Hand in Hand: Teaching Reading and Writing

        By teaching our students the best reading and writing strategies, we help them increase their comprehension as well as lower their anxiety of interpreting new material. If we as teachers understand the benefits of both bottom up and top down approaches, using schemata, and a combination of other strategies, we get insight into what our students are feeling. For example, authentic texts are very important but on the contrary, we have to decide the readability. If a student feels overwhelmed and can't even begin to dissect what is in front of them, how successful will they be at understanding the main points? Or even understanding there are different uses for vocabulary in different genres and situations. Teaching students the proper lexicon for writing a letter is much different from how you would write an article is extremely useful to their growth. It would be helpful it teachers tried to provide students with as many different situations as possible so students can compare and contrast the items which helps them understand differences and form their own opinions and knowledge about each genre/topic.
      When teaching reading, it is crucial you think about how the reading is written and obstacles students might face. In chapter 20, Brown mentions seven characteristics of written language including complexity, vocabulary, and formality. These points can be easily talked about before analyzing an assignment to ease the students. Simply assessing how hard the article is will determine what you are looking for your students to obtain from this assignment. Will they be able to comprehend it? Do you want them to learn new vocabulary or read for comprehension? Will this tie into the current class topic? These simple questions will help us teachers quickly decide if this is the right reading for our class.
       A strategy Brown mentions on pg. 369 is "guess when you aren't certain." I feel like many teachers shy away from telling their students to guess because they fear their students won't really try to comprehend. On the other hand, your students could fall into the trap of getting caught up on every word they don't know and it takes them ten minutes to read a few sentences. By explaining to your students it is okay for them to skip over words they don't know and try to read between the lines for overall meaning, you are taking a lot of the anxiety out of learning a new language. Students get uncomfortable when they feel they don't know something because they feel lost and it seems like everyone else has the answers. It is something adolescents typically possess, imaginary audience, where they feel like everyone is watching them. When we explain to students it is okay not to know new words or be confused by certain grammar points, they understand the reading so much better. Though I do believe it is important, after everyone completes the reading, that you go over any new words or points in the reading that confused them. Then they are still learning new vocabulary but in a more timely manner. It also goes back to the age old saying of "If you have a question, then someone else probably has the same question too." We've heard teachers say this hundreds of times over the years but it's generally true.
     Writing is very similar to reading in that we must focus on the process rather than the outcome as a whole. In my 319 class (Teaching Principles of Foreign Language) we discussed this for quite sometime. We were trying to understand the best approach for helping L2 learners write effectively and without fear. A great idea we discussed was have them do dialogue journals either everyday or once a week and don't correct anything on it. Just let them write about something interesting to them and just collect it, read it, and hand it back. Knowing that they can try expressing themselves without the fear of making mistakes makes it much more easier for them to focus upon what they're saying rather than how many points they will get off if they can't conjugate a verb correctly.
      By learning these strategies, it provides us with the tools to really help our students thrive in the classroom. They help us rid our classrooms of anxiety and help students reach their full potential. Some of these points, like following the SQ3R sequence, should be hung up in our offices as reminders to always be thinking about the students perspective.