Students' Name: Elsa Estefania Rodriguez Molina. 20161031565

                                              Hirlet Paola Jacome Varela. 20171001816

                                              Oscar Rene Antunez Sanchez. 20162230072

                                              Paul Esteban Borjas Vasquez. 20162500039



                                                     December 13^th, 2020

Mikulecky starts by explaining to us why is it important to have effective reading when acquiring a second language since through books we can learn and develop many skills such as writing revising and acquiring grammar. When a person is reading, he/she goes through a process to analyze the text, first, he or she read then compares the information with something that already knows, and then there are expectations about what is in the book, that’s how comprehension is made. Literacy and culture are always handed by hand, this explains how, when different people read the same text, they can have very different concepts, because of the different culture they have, they have a different idea of what is the meaning for certain things. When there is a student that is a successful reader in his native language the teacher can’t just assume that he will be that good in his second language, they need instruction to learn how to read in a second language. If the student wants to learn how to read properly in English, he has to do certain things to achieve that. Such as:

There are also reading skills that help the readings to make sense for the student some of them are: 

Reading fluency means to read fast with good comprehension, some people can read a text aloud so fast and not to understand a single word, fluency has more to do with reading in silence and look for ideas and not only say words. 

When a student reads, he acquires a better vocabulary and good reading comprehension each one of them depends on the other one, they co-exist and make a person a better reader.

REFLECTIONS:
Paul: One of the most important things that we need to pay a lot of attention to is reading, when we are in the process to develop a second language reading is the best way to acquire knowledge and vocabulary, teacher is the responsible for making this activity enjoyable for the students, by the time the students will improve all the other skills while reading.
Elsa: Here are much advice here that we can take into account when the time comes that we have to teach a student how to read in a second language and I think that the best thing we can do is to do it ourselves as an example so they can see that is it not as difficult as they see when they pay enough attention and try with perseverance, the most important thing we have to tell to the students and tell them every single moment, DO NOT TRANSLATE, that's the worst thing they can do if they want to learn quickly. 
Hirlet: Teaching reading in a second language is very important for our lives as this helps the student to better develop understanding and it is also important to teach them that when acquiring a second language that they do not make some mistakes such as translating or reading slowly word by word but We have to read fast, learn new words and enrich their vocabulary because that helps us to express ourselves to be able to read and understand what it is we are reading because if we read and do not understand what is written we do not have a good command of a second language.
Oscar: For many of us it is a little difficult to read in our mother tongue, and if we already move to a second language, In this case, English is a great challenge because it is not our language and it is not learned overnight, and being in the world of the acquisition of a second language, there are mistakes that many of us know. If the text wants to transmit us then the story gradually loses its meaning. In addition, we have the bad habit of reading a text word by word and thus lose the opportunity to read fluently, we must have the ability to only see a sentence and have already understood it by a simple text scan in order to understand it.

1.      Reading Around the Room

Level: Beginning

Aims: Increase phonological awareness

Help students isolate initial sounds

Class Time: 5–10 minutes

Preparation Time: 15–20 minutes

 

1. Write or print out labels and attach them to objects in the classroom.

2. Demonstrate appropriate use of pointer sticks for pointing to the labels and reading the words.

3. Allow the students to read around the room by pointing to the different labels and reading the words aloud.

 

2.      Sorting by Sound

Level: Beginning

Aims: Increase phonological awareness

Help students isolate initial sounds

Class Time: 15 minutes

Preparation Time: 30 minutes

 

 

1. Divide the students into small groups. Each group should have a set of small boxes and a stack of picture cards.

2. Instruct the students to divide the cards equally among the members of the group. They should take turns naming aloud the item on one card and placing the card into the correct box until all the cards are in boxes.

3. Once all of the picture cards have been sorted by sound, students should empty the boxes one at a time. They should repeat the names of the objects aloud to make sure that all of the pictures were placed correctly

 

3.      BabyMouse Talks to Felicia Furrypaws

Levels: High Beginning +

Aims: Facilitate reading comprehension using the visual elements of graphic novels

Learn about character traits Communicate through written dialogue

Class Time: 20–25 minutes

Preparation: Time 5 minutes

 

1. Engage students in an expressive class read-aloud of BabyMouse Queen of the

World! Encourage students to interact with the text through comments.

