The Workshop on Competency-based Reading Instruction

 

About the instructor:

    1. Master of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Chung Chang University

    2. In-service English teacher at Focus Junior High School

It is our honor to invite Leo Peng, an in-service English teacher at Focus Junior High School, sharing his ideas on teaching text types through textbooks. The workshop was fantastic due to the following two reasons:

    Firstly, the instructor is good at incorporating technology in the process of the workshop, which made the workshop smooth and successful. The software he used for the workshop is called Nearpod, an award-winning software that engages students with interactive learning experiences. Because of it, we English teachers wouldn't feel bored since we were busying answering questions, brainstorming, and sharing our own viewpoints on reading teaching. As far as I am concerned, Nearpod is so powerful that I am considering using it in my English classes.

    Secondly, Leo kept telling us English teachers the concept that we need to teach our students how to read or they may be overwhelmed by the overloaded information provided by CAP (Comprehensive Assessment Program for Junior High School Students). There are a lot of reading strategies for us to teach, including (1) recognizing the text structures, (2) identifying the topic sentences, (3) finding main ideas, (4) understanding the tone of the author, (5) making inference...and so forth. Leo's focus was on text types. Narratives and Persuasive essays were the main dish of the workshop today. His examples were all from English textbooks for junior high school students. That is to say, if we want to teach our students reading strategies, it is no need for us to look for other reading materials. That is because the textbooks are our best friends. What we English teachers have to do is to design reading teaching activities by the help of the textbooks in hand. In this way, the students can improve their reading fluency by our guidance.

    I am thrilled to know that there are more and more partners in TESOL veering their attentions on discourse instructions nowadays. Traditionally, we put an emphasis on Grammar Translation Method (GTM), which make our students get lost when they decode the reading. Let's make some changes and try to teach reading strategies. I believe that our students will appreciate what we taught them and become active learners in English.