Q. Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?
When I decided to take this teaching L2 reading course, I thought I would learn very specific and practical skills in teaching reading. In other words, I had felt that reading is just no more than particular skills that can be acquired by training before taking this course. Actually, even though I enjoy reading, I’m not the person who is really good at reading. Therefore, when I prepared reading section of TOEFL test, I just did my work with my own harsh training; I read and solved the problems, checked the answers, and reread tricky parts. It was rote training and I got totally bored. However, it was proved to be my misunderstood in the teaching reading class. Specially, I want to highlight two things; metacognitive knowledge and ER(extensive reading).
In the case of metacognitive knowledge, I benefited a lot from this concept reflecting my own metacognitive knowledge in reading English. According to the textbook, there are three types of metacognitive knowledge; knowledge of persons, tasks, and strategies.
I already knew the concept of metacognition, but I’ve never thought of knowledge of persons-especially, cognitive differences within people-since it sounds not reading skills; rather, it looks like one of the personality study. Anyway, it’s true that I got perfect opportunity to consider my own character type and how it is correlated to reading style. In addition, this process wasn’t difficult because I did MBTI test in Teaching Speaking course. Based on the test result, my personality is INTJ, which prefers introverted, intuition, thinking, and judging. Due to strong intuition, I perform well in catching big picture of whole text. On the other hand, I’m likely to have a hard time finding out specific information for T/F questions. Also, my reading is usually following where my intuition is leading me. That could lead me to misunderstand the text without accurate comprehension. Besides, TJ preference allows me to read texts with critical and logical thinking. But, what about when I don’t get what author meant? I don’t just perceive tiny information and infer the text. Instead, I prefer to judge the reading based on limited text. In this way, I could understand the relationship between my personality and reading pattern. By extension, it’s helpful for me to set strategies that might strengthen my preferences and compensate for my weaknesses.
In terms of my future English class, application of metacognition in English reading class would be a big help for students and motivate them to read. In spite of teaching paradigm shift issue in Korea like ER, this kind of class would be a challenge. However, Students need to analyze their reading pattern and try to set the best reading strategies. One big reason is their false myth that distracts them from developing reading ability; “reading ability is inborn individual competence and very hard to change.” This misbelief would make it difficult even a little trying to improve their reading.
Extensive reading and intensive reading were another impressive part in this course for several reasons. First, I could identify again the concept of extensive reading and intensive reading. What I had known was that extensive reading is reading a lot for fun and that intensive reading is for solving the problems such as Korea SAT and TOEIC reading section. Guess what? I saw various kinds of specified sub concepts; how to choose the proper reading materials and why vocabulary test is needed in extensive reading. Second, microteaching was very beneficial for me to figure out practical teaching of extensive reading. To be specific, I was quite a few familiar with this part because I learned them in TBP, but it was just superficial concepts for me in the absence of practical application in reading class. In students’ micro teaching on extensive reading, I thought, “wow, I didn’t know that extensive reading could be applied in this fascinating way.” The teaching focus was totally different from intensive reading. The presenter encouraged other students to get a big picture and asked questions that readers don’t feel big burden. Also, several interesting texts were offered that students could choose one of them. In retrospect, my reading class in middle and high schools had no fun and most of classmates were trying to overcome boredom.
How can I change my future reading English class after this course? Above all, I would make reading class making balance between extensive and intensive reading. Although there are a lot of reading materials at hand, English teachers don’t make use of it right way. Think of typical high school English class; almost reading sources come from textbook. If the contents were interesting, it would attract many students to enjoy reading. The reality is reverse. I believe that the situation is definitely ironic because English teachers have to follow Korean standard national curriculum ignoring useful materials. Not only that. English teachers who adopt out-textbook materials just make use them as supplement for textbook and seem not to care about readers’ vocabulary level. When I teach English in the future, I would choose additional reading sources for extra “extensive reading” class. Before that, identifying learners’ lexical level might be prioritized to offer optimal level of text. There is no doubt that this balanced reading course would be a chance to change learners’ attitude to existing boresome reading class.
