By: David Penner, English Instructor - Academic Bridge Program, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE - David.Penner@zu.ac.ae

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics (TESL) - Brock University, Canada - August, 2009

Table of Contents

Introduction
Rationale for a Strategy-based Reading Curriculum
Long-standing Models of Reading and Strategy Instruction
A Growing History of Support for Strategy-based Instruction
Reading Needs Target-situation Analysis
The Strategy-based REGAP Curriculum
Curricular Elements
Goals and objectives
Needs assessments
Course texts and materials
Formative and summative assessments
Reading Strategies
Course-level reading strategies
Implementing extensive reading
Building academic vocabulary
Text-level reading strategies
Pre-reading strategies
While-reading strategies
Post-reading strategies
Curriculum Evaluation
Concluding Discussion
Sample Twelve-week Outline for a Strategies-based REGAP Curriculum
Sample One-week Plan – 5 One-hour Classes
References
Appendices

This paper outlines a strategy-based, twelve-week reading English for general academic preparation (REGAP) curriculum for students of English as an additional language (EAL) planning to enroll in all types of English-medium undergraduate classes. After considering a rationale for implementing a strategy-based REGAP curriculum, a target-situation analysis is conducted and the curriculum is presented in the form of curricular elements, course-level and text-level strategies, and a curriculum evaluation. Curricular elements include goals and objectives, needs assessments, course texts and materials, and formative and summative assessments. Course-level strategies include implementing extensive reading (ER) and building vocabulary from Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Text-level strategies include the pre-reading strategies of activating schema, previewing, predicting, reading with a purpose, adopting an alignment, and others, the while-reading strategies of comprehension monitoring and questioning, lexical inferencing, reading for meaning, visualizing with graphic organisers (GOs), note-taking and marking text, and others, and the post-reading strategies of summarising, verifying and revising, sharing responses, as well as others. Following a concluding discussion, a twelve-week course outline in table format is presented, with each week incorporating curricular elements, content to apply new strategies, reviews of previous weeks’ learning, extensive reading, and AWL vocabulary. Finally, a sample week of lesson plans demonstrates how teachers may meaningfully combine all parts of the curriculum in order to meet daily goals and objectives. It is my intention that a curriculum such as this could be implemented into a university or college EAP program comprised of non-integrated courses such as reading, writing, speaking, listening, and grammar.

Rationale for a Strategy-based Reading Curriculum

Developing an understanding of key definitions can help teachers fully consider the benefits of a strategy-based reading curriculum. There seems to be general agreement that a strategy is a conscious procedure that facilitates comprehension and knowledge acquisition (Barnett, 1988; Chamot & O’Malley, 1987; Paris et al., 1994; Rubin, 1975; Williams & Moran, 1989). Paris et al. (1994) add that the use of a strategy “suggests… a person chooses one alternative action over others” and that for one to be performed, three elements are required: “a capable agent, an attainable goal, and an allowable action that agent can perform to reach the desired end state” (p. 789). Barnett (1988) adds that there can be both “productive and unproductive approaches to a learning task” (p. 151). A skill, by contrast, “has been automatised” (Williams & Moran, 1989, p. 223) and is applied to text unconsciously (Paris et al., 1994, p. 792). For example, “a fluent reader may possess the skill of rapid, automatic word recognition, but may resort to strategies such as phonological encoding when faced with an unfamiliar word” (Williams & Moran, 1989, p. 223). In sum, then, “strategies are skills under consideration” (Paris et al., 1994, p. 790, their emphasis). With this understanding, the benefits of instruction on conscious procedures that facilitate comprehension can now be considered.

Long-standing Models of Reading and Strategy Instruction

Firstly, several theoretical reading models fit well with strategy instruction. A theoretical model, according to Rosenblatt (1994), is “a generalized pattern devised in order to think about a subject” (p. 1057) and, according to Ruddell et al. (1994), “a snap-shot of a dynamic process” (p. 812). Several of these “snap-shots” fit well with reading instruction, as they attempt to illustrate how readers alter their behaviour in order to arrive at meaning, including Rumelhart’s (1994) knowledge interaction theory, Stanovich’s (1980) theory of compensation, and Rosenblatt’s (1994) transactional theory of reading.

