How to, or not to teach reading

I remember one time when I was teaching a reading class and when I had the students open to the correct page the Chinese teacher interrupted me and said that I should have all children pointing to the words that they are reading with their fingers as they are reading them and read word for word what I am saying. I think this just teaches the children to be little robots and repeat after me. I also don’t like the method of having the students point at each word as they read it as I think this teaches them to read every word later and will slow down their reading speed when they get older and learn to read every word by moving their finger back and forth, rather than looking at the center of the page and scrolling down on their own with their eyes.
She also didn’t like the way that I asked questions that were off the list of questions that the school gives you. I wanted them to understand more than just what is on the test. I wanted them to understand the reading for its own sake.
Does anybody have any comments on this and on how we can get schools to ween kids off following along reading every word with their fingers as it will only hurt them later. I think having kids point at every word they are reading does more damage in the long term :ponder: .

I like having my 1st and 2nd graders use their fingers, but mainly to try to get them to pay attention and not wander off. I also think it helps them notice the tiny differences in words like different verb tenses. When we start reading, it is word by word but as you read more and more, it becomes by sentence so I don’t think it does long term damage. Making you use their list and nothing else is lame and short sighted.

Using their fingers, helps them to stay on the same line, and not get fidgety. As they get more proficient, they start seeing the bigger picture, and stop using the fingers by themselves. It’s not a bad idea at all, scanning the pages is not easy for 5-6 year olds but since they’ve been pointing at things from 6 months of age, and everything was taught to them like that, the habit is easy to carry over to reading initially.

It’s not a good idea to point at words because your brain doesn’t work like that. When you read, you scan in chunks of several words at once; you don’t apprehend the meaning of each word individually and then piece the phrase together by referring to some grammatical rule-book in your head. One day Chinese teachers will read some modern cognitive/functional psychology research - say, something written after 1940 - and perhaps realise this might have some relevance to language acquisition.

Just ignore them and carry on with what you know works. Your method sounds great. Can hardly be worse than what they do in the public schools, can it?

I like them to have their finger under the center of the sentence they read at times, not moving, but never word by word.

People read in chunks AFTER they can automatically recognize words at sight. Until that happens, I see no problem with pointing. It also has the advantage that if you’re “working the room” you can see at a glance who is “with you” as you read aloud and who is not. I don’t like having kids repeat each word though – we want to model fluent reading, and learners are not yet at that level in the beginning. Better for them to listen to a fluent reader and follow along, with comprehension questions and/or translation used to gauge understanding.

Well, true … you wouldn’t want them reading from a book full of completely unfamiliar words … but I got the impression that the writer is teaching a fairly high-level class and is attempting to get students to read naturally, and that the ‘advisor’ says the students will be unable to read properly unless you make them point.

I guess if you’re teaching very young kids and/or you’re using the book to teach vocabulary, pointing has other valid purposes (such as reminding them they’re supposed to be reading) but it has no other function. If you need to stop and focus on an unfamiliar word, your eyes can servo to the right place without any manual intervention, so from a learning point of view it’s probably not very helpful. One of my earliest memories is of learning writing at school, and on told to put a ‘finger space’ between each word thinking, ‘duh - I’m sure I can put a word space there without using my finger’. I probably couldn’t (I’m not trying to say I was some sort of word-spacing prodigy) but I imagine I did stop relying on ‘finger spaces’ quicker than other kids who had been taught this completely pointless method. Sounds to me like the OP has a great approach to reading exercises; if those kids could read fluently enough to enjoy reading for its own sake, they’ll do well.

I think the pointing method is useful for beginner readers, especially when they are learning phonics, and when they teacher is reading out loud at the same time. But it’s daft for advanced students. Maybe on the line for tired teens on a Friday night, just to keep them focused.