2. Introduce BabyMouse and Felicia Furrypaws as the main characters in the text by pausing at appropriate places and leading a discussion about the characters. The discussion might include concepts about the characters’

behavior, attitude, and interactions with others. Students should be able to see the text, because they will gain important clues about the story’s events and characters from the visual elements.

3. Model the dialogue box activity for the students on large chart paper. (See

Appendix below.) Assume the role of BabyMouse and choose a student for the role of Felicia Furrypaws. You and the student write back and forth to one another in the speech bubbles as you assume your roles. For example,

BabyMouse says, How are you today? Felicia Furrypaws replies, I am not having a good day. 

4. Then, assign partners for the dialogue box activity. One student assumes the role of BabyMouse and the other partner becomes Felicia Furrypaws.

Students work in their partner teams to complete the dialogue. Additional dialogue sheets may be given to groups who need more space to continue their written conversation.

5. The lesson may end by having a group share or role-play their story in front

of the class.

 

4.      The Food Label Store

Levels: Beginning; ESL primarily, but can be adapted for EFL

Aims: Involve students in the development of their own reading skills

Help students see a connection between reading in school and reading in the outside world

Class Time: No set time

Preparation Time: 20–30 minutes

1. Tell the students to bring to class food labels of any description (e.g., labels from cans, meats, bottles, jars; fronts of boxes of cereals, mixes, soap, milk containers; wrappers from loaves of bread, rolls).

2. Place the students in whatever size group you think works best (anywhere from three to six students works well) and give each group a cardboard store.

3. Have them glue their labels to their store.

4. When the groups have finished creating their stores, ask a series of questions that the students can answer by reading the labels from their stores. Sample questions include: What food is the most expensive? The cheapest? Which product is the heaviest? The lightest? Which food do you like best? Why? The least? Why? What two foods go together (e.g., salt and pepper; bread and butter; peanut butter and jelly)?

How many brands are there of the same product?

5.      You might also have the students do a variety of tasks. For example, ask them to find as many brand names as they can as quickly as possible. Another task is to have them add up the total cost of all of the products in the store. Or ask them to put all of the products in various categories (e.g., meats, dairy products).

REFLECTIONS:
Paul: Teaching reading could be tedious work and some of the students could get bored. On the other way, some of them could learn easily and develop the daily habit of reading but there are more that may not be interested in learning how to read properly. Using different strategies teachers can catch the attention of the students who are not interested in reading and then start to motivate them to continue their process independently. 

Elsa: It is always a good idea to make new strategies for teaching reading, not every single group of students is the same and some of them may learn with old methods but other groups do not, they need a better o different attention so, changing the strategies is a great way to help them and also help us as teachers.
Hirlet: I think that using new ways of teaching reading is very good because it helps the student to improve their comprehension to be better readers, whether at home, at school or anywhere else they can do. In addition, these new reading habits make the student call more attention to reading since they are ways of living more with their classmates and making them give their opinions about the readings they had until also using these strategies to be better readers.
Oscar: I think there is no excuse for saying that there are no ways to make a habit, in this case, the habit of reading because there are many methods and practices that make this process that seems difficult is a little easier and fun as are the new ways to teach reading and there are many not only those who already know and to make the job easier, they detail the procedure and the duration and if we put into practice these new ways in a short period of time we will be reading regularly and also to teach these techniques to those who have not yet discovered.

The tendency of local and global strategies focuses on people to have a more effective reading, the local elements are sound letters, meanings, syntax, and there are also the global elements that are synthesis, organization of texts, and knowledge. Also, there is a relationship between reading performance with trends, which are calculated coefficients of the readers. The hierarchical method uses another method called the interactive method (K-means) this is used for the calculation of percentages in the local and global trends in this analysis that was developed could be observed the preferences of trends that had the subjects at the time that significant influence had on reading comprehension.

The capacity that the subjects have at the moment of reading based on the strategies has brought an efficacy in the reading comprehension, since in this way the subject has a better comprehension at the moment of reading, also having previous experiences to understand the content. While for the research of (Carrell) their studies were not the best because it was believed that comprehension in global and local strategies did not have much influence. Their analyses were similar from a global to a local perspective, in terms of reading comprehension.  Finally, these strategies help students to have better comprehension when reading and to be more effective in their reading management, and to have better knowledge in the acquisition of a second L2 language.