Rumelhart (1994) believes that understanding the written language involves a simultaneous interaction between “sensory, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information” (p. 864) – that is, the apprehension of information does not flow strictly from lower to higher levels of analyses, nor from higher to lower levels (p. 868). Rather, “each knowledge source [i.e., featural, letter-level, letter-cluster, lexical-level, syntactic, and semantic-level] contains specialized knowledge about some aspect of the reading process” (p. 879). When hypotheses concerning meaning are combined in the “pattern synthesizer” (p. 878), an interpretation of what is written gets produced. This model of reading works well with strategy instruction, as strategies can enrich individual knowledge sources. For example, the strategy of lexical inferencing attempts to improve lexical-level knowledge, while the strategy of identifying grammatical categories attempts to improve semantic-level knowledge. These attempts at improvement may lead to more accurate interpretations by the pattern synthesizer.

Building on Rumelhart’s interaction hypothesis, Stanovich (1980) proposes that “a process at any level can compensate for deficiencies at any other level” (p. 36). Readers consciously activate this compensatory process when they choose to rely on specific knowledge sources to acquire meaning. Hence, “it may be that good readers use context more effectively to monitor comprehension, whereas poor readers use it to aid word recognition” (p. 59). Greater vocabulary and syntax recognition may allow readers to allocate less attention to comprehension and more to verification. As a result, by previewing and questioning to aid in prediction, readers can allot more cognitive load to vocabulary comprehension; alternatively, by relying on phonemic analysis to aid in vocabulary comprehension, more attention can be diverted to determining overall meaning.

Rosenblatt (1994) also considers how readers create meaning, suggesting that it “does not reside ready-made ‘in’ text or ‘in’ the reader, but happens or comes into being during the transaction between reader and text” (p. 1063). Without this combination of reader knowledge and the author’s meaning, text remains merely as “black marks on the page” (p. 1062). If meaning does indeed reside in the enactment, strategies could be used to shape meaning. Whether through skimming, rereading, or summarising, different “efferent” and “affective” concepts, images, and meanings can be evoked.

A Growing History of Support for Strategy-based Instruction

Along with strategy-based instruction’s fit with the above models, much research shows that using comprehension strategies produces higher-proficiency readers. In groundbreaking work, Rubin (1975) synthesised previous studies to uncover the strategies of the “good” language learner. Following this, Hosenfeld (1977) recorded strategy use in 20 proficient and 20 non-proficient second language learners’ think-aloud protocols. She observed that successful readers retain passage meanings, translate into broad phrases, skip words viewed as unimportant to overall meaning and maintain positive self-concepts (p. 120). Brown, Campione, and Day (1981), by teaching strategies to elementary students with learning disabilities, concluded that readers can be trained to use active processing strategies to improve reading comprehension (p. 18). Chamot and O’Malley (1987), with a realization that “the transfer of strategies to new learning requires extensive instructional support” (p. 240), developed the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) – “a curriculum correlated with mainstream content subjects, academic language development activities, and learning strategy instruction” (p. 227). In Barnett’s (1988) study of 272 fourth-semester French students’ strategy use, “students who were taught strategy use did show a significantly greater ability to read through context than did their more traditionally taught peers… [and] students enjoy learning about strategy use” (p. 157). Carrell, Pharis, and Liberto (1989), in their study of the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training to a heterogeneous group of 26 ESL students, found “less competent readers are able to improve through training in strategies evidenced by more successful readers” (p. 648). Following this, Oxford (1990) developed her often-referenced Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), an index of classroom-tested strategies. Soon after, in Anderson’s (1991) study of subjects’ voluntary use of strategies during a reading comprehension test and text analysis, “participants who reported using more strategies on each of these measures tended to score higher overall” (p. 463), and in Block’s (1992) qualitative think-aloud study of 25 proficient and less proficient native and non-native English students, a three-part comprehension monitoring process of evaluation, action, and checking was revealed, with the conclusion that “less proficient readers, particularly the native speakers, seemed to favor a local, word-based processing strategy while the more proficient readers tended to prefer a more global meaning-based one” (p. 336). In Brown et al.’s (1995) study of elementary students with reading difficulties receiving a year of Transactional Strategy Instruction, it was found that “TSI has positive effects on reading comprehension, interpretation, memory, and strategies knowledge and use” (p. 158). In Zhang’s (2008) comparison of EAP high school students with and without strategy instruction, “the experimental group outperformed the control group not only in perceived strategy use but also in reading improvement” (p. 106); and most recently, Zhang and Wu (2009), in a study of Chinese high school students’ meta-cognitive reading strategies awareness, concluded “high-, intermediate-, and low-proficiency students were different in strategy choice, and effective use of global strategies was found to be correlated with the students’ higher English achievements” (p. 48). With over three decades of support for strategy instruction and an understanding of how well strategy instruction fits with long-standing reading models, a target-situation analysis for EAP readers can now take place.

Reading Needs Target-situation Analysis

Before implementing a strategy-based REGAP curriculum, conducting a target-situation analysis of “the linguistic skills and knowledge [undergraduate students] need to perform competently” (Hyland, 2006, p. 74), as well as the types of texts used, can help teachers decide upon course goals and materials.

Undergraduate students require a broad range of reading skills and knowledge. Ginther and Grant (1996), in a survey of 185 faculty members, found that four reading subskills were viewed as extremely important. Namely, these subskills were to: “understand the main idea, reach valid conclusions, make critical evaluations of content, and comprehend significant detail” (p. 4). The skill whereby students “detect inferences between the lines,” was not as highly supported, since professors seemed to be more concerned with “students’ abilities to understand explicitly stated information” (p. 4). With similar results, Enright et al. (2000), in an analysis of undergraduate requirements for the TOEFL 2000 monograph series, identified four reading purposes that form a “natural hierarchy” of reading proficiency: “reading to find information, reading for basic comprehension, reading to learn, and reading to integrate information across multiple texts” (p. ii). Focusing on higher level reading skills, Shih (1992), in her promotion of more strategy-oriented approaches to reading instruction, pointed out that “students must not only comprehend texts but, over the long term, critically react to the content… recall main points and details when tested… and synthesize information from reading with other related information” (p. 290). Cultural knowledge is also required, as can be seen by Spack’s (1997) case study of a Japanese college student enrolled in a course that, according to the calendar, required no previous knowledge – she could not understand what she read even after the words were translated (p. 17). These target-situation requirements demonstrate the idea that, unlike in many ESL classes, “it is the students who must adjust to the level of the text rather than the other way around” (Clark & Ishida, 2005, pp. 226-227). As post-EAP undergraduate students, they will “have to figure ‘it’ out – whatever ‘it’ is” (Ginther & Grant, 1996, p. 20), and would, therefore benefit from an increased ability to comprehend, evaluate, remember, and integrate texts produced in the target culture.

Undergraduate students must also negotiate several text types. In Dunworth’s (2008) analysis of 112 unit outlines from 32 disciplines, identified requirements include reading articles and case studies, solving multiple choice and true-false questions, comprehending diagrams, and navigating the library (p. 318). This supports previous results such as Ginther and Grant’s (1996) survey, where over 65% of professors reported “assigning entire textbooks over the course of a semester… and articles from periodicals” and at least 40% “reported assigning additional reading from supplementary texts” (p. 5). In Hansen and Willut’s (1998) review of campus technology, new mediums include email, newsgroups, bulletin boards, online information services and publications, distance learning, and groupware (p. 12) – “professors [even] have their own Web sites, and students are expected to be able to access course syllabi, [and] course materials for lectures and activities” (Enright et al., 2000, p. 40). Finally, in Zhu and Flaitz’s (2005) survey of international students’ language needs, university administrative personnel reported that international students, “not familiar with the U.S. educational system (irrespective of their English language proficiency level) have a terrible time understanding U.S. academic concepts such as drop, add, credit hours, grading system, deadlines, etc” (p. 9). Based on the above studies, students would benefit from studying strategies with “common core” (Clapham, 2001, p. 99) academic text types, such as articles, case studies, multiple-choice tests, diagrams, computer-based platforms, and administrative language.