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For my beginner levels, like Grade 1 - 3, I ask them to use their fingers to point to the words while we are reading. When I’m teaching to the beginners, I’ll write a sentence or two on the whiteboard, randomly underline words in the sentence and ask them to tell me what the word is, then when I feel they’re able to say all the words, I ask them to read the sentence from start to finish. Then the whiteboard gets erased and they have to read it from the book. It’s time consuming, but I’m the boss so I can do as I please, and it usually gets good results.

The part that honestly bothers me the most is the point made about questions. That is almost to the point of disturbing.

A couple of relevant articles you might want to read (readings for the reading teachers):

How Useful Are Comprehension Questions? by Mario Rinvolucri
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/how-useful-are-comprehension-questions

Another related topic which hasn’t been discussed here yet is the issue of having students read aloud in the classroom. In many language classrooms, this is a very common activity. However, there is some debate about its effectiveness. Ken Wilson makes an eloquent argument in this blog post…

Reading aloud in class is a complete waste of time - Discuss. by Ken Wilson
http://kenwilsonelt.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/reading-aloud-in-class-is-a-complete-waste-of-time-discuss/

Rinvolucri has some interesting ideas, and I would love to take a language class from him, but I am sure the Chinese assistant’s desire to stick to the comprehension questions mandated by the test have nothing to do with Rinvolucri’s opinions about the uselessness of comprehension questions.
To teach the way R. suggests requires a fairly high level class with motivated students. I’m guessing it wouldn’t work for young teenagers in the average buxiban. The teacher in Taiwan typically has to ask questions to find out if the students have in fact read the text, and if they have understood any of it. That said, I rarely used straight comprehension questions in reading classes, because the students were bored by them. For younger classes, I made a game out of true/false statements about the text, or some kind of game based on questions about the text.

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I don’t. neither does my 5 year old. She still uses her finger to point at words, but as she becomes familiar, they become sight words, and she can read through the sentences. But whatever, you know best!

I wrote you a long reply that got lost while the site was down–perfect timing, I guess! Anyway, it went something like this:

For emergent readers (you can google that term), following text with a finger is a GREAT idea! As ironlady says, we don’t read in chunks until we learn to decode letters into sounds and group the sounds into words with meaning. This is a more complex process than you’d think, maybe, and following with a finger slows us down enough to allow for that process. But it’s also a great idea for another reason:

Using a finger to follow text also provides a physical component to the reading process. There are very strong connections between our bodies and minds, and more and more research shows that learning is NOT only a cognitive process. If we add a physical component to learning, we learn more quickly and more soundly. Athletes talk about practicing a manuver until they don’t have to think about it because their bodies just “know” what to do. Ironlady uses physical gestures with her TPRS students to indicate an error that they keep repeating. TPS teachers rely very heavily on this mind/body learning connection. Also, many people are very kinesthetic learners, and this finger usage will support such a learner’s reading process.

As for asking questions that were off the worksheet or whatever, I don’t know what exactly you were doing, but it was likely a great idea. Too often in Taiwan, everything about education is condensed into a single right answer and spooned into the apathetic young minds. But that’s not what reading is about. The single most important thing that reading does is teach us how to THINK! Well, if we give it a chance!

Instead of reading simply to decode characters into sound meaning, we should be reading for understanding. For young readers, begin with pre-reading activities, such as asking them to look at the cover of the book and talk about it. Talk about what they see on the cover. If there’s an orange kettle, get them to talk about it. Have they ever seen a kettle before? What was it used for? How was it used? Where was it? What color was it? Or ask questions that they have to answer using context clues. If there’s a picture with lots of animals, ask which animal is sitting in the blue chair.

Then get them to guess what they think might happen in the book, bassed on the cover. Have some discussion about this and let it develope a little, and then tell them that it’s time to find out if they were correct, and begin to read the book with them.

For older students, do the same with the cover of the book. Ask older ask them about something implied in the text that isn’t explicitly spelled out, and then ask them to tell you how they knew that information.

