Педагогические науки/ 2. Проблемы подготовки специалиста

Николаенко О.В.,

Ушатая Т.А.

Черниговский государственный институт экономики и управления

Interactive model of academic reading at the senior level of foreign languages learning at higher educational establishment

Reading texts in a foreign language as communicative skills and a means of communication is an important part of speech activity and the most spread means of foreign language communication. Reading had appeared before oral speech but it was developed on the basis of oral speech and became an important means of communication and cognition. Due to reading people transfer knowledge accumulated in labour, creative and cultural activities of mankind.

There are many reasons why getting students to read books in foreign languages is an important part of the teacher’s job. In the first place, many students want to be able to read texts in a foreign language either for their career or simply for pleasure. Reading skills helps students use publications in their life and professional activities. Anything we can do to make reading easier for them must be a good idea.

Reading is useful for other purposes: any exposure to a foreign language is a good thing for language students. At the very least, some of the language sticks in their minds as part of the process of language acquisition is likely to be even more successful.

Reading texts also provide good models for foreign language writing. When we teach students writing we will need to show them models of what we are encouraging them to do. Reading texts also provide opportunities to study language: vocabulary items, grammar, punctuation, and the way we construct sentences, paragraphs and texts. Lastly, good reading texts can introduce interesting topics, stimulate discussion, excite imaginative responses and be the springboard for well-rounded, fascinating lessons.

Reading is a receptive kind of speech which includes reading technique and reading comprehension. In connection with it there are notional and procedural aspects of reading. Notional aspect of reading depends on procedural aspect of reading and includes information comprehension through decoding languages while reading in a foreign language.

Psychophysiological basis of reading includes visual perception of the text and its comprehension. In reading information goes through visual canal, despite of auding, that’s why visual senses play an important part and make motor analyzer active. Due to it reading is attended with inside pronouncing which becomes full while reading aloud. A person who reads inward listens himself that’s why auditory senses are also important while reading. These senses give opportunities to regulate reading accuracy.

Reading is based on linguistic items recognition. In subject to strength of language mastering and the development of auditory receptors mechanisms the process of cognition can be fast and spontaneously or slow with elements of remembering. In terms of psychology reading cognition and comprehension are connected with thinking and memory. While reading a student defines notional parts of the text and synthesizes them in a single whole. Besides we read with the help of logical and mechanical memory. Information perception and its understanding take place simultaneously. These components are closely connected and that’s why the character and the level of text comprehension depend on the quality of perception.

There are about 30 kinds of reading however some scientists substitute stages of the same kind of reading as separate kinds of reading. For instance, skimming reading is divided on such stages as to skim, to preview, to review, to overview, to scan. They are not new kinds of reading they point to the place and form of reading.

So among principle kinds of reading we can name skimming reading, scanning reading and searching reading. At the senior level skimming reading and scanning reading are developed on the basis of monologue and dialogue texts of cognitive or country-specific subject and searching reading is developed on the basis of reading articles in newspapers and magazines, interviews, brochures and other professionally-oriented materials. These publications are rich in specific international vocabulary, professional vocabulary, idioms, set expressions, cliché, abbreviations. The difficulty is to percept international words and idioms which are unknown or have no equivalents in the native language.

Professionally oriented academic reading learning (POAR) is an issue of a great importance at a senior level at high school as the students of the magistrates and post-graduate students study foreign scientific publications (FSP) to conduct their own scientific research. The object of professionally oriented academic reading learning at high school has been investigated by the set of great scientists such as G. Babanov, T. Sierov, S. Fomkin and others. However, the processes, which take place while reading, haven’t enough been studied. Among the processes we can distinguish the techniques of content separation while publication reading, the techniques of prints comprehension. These techniques are distinguished as reading models. Reading model is a set of assumptions about what is happening while a student is working the text out that is modes by which a student distinguishes content out of printed texts. Such models are divided into three categories: bottom-up, top-down and interactive models.

The goal of the article is to analyse foreign language academic reading models, to prove efficient interactive academic reading models and to advise how to improve foreign languages learning process taking into account the advantages of interactive academic scientific publications reading model.

Let’s get down to the bottom-up reading model. The model means to design text meaning of the least parts of the text by the reader. This process of working the text out is called decoding. It needs word comprehension learning that is important to understand word-combinations and then a single sentence. According to the approach the text is as sequence of separate sentences within a theme to understand which you should decode every word in each sentence and the process of reading goes through visual identification of letters, grapheme-phoneme equivalents ascertainment, words comparison to their meanings, synthetic structures identification, text content design. On condition that a student uses bottom-up model it is important to understand a word to understand a text.

As opposed to the bottom-up model there is the top-down academic reading model according to it a student uses his own knowledge, expectations, assumptions, questions which he poses to the text. This model means to select a small number of informative elements of the text (verbal and nonverbal) to put forward hypotheses about its content. These hypotheses are confirmed, objected or corrected while selecting information from the text.

The main idea is that efficient reading is not each word comprehension because while reading a student correlates information understanding and comprehension to his own professional knowledge. The top-down model emphasizes the importance of background knowledge while reading, because reading is an interactive process between the students’ knowledge on the subject or problem and the author’s proposition. For those who study language as a foreign one background knowledge is more important in reading comprehension than language complication. So, to make scientific publications reading adequate students need activate background knowledge.

It is obvious that each given earlier models has a certain evaluation for learning POAR at the senior level at the higher educational establishments. Search and skimming over reading is attended with taken information evaluation. For this it is enough for a student to understand general content. However in evaluation the character of reading changes because a student’s attitude to taken information is also changes.

So, subject to the character of scientific information given in the text and to students’ demands, which are specified with the level of their proficiency, the character of reading is varied. These skills are called flexible reading skills. It is reasonable because while reading a student needs different reading models. You can’t do reading without the bottom-up model if you need to understand details of scientific information. But at the same time the word by word understanding can bring to when the processes of a lower level prevents the processes of a higher level that is scientific information comprehension by a student through the author’s idea and the syntheses with background knowledge to draw conclusion. That’s why it is reasonable to use the interactive foreign text reading model which combines the bottom-up and top-down models. It means to work out the text by the readers through using of taken information from some resources.

So students can use one model to compensate defects of the other model by using knowledge from the other level. These sources include all knowledge which is taken separately while the bottom-up and top-down text working-out, such as vocabulary, grammar and discourse.

The interactive model helps to overcome hardships inherent to first two models of text working-out. The use of this model lets a student with a lack of terms knowledge compensate it by using semantic and syntactic clues. A student also predicts speech materials because while reading his hypotheses are being checked through taken information and background knowledge. A student designs content through interactive activity when in use of two sources of information – taken information from the text and background knowledge.

Subject and language availability lets consider that information prediction takes place at the significative and verbal levels. So, approximate student activity management is reasonable at the level which goes before reading. We suggest to conduct subject discussion according to the text content and to do activities which provoke expectation and show the links between significant parts of the text and situations which are known by the students.

Such activities can provide students with goals in reading and to enhance the efficiency of reading activity. However, information prediction by a student at verbal level makes it is important to use language knowledge in reading, because they are necessary to understand scientific information exactly. The scientists do not object to the importance of background knowledge but they are for background knowledge using while difficulty overcoming before reading because scientific publications have the definite linguistic peculiarities.

In conclusion, we consider that foreign language academic reading learning at the senior level has to take place within interactive reading model, because such model, in despite of bottom-up and top-down reading, means to use background knowledge and linguistic knowledge while scientific publications reading before reading to avoid difficulties.

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