The Strategy-based REGAP Curriculum

With target-needs having been elucidated, a curriculum with these needs as end-goals can now be presented.

Curricular Elements

Curricular elements include goals and objectives, needs assessments, course texts and materials, and formative and summative assessments.

Goals and objectives.

According to Hyland (2006), curriculum goals and objectives “contribute to a coherent teaching programme and play a key planning role for selecting and sequencing content and activities into units of work and classes” (p. 82). More specifically, goals consist of “general statements about what the course hopes to accomplish, [and they are] the global target outcomes around which the course is organized” (p. 81), while objectives “are more specific, describing smaller, achievable behaviours that learners will be expected to perform at the end of the course” (p. 82).

The main goal for this course is to “prepare students for academic success” (Murphy, 1996, p. 106) by providing them with the ability to apply a range of reading strategies in order to interact with, comprehend, and gain knowledge from texts found in undergraduate contexts. As deduced from the analysis above, students should be able to

• identify and use strategies that aid comprehension, evaluation, memory, and integration;

• navigate various academic mediums including articles, case studies, testing formats, diagrams, computer-based platforms, and administrative language.

Additional curriculum goals include Grabe’s (2004) list of nine abilities that need to be developed for effective reading comprehension:

1. Ensure word recognition fluency.

2. Emphasize vocabulary learning and create a vocabulary-rich environment.

3. Activate background knowledge in appropriate ways.

4. Ensure effective language knowledge and general comprehension skills.

5. Teach text structures and discourse organization.

6. Promote the strategic reader rather than teach individual strategies.

7. Build reading fluency and rate.

8. Promote extensive reading.

9. Develop intrinsic motivation for reading. (p. 46)

Regarding performance objectives, students should be able to

• Explain the components and benefits of ER.

• Present a list of all books read as part of ER.

• Demonstrate a variety of ways to build vocabulary.

• Demonstrate receptive knowledge of the entire AWL.

• Demonstrate ways to activate and rely upon a range of pre-, while-, and post-reading strategies.

As can be seen below, curricular components, the final curriculum evaluation, the course outline and the sample week of lessons are all based on these goals and objectives.

Needs assessments.

After students are placed into an EAP classroom, either through promotion or standardised admission tests, in-class needs assessments, i.e., “present situation” analyses (Hyland, 2006, p. 74), can help teachers adjust the curriculum to meet their class’ reading and reading-strategy needs. Several resources can help to measure knowledge of strategies, vocabulary, and reading ability. Oxford’s (2009) online Learning Strategy Inventory for Language Learners, Yigiter et al.’s (2005) reading strategy inventory (pp. 137-139; see Appendix 1), and Zhang and Wu’s (2009) Survey of EFL Reading Strategies (pp. 56-58; see Appendix 2) can help students measure their perception of strategy use. Regarding vocabulary, Laufer and Nation’s (1999) general vocabulary levels test can be taken at Cobb’s (2009) Levels tests on-line and exercises adapted from Coxhead’s AWL can be taken at Luton’s (2009) Vocabulary Exercises for the Academic Word List. Regarding overall academic reading needs assessment, students can take free online IELTS practice tests at the nonprofit TestPrepPractice.net (2009), which provide instant feedback. By using assessments such as these, teachers may be able to determine the gap between students’ current strategy use, vocabulary knowledge, and reading levels and what is required for success in undergraduate programs.

Course texts and materials.

Harwood (2005), in his critique of the current EAP textbook market, suggests texts and materials should help “raise awareness of key features of academic discourse” (p. 158). Murphy (1996), in his promotion of a bimodal listening/ reading curriculum, suggests “[students] need increasing practice opportunities in comprehending-to-learn academic content material… as distinct from instruction in learning-to-comprehend” (p. 109). Following these suggestions and target-analysis results, authentic textbooks, technology and realia found in academic contexts, as well as AWL vocabulary lists are recommended for this course.