For older and more apathetic students, you can also do a book talk: choose a very good passage in the book, someting with action or ingrigue, and make it a cliffhanger!

The point here is to get the kids to relate to the events or characters in the book through their own life experiences. You want to them to create images, sounds, and sensations in their own minds, based on the text. If you do this effectively, reading will become a fun and adventurous activity. When you learn to relate to a book in this way, instead of just decoding it to get the right answer, you learn to really experience a book! And it does physically change our minds! This stuff wrinkles up our brains and broadens our horizons! It is cognitive activity that changes us physically and emotionally! Very exciting stuff, right?

In western education, this is called “scaffolding,” and it means to build new learning onto old knowledge. In fact, it is very difficult for anyone to learn a new concept without being able to relate it to something they already know.

Good luck, Lotta. I hope this helps.

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I don’t. neither does my 5 year old. She still uses her finger to point at words, but as she becomes familiar, they become sight words, and she can read through the sentences. But whatever, you know best![/quote]

Maybe I am misunderstanding the “But whatever, you know best!” comment, but isn’t that usually used when you disagree with the point made, not when providing an example of why we agree the monotone chanting we see kids doing in Taiwan is utterly useless?

Sorry…just confused by it and asking for clarification. Not trying to be polemical.

Rinvolucri makes some great points, but I would face a LOT of obsticles with using his ideas in my current job. I wonder if others face the same problems I do:

**The stories we read are horribly boring. They’re not my choice, but the school’s choice. How can we expect students to come up with in-depth questions about Jane kicking a ball to Tom and Tom not catching it?

**The students’ creative functions are an utter mess. Once you get past the hump, they are creative. It is difficult to get them past that and takes a lot of work. They are so conditioned to read simply for the sake of answering comprehension questions.

**The purpose of reading seems odd to me. I recently took a book to my level 1 class to re-read it to them. They loved it a month before, so assumed they would love it again. Some students argued, claiming we read it already in class. One child even got angry about it. They saw books as sort of a checklist you go through to say, “yes. I read that one.”

With the reading out loud article, I agree that mostly, he is right. I do oral readings with my class regularly, but for a different purpose. I try to help them read so the story comes to life more.
“Stop it,” screamed Tom.

I will not let my students simply mumble, “Stop it” at that point. It says he screamed it. So when we get there, they have to scream it as well.

I look and help with voice inflection as well. A good way to do that in the beginning is look for a story with italics in it at times.
“But I want to go with you.”

Teach them how to put the emphasis on that. You’ll see huge leaps in comprehension and ability to talk about the story. (That is, if you can use good stories).

Edit: double post

[quote=“Puppet”]Rinvolucri makes some great points, but I would face a LOT of obsticles with using his ideas in my current job. I wonder if others face the same problems I do:

**The stories we read are horribly boring. They’re not my choice, but the school’s choice. How can we expect students to come up with in-depth questions about Jane kicking a ball to Tom and Tom not catching it?[/quote]

Make up a parallel story using the kids in the class. The same sorts of things happen to the kids, but of course they happen differently (more interestingly). Then, you can ask comprehension questions about both the reading content (the boring story) and what happens to your kids in the parallel story. That keeps engagement higher.

You can do that easily by simply asking the first boring question “Does Jane have a hamburger?” Yes. Then ask the same question about someone in the class. “Does Yi-ju have a hamburger?” Yes. Really? Is Yi-ju’s hamburger big or small? Is it green? Is Jane’s hamburger big and green? Whose hamburger is bigger? Whose hamburger is uglier? and so on. For younger kids, who are very concrete, you may want to prepare in advance so that you have a cutout picture of a big green hamburger (or whatever) to “give” to Yi-ju to hold, so that she really does have a big green hamburger.

Things like this greatly increase the amount of input language the kids get, and keeps them on task with reading, because even if the story is boring, they need the information to participate in the more interesting story that emerges during Q&A.

Thanks for the tip, Terry. :smiley: