PGI410188-41010064DO/ME (20202) - Tecnologias em Ensino e Aprendizagem

Reading activities in L2 classrooms have changed throughout the years because of technology. If before students only had access to texts in English through their textbooks and what the teacher decided to bring to them, now they have an enormous variety of sources to access themselves at any time they want. Although it seems a great improvement in terms of the number of input students are exposed to, sometimes it can be harsh for the students to catch up with all the content available depending on the learners' level of proficiency. For me, as a teacher, one of the challenges of working with reading is to select texts that are from "real world" environments and at the same time choose texts that are in the level the students (and sometimes that has the grammar that is being taught as well). 

As argued by Stanley (2013), online reading requires the improvement of another skill which the author called "digital literacy". Stanley used Kavalier and Flanning (2006) definition to explain what it means: "[it refers to] a person's ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment and includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments". Since this is a new skill students need to develop and it is part of students' lives, it is also our job as teachers to help them to deal with this new environment. 

Moreover, Chappelle and Jamieson in their chapter about reading, propose 7 tips to deal with CALL and reading in the classroom. One of the most important ones, in my opinion, is related to the selection of the texts, because according to the authors "Many experts would agree that the process of language development can be more efficient if learners read the material at an appropriate level, and if they receive help with the language while they are reading" (p. 63). Therefore, it is not only necessary to choose materials that are at the students' level but also aid the students in their process of understanding the text as well. 

Good afternoon, everyone!

When introducing his chapter about reading, Stanley (2013) emphasizes that literacy goes beyond the ability to decode. The author says that, to function in our society, learners need to apply different strategies and skills to deal with media texts, new genres such as e-mails, text messages, blogs, etc. Also, he points out that learners need to make sense of how pictures and written language contribute to text meaning. Chapelle and Jamieson (2008) state that reading is both the goal and the medium through which learners can develop their English ability. They explain that when learners are not proficient in the language, reading becomes a puzzle. Thus, teachers must find ways to help learners understand the meaning of texts and develop their skills. Using CALL, teachers have access to a greater variety of texts, increasing the likelihood they find appropriate texts to learners’ level of English and the task at hand.

Hello! 

As Tatiana has mentioned, reading is not just about decoding words. However, high-level processing reading skills can only be fully developed when/if students have well established the target language mapping principles. Thus, teaching reading skills in L2 classes can be very challenging, and learners may need extensive practice to automate their abilities to read L2 texts. As Stanley (2013) states, “reading is a complex and multifaceted skill” (p. 99); therefore, even if students can read isolated words reasonably well, many of them will still need to practice to develop reading fluency. Here comes the benefits of technology: it not only offers a diversity of texts but also facilitates access to tools to support reading comprehension (e.g., dictionaries, graphic organizers, highlighting tools, etc.). 

Hello everyone,

Regarding Stanley (2013) two points caught my attention. The first is related to the different strategies that students should adapt while reading some new text genres they find online. Chapelle and Jamieson (2008) also mentioned this topic as the seventh teaching tip. The other topic is related to "critical literacy" and how important it is in a world full of fake news and unreliable influencers. Besides, it makes total sense when we see education as a way of freeing people's minds and empowering them.

When it comes to reading, Stanley (2013) states that to meet today's needs for understanding all sorts of information which is to us presented, either in new forms of communication or new media, the teacher plays an important role assisting learners in developing these new reading skill strategies. Moreover, the author adds that "all of these new texts require a new set of skills, usually clustered under the umbrella term of digital literacy" (p. 99), term which means to be able to effectively perform tasks in a digital environment. It is also quite interesting to mention that the activities proposed by the author provide learners not only the chance to use technology as a tool to help with reading-skills development but also provides activities to develop reading sub-units, such as, skimming, reading for gist, scanning, inferencing and activating schema. I particularly really like to teach reading and the activities proposed by the author made me want to change some things up a little bit when it comes to teaching this particular skill to my students. I felt really motivated to try to innovate a little bit more using some of the activities proposed by him.

I think reading activities provide a great opportunity for the students to observe their strenghts and weaknessess in the second language. Usually, reading activities are done individually and with some time for the student to reflect about the text, and for this reason the students can pay attention to what they understand entirely, what they understand by the context and so on. As my colleagues mentioned, I think reading strategies can be very useful to teach the students, so they can learn how to focus on specific information and select what are the important parts of a text for them to read. 

“Teachers need to help learners develop skills required for reading new media”. This statement by Stanley (2013, p. 99) illustrates how important it is for teachers to select reading activities that not only provide current content, but also in the format that students have to use in real life. As I work with some senior students (in their late 60s and early 70s), I sometimes ask them to read an article from a news website or do some other activities on their phones and they need assistance to do so. Whenever I can help them with their abilities to use their own phones and see they have made some progress (or, in Stanley’s words, expand their digital literacy), we all get really satisfied!

Another point I found relevant in Stanley’s introduction to reading is when he stated that students do read for pleasure today. As we have discussed in the social dilemma forum, students use their phones so much that technology addiction is a major concern. However, this time spent on the phone also allows them to receive a lot of visual stimuli, including reading practice. If teachers can select reading styles and topics of students’ interests, I believe they will be successful in conducting reading activities in class. When I am using a textbook and it suggests a text that I find outdated or boring, I promptly search online for another reading activity that covers the same topic in a more engaging way, in order to adapt the activity to students’ realities.

Hello, everyone

In this time of pressures, challenges, and threats to public education, as teachers, we need to undertake language research, how contexts shape students’ learning, and, most importantly, how we can realize greater impact from the research conducted. In Stanley’s book, we can reflect and put into practice different activities, attempting to questions about digital technology and reader agency through the lens of multimodalities and multiliteracies. 

Chappelle and Jamieson's tips on reading and teaching through CALL are very informative. Reading development is a process, so, as they explain in the chapter, the teacher must provide reading activities that are according to students' level, providing activities that they can “notice” vocabulary, that they can interact with the computer and software during their learning process, etc.  

When I was reading Chapelle and Jamieson in which they stated that CALL can be good for teaching reading, I remembered a course that I took during my undergraduate course with Professor Celso. The focus of the course was writing and reading through CALL, and I felt that course was the moment that I most had progress because we (students) were in contact with reading and writing all the time, and we had many moments of practice during the course. We did activities that were active for us, we had to discuss in forums, but also to create things in the forum activities. I do not remember many of the activities, but I remember that when I left the course I could perceive that it was the first course of writing and reading that I left feeling more prepared for the next courses that I would take and that I had learned a lot from that course. Moreover, I perceive that the activities were based on Chappelle and Jamieson’s principles, all activities were according to our level, we received feedback constantly, there were specific activities for explicit language learning, and so on.  

Finally, Considering Chappelle and Jamiesons’ chapter and my experience in that course, I do believe that learning to read in CALL can be very fruitful,  many resources can be used.

Reading is one of the most freeing and important abilities that language learners can acquire. It allows them to search for new information at any time and filter them according to their needs. However, this ability is the one that requires most self-learning. Luckily, in today’s modern world, where the main way to interact with technology is through text, students are reading on a daily basis (some argue more than ever). I find it very important that Stanley brought the definition of digital literacy, as it is one of the most important reading abilities that students need nowadays. I was surprised, though, that he didn’t discuss skimming and scanning, as these are very common tasks that we do when browsing.

Last month, in a PPGI event, there was a very nice lecture about reading and technology. Professor Lalo Salmeron presented his research about digital reading. He said that digital literacy and digital reading are intertwined as these processes involve students’ ability to access and retrieve; integrate and interpret and reflect and evaluate the available information.  But, how can we, teachers, foster students digital literacy, particularly through digital reading? Stanley’s “ Language Learning with Technology” (2013) offers precious guidance.  In order to promote reading literacy, Stanley suggests activities that  teachers can use to develop reading-skills using digital resources.  The activities suggested (as well as the websites, apps) focus on reading sub-skills such as skimming, scanning, reading for gist, activating schema, and inferencing. And more important, all the activities are user-friendly and interesting. 

Reading is usually the skills our learners are most familiar with. Still, many of them present difficulties in grasping the information and understanding the meanings conveyed in written material. Thus, I think that one of the major issues teachers have to deal with when teaching reading is to provide students with strategies that allow them to read in a fruitful way, no only decoding words but also making sense of what they are reading and being able to use that information to build up knowledge and ideas. That being said, as Stanley (2013) mentions, reading electronic texts require a whole new set of strategies, and the best way to help our students is to make use of the great variety of electronic material in order to provide them with the tools needed to understand what they read and to so with critical stance.