First of all, much support exists for the use of authentic texts in the EAP curriculum. For example, in Kasper’s (1995) study of the use of a psychology textbook by EAP students from various disciplines, he concludes that by “working through the discipline-based text, [students] become aware of how to construct meaning from information stored in memory, how to extract relevant information from the larger context, and how to filter our redundant or irrelevant information” (p. 298). Furthermore, in Flowerdew and Peacock’s (2001) consideration of the challenges facing EAP curriculum designers, they suggest that “non-authentic texts cannot represent real-world language use… [and] simplified materials often lose some meaning with simplification (p. 182). In a further attack on simplification, Waring and Takaki (2003), in their study of vocabulary learning in graded readers, contend that “learners do not learn a lot of new words from graded reading” (pp. 153-154, their emphasis), and finally, authentic texts “provide more implicit opportunities for learning. For instance, reading texts can raise students’ awareness of salient features of academic prose regardless of whether these features are actually highlighted by the textbook writer or not” (Harwood, 2005, p. 153).

Once teachers decide upon using authentic texts, they must consider which types to choose and how to present them. Brantmeier (2003), in her study of social factors and comprehension, concludes “topic familiarity may relate to a certain level of vocabulary knowledge and therefore may contribute to reading comprehension” (p. 41). As a result, students may comprehend a general psychology text more than a math or physics text (Kasper, 1995). Shih (1992) suggests that students should use “whole texts... [as] excerpts may deprive readers of important context clues; also, students need to build schema about the format, register, and other features… associated with different types of reading materials” (p. 295). Zhu and Flaitz (2005) support the use of whole texts (entire chapters or complete articles) as well, observing students’ frustration in transferring de-contextualised strategy learning to the context of extensive reading (p. 9). In her investigation on activating background knowledge, Clapham (2001) suggests that chosen texts should include “different rhetorical functions such as introductions, reports of research methods and discussions of results which are common across most disciplines” (p. 99), while Hauptman (2000, as cited in Huang, 2006) advises using “highly signaled texts [that] contain both iconic signaling (pictures, graphs, charts, tables, maps, etc.) and non-iconic signaling (boldface, underline, margin notes, titles/subtitles, outlines, etc.)” (p. 373). Lastly, Masuhara (2003), in her review of materials for reading development, states that “engagement of affect (e.g., interest, attitude, emotions) should be given prime importance in reading materials production” (p. 351). To contend with such myriad suggestions when deciding on a textbook, teachers should create a checklist that includes sections on content, text organization, rhetorical functions, signaling, and potential affect, and consider introductory undergraduate textbooks from fields such as popular culture, film, or psychology.

To help students develop awareness of the technology, realia, and vocabulary used in undergraduate education, students can practice strategy usage while navigating online journals, and university websites, brochures, and hardcopy course calendars. Shih (1992) suggests “a logical theme for readings at the beginning of the term is orientation to the assumptions and demands of high school/ college” (p. 296). Orientation guides can be found on many university websites, e.g., Brock University’s (2009) At a Glance: Keys to Success. Regarding materials to help students learn academic vocabulary, frequency lists of Coxhead’s AWL and related exercises can be accessed at Gillet’s (2009) Using English for Academic Purposes website.

To sum up, to give students the optimal platform on which to practice strategy usage, teachers should incorporate authentic, whole textbooks, technology, and realia, and to aid in the course’s other goal of vocabulary learning, AWL frequency lists should be provided as well.

Formative and summative assessments. The final curricular element relates to formative and summative assessments, which “are used to determine the extent to which learners have learned what has been taught… [and] are designed to sample the specific skills or knowledge which form the basis of the course objectives” (Brindley & Ross, 2001, p. 149). When designing these assessments, reading strategy EAP teachers should consider reliability and validity, the types of assessments used in undergraduate courses, and ways to present assessment results.

Assessments should be both valid and reliable. Since this course is made up of strategies, a valid assessment would be one that requires students to identify and make use of strategies taught. For example, students could be given a text and be asked to scan for specific information or summarise the main idea, or they could be given a topic and be asked to produce a concept map that demonstrates their ability to activate background knowledge. A reliable assessment is one that “measures consistently, both in terms of the same student on different occasions and the same task across different raters” (Hyland, 2006, p. 100). Examples of reliable test formats include “written and oral recall, cloze, sentence completion… question, true/false, matching activity, checklist, and fill-in-the-blank tests” (Brantmeier, 2005, p. 39). These reliable assessments, however, may not be valid. To remedy this, Alderson (2000), in his seminal work on assessing reading, suggests some reading strategy exercises that can serve as assessments that are both valid and reliable (pp. 314-317). For example, to assess lexical inferencing, teachers could provide a nonsense word within a paragraph and ask students to choose the correct definition of the word based on their understanding of the text (p. 314). To assess previewing, skimming, and scanning, teachers could provide students with questions about a textbook they have never seen before and then let them examine it for a short period of time (pp. 315-316). To assess understanding of strategies in general, teachers could provide students with stories of problems and ask them to suggest effective strategies. Alderson (2000) cautions, however, that “the extent to which these exercises can be used as test items depends on the extent to which we can be prescriptive about correct or best answers” (p. 317).

Also,

if EAP courses are to dedicate at least part of their syllabi to the modeling and emulation or critique of those tasks that students are later to encounter… it is essential that EAP practitioners have an active and ongoing awareness of the assessment environment for which they are preparing their students. (Dunworth, 2008, p. 322)

Dunworth concludes from his survey that “multiple-choice questions featured strongly in both frequency of occurrence and value in terms of marks awarded” (p. 319), and thus EAP reading teachers should make use of them. Caution is required, however, since, in Wolf’s (1993) study of assessment types, “scores on the multiple choice tests were generally higher than those on the open-ended questions, which in turn were higher than those on the cloze tasks” (pp. 479, 481). He also warns that “multiple choice items may [in fact] be assessing [students’] ability to guess – a test-taking strategy – rather than their ability to construct meaning (p. 482). As well, Waring and Takaki (2003) clarify that “recognition of the meaning when prompted… is not considered to be ‘learning a new word’… but is a demonstration of simple prompted recognition which does not occur in natural reading” (p. 149). As a result of these observations, teachers should also test “learners’ reconstructions of meaning on comprehension assessment tasks” (Wolf, 1993, p. 473). According to Enright et al. (2000), one way to do this is to provide students with a reading, take it away, and then question them about what they just read (p. 33).

After assessment, Banerjee and Wall (2006) suggest several ways that results can be provided. Teachers can write a profile report for each student, commenting on their general reading abilities (p. 51), or they can create “‘can-do’ scales, which consist of lists of performance objectives and columns where EAP tutors indicate whether students are able or not [able] to achieve each objective” (p. 51). Banerjee and Wall (2006) also created a Final Assessment Checklist intended to provide undergraduate admissions officers with an accurate picture of students’ abilities, reflect current EAP theory, comment only on those features with evidence, and indicate whether or not students achieved certain abilities (p. 57; see Appendix 3 for the reading section of this checklist).

In conclusion, by keeping in mind validity, reliability, ways that undergraduate students are assessed, and ways to provide assessment evidence, teachers can help students understand their ability to “use the language for their intended purposes” (Brindley & Ross, 2001, p. 149).

Reading Strategies

Now that curricular elements have been considered, course- and text-level strategies can be presented. Since “strategic reading not only entails knowing which strategies to use, but also how to employ them successfully” (Anderson, 1991, pp. 468-469), strategies are followed by teaching suggestions.

Course-level reading strategies.

To begin with, course-level strategies are long-term, spanning the length of the course and beyond. The ones chosen for this curriculum include implementing ER and building AWL vocabulary.

Implementing extensive reading.

ER is defined as “the reading of materials in the target language in a rapid and casual way with a focus on quantity rather than quality” (Tanaka & Stapleton, 2007, p. 115). It is a strategy where “learners read texts containing some unfamiliar language features but cope with only minor interruptions to understanding the message of the text” (Hsueh-chao & Nation, 2000, p. 423). Upon considering the benefits of ER, ways to implement an ER program are provided.

ER provides numerous benefits. It increases “vocabulary breadth” (Hunt & Beglar, 2005, p. 28), “word recognition accuracy… automaticity… [and] rapid speed of processing across extended text (Grabe, 2004, p. 55); it leads to better verbal fluency, syntactic knowledge, semantic memory, meta-linguistic awareness, broader knowledge of the world (Grabe, 2003, p. 249), better writing style, spelling (Krashen, 2004, p. 17), and “positive attitudes towards reading” (Macalister, 2008, p. 254) (p. 149); it reduces readers’ “forgetting rate” (Waring & Takaki, 2003, p. 155) and helps students “learn to read without word-by-word decoding at the sentence level” (Powell, 2005, p. 29). Further, with ER, students can “develop the competence to move from the beginning ‘ordinary conversational’ level to where they can use the second language for more demanding purposes, such as the study of literature, business, and so on” (Krashen, 2004, p. 147), and, finally, they can “learn to ‘orchestrate, coordinate, and apply intensively acquired skills/ strategies over the larger texts and multiple reading sources that are required in all academic course work” (Carrell & Carson, 1997, p. 47).

Ways to implement ER has also been extensively researched. To begin with, Day and Bamford (2002) provide a widely-recognised list of points to consider:

1. The reading material is easy.

2. A variety of reading material on a wide range of topics must be available.

3. Learners choose what they want to read.

4. Learners read as much as possible.

5. The purpose of reading is usually related to pleasure, information, and general understanding.

6. Reading is its own reward.

7. Reading speed is usually faster rather than slower.

8. Reading is individual and silent.

9. Teachers orient and guide their students.

10. The teacher is a role model of a reader. (pp. 137-140)

Elaborating on point one (ease of reading material), Hsueh-chao and Nation (2000) predict that 98% lexical coverage is required (p. 419). With books at this level, it is easier to discourage students from using dictionaries so that they can practice strategies, such as “ignoring unknown words or passages, going for the general meaning, and being comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity” (Day & Bamford, 2002, p. 139). Day and Bamford (1998) also advocate a wide variety of books, “so as to encourage reading for different reasons and in different ways” (p. 8), stating that “in terms of reading outcomes, the focus shifts away from comprehension achieved or knowledge gained and towards the reader's personal experience” (Day & Bamford, 2002, p. 138). As such, teachers should eliminate follow-up testing, so that students aim for general understanding and develop internal motivation (Powell, 2005, p, 29). In conclusion, “the most critical element in learning to read is the amount of time spent actually reading” (Day & Bamford, 2002, p. 138). Ellis (2005) concurs, stating, “in general, the more exposure [students] receive, the more and the faster they will learn” (p. 217).

Building Academic Vocabulary.

After Evans and Green (2007) determine inadequate receptive and productive vocabulary to be the main problem confronting 5000 surveyed Hong Kong undergraduate students, they suggest that “EAP programme design should place a great deal of stress on the teaching and learning of subject-specific and common core lexis” (p. 14). Indeed, to decrease cognitive load, “increased use of orthographic redundancy enables [readers] to identify a word on the basis of fewer visually extracted features” (Stanovich, 1980, p. 38). Although the current curriculum is not subject-specific, core academic lexis can be systematically addressed with the use of Coxhead’s (2000) AWL. After presenting aspects of the Word List, the benefits of explicit learning are considered and strategies are suggested.

Created from a corpus of 3.5 million words, “the Academic Word List includes 570 word families that constitute a specialised vocabulary with good coverage of academic texts, regardless of the subject area” (Coxhead, 2000, p. 226). The corpus “involved 28 subject areas organised into 7 general areas within each of four disciplines: arts, commerce, law, and science” (p. 216). The AWL is “an even-handed selection of words that appear across the various subject areas covered by the texts contained within the corpus” (p. 216), and, according to Chung and Nation (2003), “covers on average 8.5% of academic text” (p. 104). Figure 3 provides the combined amount of coverage the AWL and West’s (1953, as cited in Coxhead, 2000) General Service List (GSL) provide in Coxhead’s academic corpus. Without the ability to provide vocabulary unique to one subject, the AWL can act as backdrop for the curriculum’s program of explicit vocabulary learning.

