READING STRATEGIES: MEANING, SOME EXAMPLES AND IMPORTANCE IN CLIL

Hello blogger explorers!

The other day in one of Raquel’s Fernandez lessons I realized how important is to design effective reading strategies. But… First of all, do you know what is a reading strategy? Here you have my own definition, I built it when Raquel asked us about it:

Reading strategies are educational tools that a person use to read and comprehend a text.

 As you could see, they have many connections in an educational context. The reasons are because they could…

·         Facilitate the reading comprehension of our students

·         Motivate them: previous, during and after the reading activity

·         Involve the students with a text in all senses

·          Be used by learners and teachers

After talking about the meaning of reading strategies and its definition we started analyzing them. Raquel divided us into groups of three people, each one should analyze a strategy. Later, we shared our descriptions and reflections about the different Method in a website called Padlet ( you could click on it in order to see all my partners work). Once I have read all the comments and videos I have selected the following ones: (Notice that my selection has been done taking into account the previous, during and after stages)

• BUILDING READING COMPREHENSION: this reading strategy should be done as a warm-up. The teacher takes an important role because he/she has to ask questions. They should make students reflect about characters, places or content that appear in the story. Moreover, students also play an important part because they have to produce and share their own deductions. This way, the teacher could assess which is his/her students’ previous knowledge in order to improve it.

• CRITICAL READING: this creative activity could be used during the reading process. However It must start before students read the first page. The reason is because they should state their hypothesis paying attention to the book cover. After this, students can change their opinions orally. While they are reading students should think about other questions and write them down in a small paper, such as a post-it. Moreover, they should classify them into different categories (why, what, when, where, who, how). It is important to mention, that this procedure will help the student to be able to answer the question by themselves.

• SUMMARY MAP: it is an example of an after reading activity. The aim is to create a summary map. To do so, the teacher should establish general questions that help them to achieve this objective, for example: who is the main character? Which are the main problems? Which are the solutions?. In addition, these questions should be answered in groups in order to develop their speaking skills and also to exchange their ideas. Once, they have done it, the summary could be easily done.

IMPORTANCE IN CLIL

As you could see these different reading methods could be applied in any subject, not only with literature. It is because their main goal is to help student to understand the meaning of a text. Moreover, as we all probably know CLIL deals with, among other things, communication and content. Sometimes, bilingual students feel that is difficult to understand the content because it is explained in L2. In this case, reading strategies could work as the language and content scaffolding they need. The reason is because they help students to synthesize the main information in order to make it more understandable. Furthermore, as it could be observed in the examples I have proposed, all these kind of activities start using LOTS, where students are applying, understanding and remembering; through teacher’s questions or activating previous knowledge. However, the process ends using HOTS because students could create, evaluate and analyze through their own exchanging opinions, assessing their hypothesis or building their own summary. This means, that with reading strategies we are also working on all cognitive skills which is also a big component in CLIL.

In my opinion, I think is important to be aware of how reading strategies could facilitate and improve the reading comprehension of our students. Also, I consider that as (future) teachers we should work with them in class in order to teach our students how easily they could be used.

Now, that you have read my post would you like to share with me: which are your perceptions between reading strategies and CLIL? 

See you in the next post! Best wishes