Teaching Reading II

Application Workshop
By Jan Lefebvre

Preparing a center-based classroom

Reading is a multilayered skill that requires strategies and techniques to develop the reader are potential in understanding and comprehending the reading material. Understanding calls for the recognition of phonological, syntactic and semantic language patterns; whereas comprehension requires the use of appropriate operations to decode the underlied messages in the passage.

In order to improve the students’ abilities and adjust their attitudes towards reading, the resort to center-based classroom is likely to facilitate orient instruction and let them keep track of positive achievement. The rational behind center-based classroom instruction is to equip students with the appropriate tools to handle reading along with other skills in a successful way.

The following are stages that instructors should consider while preparing for a center-based classroom:

• Selecting themes or topics relevant to the students’ needs, age and level of proficiency.
• Identifying instructional materials from different sources for the sake of variety.
• Setting curriculum-related objectives and goals (content and linguistic).
• Adjusting centers to the students’ language proficiency.
• Devising the appropriate assessment tasks.

The implementation stage of center-based classroom instruction requires the establishment of work groups, creation of work boards, brainstorming, introducing centers to students and tracking the students’ progress.

The class is split into small groups where students are supposed to interact with the reading material resorting to their experience and background knowledge. The students are offered the opportunity to exchange ideas and depict the messages in the text. In doing this, they will need to use cognitive operations which they may not have developed yet. The instructor’s role, at this stage, is to assist his/her students to adopt the appropriate strategies.

The sample below sheds light on how a center-based classroom instruction is run:

Topic: Health
Objectives: content Vs language.
Setting: work groups.
Resources: Miscellaneous (e.g. Books in a Box)
Procedure:
Center choices:

1. Drama and role play.
   1. Content objective: acquisition of new lexis.
   2. Language objective: need and have to.
2. Games:
   1. Content objective: practice new lexis.
   2. Language objective: should /had better…
3. Writing :
   1. Content objective: use of health related lexis (collocations)
   2. Language objective: expressing opinions.
4. Reading:
   1. Content objectives: skimming and scanning.
   2. Language objective: must / mustn’t.

Center-based classroom then proves to be an effective way in dealing with language instruction. It tends to make a shift from high structure (teacher-centered) to low structure (learner-centered) to enhance the sense of responsible learning attitudes.

Mokhlis Mohamed
Biare Abderrahim