REFLECTIONS:
Paul: Reading provide different extra skills to the students who are active readers, all that metacognitive awareness is developed unconsciously by students. We can divide it into 2 groups, the first one is about local skills like sound letters, meaning, or syntax. The second is the global skills such as synthesis, this will make easier the educational process for the students.
Elsa: We as students should see and be aware of our own needs of learning, even though we know the teacher is there to help us we have to take care of our own learning and adopt new strategies every single time we think or we see that the old one is not working anymore or is not sufficient. 
Hirlet: The metacognitive awareness of reading strategies based on how the student interacts in their environment, this is also based on the ethnographic which is what a student of society performs better with known people than with unknown people. Furthermore, it is known what global and local strategies are; this is how the student performs better in reading comprehension for these strategies, but it is considered that there is not much change between these two strategies.
Oscar: Reading comprehension is fundamental because when we understand a text we enter a new world because we know and understand the purpose of that reading, but that is not achieved overnight, it is a process where we have to know parts of the grammar as the syntax, we must also know the meaning of the words, the sound they produce, i.e. phonics and another important thing mentioned in the text is that the student learns to overcome his fears or weaknesses which is done through silent reading groups where they also measure reading ability, i.e. fluency, clarity in pronouncing words, etc.

1.       Children, when reading, construct their own meaning: In a classroom, every single child can catch a different meaning from a text the whole class is reading, that is because all of them have a different perception of the world, this is called prior knowledge and means that the reader takes the information that hey already know and mix it with the new one that they are acquiring from the book. Prior knowledge can be divided into two: overall prior knowledge which is the one that is centered in the knowledge the students acquire both, in and out of school, and specific prior knowledge which is two parts: text-specific knowledge that is centered in the understanding of the type of text, and topic-specific knowledge is to understand something specific about the topic.

2.       Effective reading instruction can develop engaged readers who are knowledgeable, strategic, motivated, and socially interactive: The students that are engaged readers have a special characterizing: They know how to use prior knowledge to gain new information, they use strategies and sources to gain the information they read for pleasure and interact socially under the purpose of constructing more knowledge.

 

3.       Phonemic awareness, a precursor competency in identifying words, is one of the best predictors of later success in reading: One of the first things that are taught to children is the recognition of word patterns by identifying the sounds of every letter, writing and spelling are also part of the reading instruction because they affect positively reading ability.

4.       Modeling is an important form of classroom support for literacy learning: Two types of modeling are talk-aloud and think-aloud. In talk-aloud, the teacher gives the steps for the activity and guides the students through the whole thing, and in think-aloud, the teacher gives the students the thinking process they have to follow to finish the activity.

 

5.       Storybook reading, done in the context of sharing experiences, ideas, and opinions, is a highly demanding mental activity for children: Storybooks are more effective when students share their insights, when they read one-to-one aloud, they increase the quality of their responses to the different situations that happen in the story.
6.       Responding to literature helps students to construct their own meaning, which may not always be the same for all readers: To have a response to literature is a natural part of the process of reading, bur reading a text is not the same as reading poetry when reading a text, the students are looking for information but with poetry or fictions they get involved in a tangled plot. The students construct their own opinions or responses and the teachers have to be prepared for all kinds of responses.

7.       Children who engage in daily discussions about what they read are more likely to become critical readers and learners: As it was pointed out before, to discuss the reading with someone else is a great way to improve the reading and the ideas children can have about what they are reading. Discussions in the classroom are not so common but it should be because it helps to improve the children’s understanding. 

8.       Expert readers have strategies that they use to construct meaning before, during, and after reading: The more the students read the more strategies they learn to construct their own meanings, some of these strategies are: inferencing, which is the process to construct conclusions based on what they have read. Identifying important information: they do not focus their attention on the information that is not relevant but on the one that has the whole meaning in the book. Summarizing: They become very skillful at reducing the information to make a short explanation.

9.       Children’s reading and writing abilities develop together: These two skills go hand to hand, one of them cannot exist without the other. When reading the students learn how to modify meaning and while writing they think and develop the ideas in a better way. 

10.       The most valuable form of reading assessment reflects our current understanding of the reading process and simulates authentic reading tasks: There has to be a test to identify how the reading of every student has grown since the beginning, in this way they are stimulated to keep growing.

REFLECTIONS:
Paul: About the ten principals we already know that the teacher will show the way that the students have to follow, but this is not as easy as give them the books, the teacher must select books that really improve the literary knowledge of the students. If this works, students will grow in different skills, teachers must stimulate the students to keep growing. 
Elsa: These principles teach us how the children's construct their own knowledge and it is so interesting to understand how learning and ideas take shape in our brain, it all depending on our culture and how we think, and also is interesting to see that in every single child, the answers to a single question can be many only because of the way they have been brought up.
Hirlet: The teacher needs to have knowledge of some principles of teaching reading because in this way it makes the student more confident when reading and the teacher teaches different ways of reading. Also, these principles help to develop writing and reading skills, as well as for the student to form their own ideas of what is understood in reading, to build meanings before, during, and after reading because in this way they know and pay attention to reading.
Oscar: As the text says, prior knowledge exists in each of us because according to what we live day by day, when we read we can relate what we have already experienced with what we are reading it is also important that when we read we are instructed to a way in which the process involved in reading is clear to us, in addition to giving students the freedom to choose the books of their choice and creating activities that make them think and discuss what they have read, whether they are discussion groups, forums or interaction activity between themselves so that they are more interested and passionate about reading.
 

Furthermore to this impact, professionals conducted ethnography tests that would be based on children's behavior based on developing learning strategies and adapting to new environments also observed that they enter more into confidence when surrounded by familiar people and not strangers and they can manage more acceptably. On the other hand, a second observation was made about how these children interact in front of a computer and what their software preferences are. These tests were made to have a development in the literacy skills also in linguistic literacy to have better development in the use of computers.

In addition to these tests that were conducted they also conducted an analysis of who used a computer the most and what benefits they used it for if it was concluded that the student who has a computer at home uses it more frequently and also uses it to play games while the student who does not have one and gets a computer uses it for his studies and nothing else. In addition to this, it was realized that a woman has a more advanced reading comprehension than a man since they are weaker when they fall into the use of computers not only that but also that the concern of the parents about the use of the computer was observed to hinder the development of literacy. In human life, it is important to develop early language and computer literacy teaching.

REFLECTIONS:
Paul: Computers have changed the way in that we live, this also has an impact on the educational process, nowadays is more common see the students with their computers or smartphones instead of a book and pen. Teachers can take advantage of these promote reading, thanks to the internet students can get all the books that they want with a click, this could help students to read independently. But there are some cons of computers during the reading process, the most common lost your time with other activities.   
Elsa: I agree with what this article says but there are also good things about computers, although more children use it to play there are others that use it to read and keep them with a constant flow of knowledge, it all depends on the parents and their educators and the way that teaches the child to see an electrical device.
Hirlet: The impact of the use of computers is a very extensive topic because nowadays the use of a computer has become something indispensable in students and teachers, also because it is believed that students who have a computer at home do not use it for their homework but also use it for other activities, while the student who does not have a computer and uses the one of his school or friend only uses it for his homework or research and I think it must be the right thing to do.
Oscar: As we all know times have changed and now technology has become so advanced that even in the most inhospitable places there are technological devices and as for the impact of the use of the computer for learning and reading depends on each child or parent because many times when having a computer we deviate from reality leaving aside learning and we get into a world of ignorance, Although on the other hand there are people who if they give a good handle to technology using it to enrich their IQ, getting out of ignorance and knowing teaching strategies for their own benefit, I also agree that men are more easily distracted than women when it comes to computer use.

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International Literacy Association. (2019). Creating Passionate Readers Through Independent Reading. 

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Mikulecky, B. S. (2008). Teaching Reading in a Second Language. Person Education Inc.

Pearson, N. K. (2002). chapter 10. In I. r. assosiation, Effective Practices for Developing reading comprehension (pp. 205-236).

Raddi, O. (2002). The Impact of Computer Use on Literacy in Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Skills. Australia: Department of Science and Mathematics Education The University of Melbourne.

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