lexical, grammatical, sentence connections, paragraph organization, etc.

The above-mentioned factors are not mutually exclusive. Reading comprehension requires more than the understanding of the meanings of individual words. It also requires far more than the awareness of the surface and deep structure of individual sentences. Syntactic understanding of individual sentences is certainly a prerequisite to the achievement of total paragraph or passage comprehension. It is only a prerequisite in that just as students who read a sentence word for word usually fail to comprehend its total meaning, so students who read a paragraph or indeed a passage sentence by sentence usually fail to comprehend its total meaning. Reading comprehension requires the skill to recognize the lexical and the structural relationships within individual sentences and to recognize the logical relationships between them.

Reading is a process comprising a complex set of interrelated skills that involve: a) word recognition and the mastery of basic vocabulary and such technical or specialized vocabulary as may from time to time be required; b) the ability to see in the material the structures of the sentences, paragraphs, and longer passages that constitute the thought units; c) the intelligence necessary to follow the thought development thus presented and makes any relevant deductions, inferences, or critical assessments; d) the ability to concentrate on the reading task.

If we neglect the factors the teacher has no control over intelligence and ability to concentrate – we are left with a list of skills which can be taught: a) to recognize English words and to build up an appropriate vocabulary; b) to identify sentence patterns; c) to react to typographic conventions; d) to identify the longer passages that constitute thought units; e) to follow and evaluate the development of the information being presented.

There is both a danger and a misconception in assuming that once we have listed the skills which make up reading comprehension and have been provided with a description of linguistic units beyond the sentence, we have identified the problems involved in learning to read English for information. The misconception arises out of a failure to differentiate among the skills and abilities used in reading, the linguistic knowledge required to read, and the difficulties inherent in acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge. The danger lies in the inference that no further step need to be taken in order to identify reading problems and present them in a hierarchy of difficulty. In fact, to establish that there is a relationship among the presence of certain skills, familiarity with linguistic features of discourse, and successful reading comprehension would require elaborate research and extensive testing. There’s a relationship between knowledge of formal devices of textual cohesion, in particular anaphoric devices and sentence connectors, and effective reading comprehension for nonnative speakers.

The fact that the reader is inevitably always the perceiver or recipient of a written communication means that any problems he may have in comprehending it have been preceded by the writer’s difficulties in producing it for him. Although it is not being suggested that the problems of the reader and those of the writer are identical, the fact that the principal aim of the scientific writer is to record information for a reader or readers to understand and in the way which will cause fewest problems indicates that the writer has reading problems uppermost in his mind. This would suggest that an examination of the kind of problems taken into consideration by the author who composes the text and a close study of the solutions he finds to overcome such problems might throw light on the kind of knowledge required to read and comprehend the text. It would be not reasonable to assume, therefore, that the advice offered to writers of scientific or technical papers, books, etc., in a manual on the craft effective writing might provide the teacher with an approach to the principles which go into the production of texts and that principles of writing are in fact principles of comprehension. Once uncovered, these principles might provide the basis for strategies which the student might adopt in order to read for information in the most efficient way. Clear and precise written communication depends to a large extent upon the author’s skill at presenting information in a way in which it is appropriately perceived by the intended readership. Hence we may operate on the following assumptions, first of all that the writer of a student’s book, a textbook, a paper, etc., has an intuitive knowledge of at least some of the comprehension problems his intended readership may experience and that he does his best to cater to these problems in his writing, and than that just as a knowledge of sentence grammar appears to contribute to comprehension, so familiarity with the linguistic features which bind a text together will help to extend and amplify comprehension.

References :

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