M.B. Dosmagambetova, M.A. Nugumanova

Karaganda State Technical University (Karaganda)

The methodology of teaching the communicative reading in technical university

Reading is a skill that will empower everyone who learns it. Good teaching enables students to learn to read and read to learn. The role of the teacher in the teaching-reading process should be as a companion rather than the boss.

Based on the fundamentals of the communicative approach to language learning, the communicative foreign language teaching is a teaching that is organized based on tasks of communicative character.

Studying the process of teaching students communicative reading, we reviewed the available academic literature and identified several criteria necessary for the selection of texts, which allows to solve tasks of our research.

The analysis of the literature on the issue suggests that in defining the criteria for texts’ selection, scholars take into account such factors as:

1) the age of students;

2) the learning objective;

3) the place of education, i.e. introducing information; cultural nature, directly of the target language or foreign.

After analyzing the different points of view on criteria for selection of textual material, we came to the conclusion that we will be guided by the following criteria: the criterion of artistic and aesthetic significance of the text, the criterion relevance, the criterion of saturation of the cultural facts, the criterion of authenticity.

To develop students’ communicative competence in reading, classroom and homework reading activities must resemble (or be) real-life reading tasks that involve meaningful communication. They must therefore be authentic in three ways.

1. The reading material must be authentic: It must be the kind of material that students will need and want to be able to read when traveling, studying abroad, or using the language in other contexts outside the classroom.

When selecting texts for student assignments, remember that the difficulty of a reading text is less a function of the language, and more a function of the conceptual difficulty and the task(s) that students are expected to complete. Simplifying a text by changing the language often removes natural redundancy and makes the organization somewhat difficult for students to predict. This actually makes a text more difficult to read than if the original were used.

Rather than simplifying a text by changing its language, make it more approachable by eliciting students' existing knowledge in pre-reading discussion, reviewing new vocabulary before reading, and asking students to perform tasks that are within their competence, such as skimming to get the main idea or scanning for specific information, before they begin intensive reading.

2. The reading purpose must be authentic: Students must be reading for reasons that make sense and have relevance to them. "Because the teacher assigned it" is not an authentic reason for reading a text.

To identify relevant reading purposes, ask students how they plan to use the language they are learning and what topics they are interested in reading and learning about. Give them opportunities to choose their reading assignments, and encourage them to use the library, the Internet, and foreign language newsstands and bookstores to find other things they would like to read.

3. The reading approach must be authentic: Students should read the text in a way that matches the reading purpose, the type of text, and the way people normally read. This means that reading aloud will take place only in situations where it would take place outside the classroom, such as reading for pleasure. The majority of students' reading should be done silently.

Reading is a neglected skill. In most of our educational institutions, the learners do not want to read anything beyond the prescribed textbook. The teacher should motivate them to read not only for information but for pleasure too.

There are three stages of classroom teaching of reading skills: pre-reading stage, reading stage and follow up or post-reading stage.

Pre-reading stage. The teacher should motivate the learners. The purpose of reading should be made clear to them. The selection of material is very important. It should be fit for the age and the interest of the learners. It should be informative too.

The teacher should try to relate the subject with learner's own experience, interest and needs. To motivate the learners the teacher should ask the introductory questions related to the theme of the text. This should be followed by discussions · relating to the topic.

This arouses the curiosity of the learners. There are various things we can do before reading a text which will make it easier for students to understand the text and help them focus attention to it as they read.

They include:

· presenting some of the new words which will appear in the text;

· giving a brief introduction to the text;

· giving one or two ‘guiding’ question (orally or on the board) for students to think about as they read;

· suggest them to read the title of the text and try to guess what it is about.

An important part of reading is being able to guess the meaning of unknown words, and we can help students to develop their reading by giving them practice in this. It is important to introduce the theme of the text before we ask them to read it. This serves two purposes:

- to help students in their reading, by giving them some idea what to expect;

- to increase their interest and so make them want to read the text [1].

One way to introduce the text is just to give the simple sentence. It is important to mention that the teacher should not say too much when introducing the text, because it may kill the students’ interest instead of arousing it [2].

Reading stage. The teacher should begin with short passages of the text. S/he can even select a short story. S/he should anticipate the problems of the learners. The teacher should give a glossary of the difficult words; explain new and difficult structures with examples. S/he should explain the terms, which are from different culture. The idiomatic expressions and the use of the figurative language should be explained. The learners should be asked to read silently at a fairly good speed. They should read by sense group and not the individual words. Speed-reading should be 'timed'.

They should be encouraged to look into the dictionary for difficult words. For difficult passive vocabulary, the learners should be encouraged to guess the meaning from the context. The teacher should try to remove the faults of reading among the learners. The role of the teacher is that of the facilitator, who supervises the learners' activity of reading. When they have finished with reading, the next stage is post-reading or follow-up activity.

Follow-up stage. In the follow-up or the post-reading stage, the teacher should put challenging questions to the learners.

The questions should cover all the comprehension skills. The learners can be asked to select the topic sentence from the paragraphs of the text. They should be able to understand relation between parts of the text through reference and cohesive devices. They should be asked to reorganize the jumbled sentences and the paragraphs. They should answer multiple choice questions, true or false questions. They should be able to fill in the blanks. They must know how to transfer the information to the table, diagram or graph. They can be asked to write an outline or a summary of the text.

The teacher can give homework to the learners. They should be asked to write their personal experience related to the theme of text. The classroom reading activity should be extended further. There should be a library period to cultivate library culture in students. They should be encouraged to read stories, newspapers, magazine, novelettes and the abridged editions of famous books.

Comprehension questions are just one form of activity appropriate for post-reading. Consider vocabulary study, identifying the author’s purpose, discussing the author’s line of reasoning, examining grammatical structure, or steering students toward a follow-up writing activity. The activities which are given to students after reading the text are generated by the text and extend its potential for meaningful language work. The tasks cannot be performed without the text, that is, they cannot replace the text. Frequently, they involve the students in detailed revision of the text, which will help them to understand the text better [1].

And also there are numerous ways of testing reading comprehension, ranging from multiple-choice items to opened-ended questions.

Thus, the use of different communicative techniques for teaching different kinds of reading in a foreign language, allows to provide efficiency of formation of linguistic and sociocultural competence of students, stimulate interest in reading literature in the original language, and to improve the methodological diversity of foreign language lessons.

Our analysis of scientific and methodological literature on the teaching of reading has shown that there are different types of reading and communication techniques for working with text, through which students develop not only reading skills, but skills of speaking, logical thinking and erudition. Focus and new priorities in teaching, as well as the results of many studies contribute to the development of a new communicative-based methodology for teaching reading. First of all, we can emphasize the importance of proper planning course of learning to read, the need to clarify the objectives and content of learning to read, bearing in mind the scope of future application of knowledge and skills prerequisite learning.

We considered the forms of organization of work with foreign-language text; communicative-based exercises allow you to teach reading in the foreign language lessons effectively.

References:

1. Knutson Elizabeth. Reading with a Purpose. December 1998. http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/ reading digest, September 8th, 2010 http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/making-read, September 8th2010

2. Alen Maley. Extensive reading: why it is good for our students... and for us (8 December, 2009)http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/making-read, August 9th2010

3. Рогова Г.В., Рабинович Ф. М. Методика обучения иностранным языкам в средней школе. – М.: Просвещение, 2008.

4. Zhang, Yu. Reading to Speak: Integrating Oral Communication Skills. English Teaching Forum, number 1, 2009

5. Carrell, P. L., & Grabe, W. 2002. Reading.In N. Schmitt (Ed.), An introduction to applied Linguistics. London: Arnold