Level »»1: From indifference to experiencing reading
Transition 1.1 | From little reading practice to a somewhat curious reader | |
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Focus | Motivating and facilitating | |
Goals | Teacher activities | Student activities |
Articulate an emotional response to texts. | Encourage students to talk about their reading experiences by referring to their emotional perceptions (being sad, scared, excited, moved, angry, …) and to share their impressions with others. | Talk about reading experiences, impressions and feelings. |
Express first reading experiences and appreciate them as valuable. | Show an interest in the students’ reading histories and help students to retrieve positive reading experiences. | Remember and describe early reading experiences: do a text, a ranking list, collage or another form of presentation. |
Become familiar with the different kinds of books that can be selected. | Provide opportunities for silent reading (for pleasure rather than teacher-led). Introduce different genres, authors and themes (taking the students’ wishes and interests into account). |
Read a variety of texts and try out different genres, authors and themes. Explore these different texts by examining excerpts/extracts, the blurb, reviews or book covers. |
Choose a book according to personal interests. | Recommend books that are likely to match the needs and interests of the students. Provide students with relevant knowledge about the book and present it in an appealing way (‘book talk’). | Select a book on the basis of personal interests. |
Choose a book according to personal interests. | Encourage students to stop reading a book if it neither interests nor engages them. Under the motto of: there is a good book for everyone. | Use a combination of intuition and trial and error to discover appealing texts. |
Respond creatively to texts. | Encourage students to respond imaginatively; Choose creative activities that improve the students’ understanding of the text (see student activities). | Participate in creative activities related to a book. produce creative responses (write a letter or an e-mail, put on a radio play or film, draw a picture, do tweets about book characters/reading experiences, do a poster about the best book, turn a story into a short comic strip or rap, etc.). |
Transition 1.2 | From non-specific attention to a focus on familiar topics of interest | |
Focus | Exploring reading habits and interests | |
Goals | Teacher activities | Student activities |
Use basic reading strategies. | Focus on basic reading strategies (asking questions, anticipating), and encourage students to take notes while reading (for example in their reading diary). | Become familiar with posing simple questions that help understand the information in the text (e.g. who, what, when, where?). |
Use basic reading strategies. | Help students identify the logic of the narrative and genre features, such as a happy end in a fairy tale, or having the villain taken into custody in crime fiction. | Use basic expectations to predict plot developments (e.g. expectations based on genre). |
Relate to personal experiences to understand the text. | Give students examples of how to make a link between what they have read and what they know from personal experience. Set tasks that provide an opportunity to compare the fictional world with the factual. | Make a link between what has been read and personal experiences e.g. with regard to situations or real people. |
Form a personal opinion about the story and its characters. | Give students simple tasks to investigate the fictional world, and help them extract the relevant information from a text with regard to characters and plot. | Talk about the story, and have a personal response to events in the story and the characters’ behaviour. |
Express and share interests. | Explore students’ interests and show interest in their view of the world. | Share interests with classmates such as hobbies and favourite magazines, books, films or TV programmes, etc. |
Share reading experiences. | Select books that provide opportunities for unmotivated readers to gain a positive reading experience. Make use of classmates’ positive reading experiences here as well. | Exchange reading experiences and recommend books to classmates. Create a class library or decide which books to order for the school library. |
Share reading experiences. | Provide the students with enough space and create a safe environment in which less experienced readers feel able to reflect upon their reading experience. | Find out and discuss preferred reading environment and circumstances. |
Share reading experiences. | Devise simple performance activities to increase student enthusiasm. | Play with different forms of reading as a performance, for example, reading aloud and stopping at a cliff hanger, dramatic reading, exploring rhythms etc. |