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„Êè¿âñüêèé ïîë³òåõí³÷íèé ³íñòèòóò”
TEACHING
National Polytechnic University of Ukraine
is one of the biggest educational establishments in Ukraine, in post –Soviet
countries and Europe. The authorities of the university try to do their best to
adopt university’s educational program to European standards and principles.
According to the new requirements all students of engineering faculties have to
reach B-2 level in the process of learning a foreign language. Students of these
faculties mainly deal with reading and translating of technical texts that are
given in their text-books. These texts present a lot of problems for them
because their knowledge of English doesn’t correspond to the level of texts’
difficulty. The situation is also highly aggravated with problems of teaching
methods, low motivation of students, with absence of appropriate teaching
material and technical means of teaching. In this article I would like to highlight
some of the ideas that explain the problems of reading and ways of these
problems solution.
For discussion the problem of reading we
have to formulate its definition. So, what is reading?
Students of engineering departments mainly
deal with intensive type of reading. In intensive reading students usually read
a page to explore the meaning and to be acquainted with writing mechanisms. In
intensive ( or creative ) reading students are exposed to relatively short
texts which are used either to exemplify specific aspects of the lexical,
syntactic or discourse system of language, or to provide the basis for targeted
reading strategy practice. The importance of reading for this category of
students is out of question. But how to make a student a fluent reader? It is
obvious that reading component of an English language course has to include a
set of learning goals for the ability to read different texts in English, for
building a knowledge of language which will facilitate reading ability, for
building schematic knowledge, for the ability to adapt the reading style
according to reading purpose ( skimming, scanning or careful reading), for developing
an awareness of the structure of written texts in English and for taking a
critical stance to the content of the texts.
With
the students of engineering departments the main problem is in the absence of
motivation on one side and relative difficulty of the texts on the other. Most
of students were taught at school in teacher dominated classes and are
accustomed to spoon- feeding method of studying.
Most
of them complain on the difficulty of texts and always ask about the meaning of
unknown words. The percentage of these unknown words for intensive reading
doesn’t have to exceed 25%. For intensive reading to be possible and for it to
have the desired result, texts must be well within the learners’ reading
comprehension. The use of easy material is controversial. There is still a
pervasive view that, to accustom students to real-world reading, real-world
texts should be used. This is to confuse the means with the end and
paradoxically to rob students of exactly the material they need to progress to
the goal of reading real-world texts. For students to be motivated to read and
study more, and to be able to ladder up as their foreign language and reading
skills improve, they must be reading texts that reflect their language ability
– text they find easy and enjoyable at every step of the way. If we analyze the
texts of the course-books we can easily find out that they are of the same
difficulty for all the years from the first to the fifth. For the students of
linguistic faculties the text-books are carefully graded from Elementary to
Proficiency level. So, for students of engineering departments the texts are approximately
of the same difficulty and are included into the text-book on the principle of
their correspondence to the students’ specialty and not on their language level
proficiency. As a result we encounter the same problem with reading at all
levels because these levels may be the same as there is no envisaged system of
grading or progress. Teachers orient and
guide their students sticking to the prescribed pattern of reading stages:
-
pre-reading ( it demands that the
teachers try to increase the students’
motivation by helping them to recognize the knowledge that they already have
about the topic of the text through discussion of titles, subheadings, figures,
photographs, etc.);
-
while-reading or interactive (
develops students’ ability in tackling texts by developing their linguistic and
schematic or background knowledge);
-
post-reading ( enhance learning
comprehension through the use of matching exercises, cloze exercises, cut-up
sentences, and comprehension questions. For the cloze activity, the teacher puts
blanks in the text. The cut-up sentences activity uses sentences from the given
text and helps learners to gain confidence by manipulating the text in various
ways).
The students are heavily dependant on their
teacher who dominates the class. They are given assignments and are under full
teacher’s control. They always wait for the teacher to give the meaning of the
unknown word, to translate the sentence that seems
too difficult to make any sense and the
teacher helps them to wade through the difficult foreign language.
If we measure the time of speaking on
the side of students and that of the teacher we can easily find out that in
general a student speaks not more than 2 minutes ( in class of 10 students it
makes 20 minutes all in all ). Teacher’s part of it is a bit bigger and makes
around 50 minutes. The process like that creates the feeling of satisfaction on
both sides because the students do not have to work hard and the teacher is
happy being tired because he or she subconsciously shares that tiredness with
her students and thinks that they have just done the same work he or she did.
The primary activity of a reading
lesson should be learners reading – not listening to the teacher. Teachers must
learn to be quiet: all too often, teachers interfere with and so impede their
students’ reading development by being too dominant and by talking too much.
Students’ books are black and white,
printed in small type, they lack color and pictures (in addition to being
pretty, color is actually an aid to memory, drawing both hemispheres of the
brain together and thus greatly improving our memory capabilities). The texts
are overloaded by unknown lexis that is easy for the teacher but not for the
students. If you ask a student of a linguistic faculty why he or she hates
chemistry, they will name just the same reasons: too difficult and, as a result,
dull and boring.
When telling an anecdote, a speaker needs
both to select and sequence the events in a logical and chronological order and
decide how to make the ending as effective as possible. To create effective
program of language studying we also have to take into consideration all stages
of it.
When we teach students to read
different texts we are interested not in their translation capabilities but in
their ability to get and understand information that may be useful in
exercising of their future professional duties.
The problems highlighted in this
article focus on effective reading strategies that increase students’
comprehension. Students of engineering departments mainly deal with intensive
type of reading and experience difficulties due to different reasons:
difficulty with texts that do not correspond to their language proficiency,
teachers’ domination in class that deprives them of the possibility to become
independent readers, inadequacy of teaching materials, dullness and boredom of
classes and lack of interest and motivation as the result.