HOW DO I BOOST READING AND WRITING WHILE AT THE SAME TIME NURTURING THEIR ABILITY TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES MEANINGFULLY? (Summary)

Fostering reading and writing, while at the same time motivating our students the ability to express meaningfully, is not an easy task. When analyzing the implementation and the corresponding preparation of Reading and Writing Skills in the foreign language classroom, it is possible to affirm that the teacher does not give the correct amount of time and even less prepare what is going to be proposed to students. “Writing (for example) has been a neglected area of English language teaching for some years” (Maley 2010, p. 8) Moreover, the teachers are more worried about other issues in the language such as the Grammar or Vocabulary and little time to practice Listening or Speaking. But just at the end, and if there is time, he/she decides then to give a piece of paper with a lot of lines for students to write on or just make copies of a reading about celebrations, for example, that he/she got from a pop-up textbook or a web page in which comprehension questions are already set.

 

 “There is no time”, “I have a lot of students”, “I don’t know what they like”, “anyway they don’t do anything” “this worksheet could work” “It is not too long/short” are the many different excuses a teacher gives just to support reasons why he/she does not teach Reading and Writing or just why he/she guides a mediocre process. What maybe we as teachers do not know is that if more organization is implemented at the moment of designing the materials and executing the activities in the classroom, we can guide a process to be proud of. With this perception of teaching Reading and Writing the teacher could be changing the students’ perspective towards the lessons by giving them the chance to be more enrolled in the process promoting meaningful participation.

 

Reading and writing are considered very important skills at the moment of communicating, it is so that when school starts the main concerns is to learn how to read and write. In order to foster students’ perceptions of meaning towards suggested Reading and Writing tasks in the classroom, it is vital for the learners to make sense on what has been implemented.

According to Tribble (1996) “writing means whereby a text is produced. It includes all of the preparatory work a writer does before beginning writing, as well as the work that he or she does while writing and during revising and editing” ( p. 161)  On the other side, Godman (1991) (Cited in Suleiman) affirms that “Reading is seen as an active process of comprehending [where] students need to be taught strategies to read more efficiently (e. g., guess from context, define expectations, make inferences about the text, skim ahead to fill in the context, etc.” (p. 143) Taking into account the definitions stated above, it is possible to say that Reading is not only the action of decoding words to find out a message neither Writing represents joining morphemes to convey a message. In fact they are really complex processes that need further attention and preparation from the teacher. If the teacher wants coherent Writing and Reading activities, it is important to take into account processes such as correlating the two skills into a circle of receiving and producing information, in other words, to implement a reading-to-write process as one of the strategies to show coherence by connecting topics and ideas.

 

 Furthermore, Reading is considered as a receptive skill and writing is a productive one. In this sense, regarding the concept of receptive skill (reading in this case) Cook (1998) (cited in Harmer) assures that “in order to make sense of any text, we need to have pre-existent knowledge of the world” (p. 251). Each of us carries in our heads mental representations of typical situations that we have come across during our life experiences and in that sense we have to catch the attention of our students to make the activities meaningful to them. As Jeremy Harmer claims, when we are stimulated by particular words, discourse patterns, or contexts, we employ our previous knowledge as we approach the process of comprehension, and we deploy a range of receptive skills (i.e. strategies) such as predicting, guessing, or interpreting. (p. 199)

 To conclude, to teach reading and writing skills definitely needs a lot of preparation from the teacher and a lot of commitment and interest from the student. It is not intended to be an easy process in which out of the blue students have to get involved and participate just because it is part of a task. To find students something interesting to read and write about means to implement activities that are coherent in the sense that they are not presented in an isolated way. Meaningful reading and writing represents a process introduced little by little with the appropriate activities, so students can feel that in fact there are links that make the process stronger and more comprehensible. Teaching Reading and Writing need to be connected in a logical and coherent way which is illustrated by the concept that language is a whole not a set of segregated items. Moreover, for students, Reading and Writing activities should give the sense of being useful at the moment of pursuing the possibility of expressing thoughts and ideas involving the things that happen to them every day (meaningful production). While teachers keep having the same old internet-designed worksheets or text-book activities for Reading and Writing without reflecting on the process, the students will not give one hundred percent of them and their lives in the procedure. Foster Reading and Writing activities involves being part of a serious and oriented process of steps and connections, so they teacher would have a blooming process that will open the door of fostering meaningful expressions that represent the honest voice of our learners.