Tip 5

5.Choose Call materials that teach English through reading

 

• ›  In class, the main purpose of reading is to help learners increase their knowledge of English.

               What the research says

• ›   Explicit teaching is better that letting students learn by their own in reading.

• ›  There is no evidence that it positively affect learning when students learn simply by exposure to vocabulary and grammar they need to know.

• ›  When guessing their way through the vocabulary in reading, readers often do not guess correctly and end up with a poor understanding of the text and no opportunity to acquire the guessed words.

• ›  The use of explicit instruction can draw learners attention to the language and help understand new vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

       What teachers can do

•    Look for CALL activities that provide explicit teaching and practice with the language they want students to learn from a text(vocabulary exercises).  
•    Many CALL activities fail to include sufficient explicit teaching. In such cases, the teacher should supplement the lesson by preteaching the vocabulary and foregrounding the reading in CALL materials. 
•   Include activities focused on vocabulary, syntactic structures, derivational affixes and cohesive devises found in the texts.