Explicit vocabulary instruction in L2 learning comes highly recommended. Laufer-Dvorkin (2006), in her comparison of lexical focus on form and focus on forms with 158 high school English learners, found that when students focused more on decontextualised items, “72% as opposed to 47% of the word meanings were retained” (p. 160). Norris and Ortega (2000), in a synthesis of 49 experimental and quasi-experimental studies, found that “explicit types of instruction are more effective than implicit types” (p. 417). In Prince’s (1996) comparison of 48 ESL pharmacy students learning vocabulary through context or by translation, “linking a new word to its translation equivalent is certainly the most rapid way of ascertaining its meaning” (p. 486). As there is much support for explicit vocabulary learning, explicit vocabulary learning strategies fit well with a strategy-based REGAP curriculum.

There are many strategies for explicit AWL learning. “Teachers and students can set short-term vocabulary learning goals of reasonable size... [as] the AWL can be divided into 10 rank-ordered sublists according to decreasing word family frequency” (Coxhead, 2000, p. 228). Nation and Crabbe (1991), in their production of a traveller’s survival syllabus, suggest that vocabulary learning should be organised into manageable amounts each day (p. 199), and opposite words, such as entrance and exit and free associates, such as numbers, should not be learned at the same time (p. 199). Chung and Nation (2003) suggest “words which are based on Greek or Latin roots should be analyzed where possible and the meanings of the word parts should be related to the meaning of the word” (p. 114). Fortunately, “more than 82% of the words in the AWL are of Greek or Latin origin, indicating that the study of prefixes, suffixes, and stems may be one way to study this vocabulary” (Coxhead, 2000, p. 228). Another way to analyse words is by their polysemes. Ming-tzu and Nation (2004) provide a list of 60 homographs gleaned from the AWL with their semantic relatedness scale (pp. 311-313). Further, a strategy that should not be overlooked is learning vocabulary with keyword mnemonics, “whereby a word, a phrase, or a sentence and visual imagery serve as mediator between what is known and what is to be learned” (Cohen, 1987, p. 43). In Campos et al.’s (2004) study of 363 Latin students, they found that the “peer-generated-keyword method is more effective than the rote method for high-vividness words” (p. 130). The method comprises two steps: “the first verbal and the second visual… For example, let us suppose that the L2 word [to be learned] is Latin mensa (= table); the keyword might thus be men; the visual association might be ‘three men on a table’” (p. 125). Students can also practice “sketching semantic networks to connect the new words and concepts with words and concepts [they] already know” (Shih, 1992, p. 304). Cobb and Horst (2001) suggest using a concordancer, such as Cobb’s (2009) Compleat Lexical Tutor, where students “might overcome the unreliability of contextual learning, since with a number of contexts available learners can search for ones that makes sense, doing in minutes what takes years in natural exposure” (p. 324). Similarly, students can use Haywood’s (2009) The AWL Highlighter. By pasting in text, the program automatically highlights words from the AWL. Finally, in Lawrence’s (2007) promotion of strategy instruction, many vocabulary-learning strategies are provided:

1. Students study frequency lists, particularly for grade levels. Students should be automatically able to recite them. They should use words in sentences and spell them.

2. After some study, students pick words out of a hat, say the words, spell them and use them in sentences. The rest of the class guesses the meaning of the words from the context.

3. Word walls are created by the students for academic subjects. A few minutes daily of the reading block, or other content area, are devoted to studying the words.

4. Students keep their own vocabulary journals with pictures, definitions and sentences with words.

5. For more advanced students and some beginners, word families, prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms and homophones are studied. Semantic webs are used. Store bought puzzles and games are available, and students can make their own. (pp. 64-66)

In conclusion, by implementing the course-level strategies of ER and explicit AWL vocabulary building, students may develop independent learning habits that extend beyond the length of the course.

Text-level reading strategies.

Before presenting students with text-level reading strategies, teachers must decide how to categorise them. Barnett (1988) divides strategies into text-level, or “those related to the reading passage as a whole,” and word-level, which include, for example, “using context to guess word meanings” (p. 150). Willliams and Moran (1989) group them into language-related skills, such as guessing the meaning of unknown words, and reason-related skills, such as inferencing and identifying the main idea (p. 224). Oxford (1990) divides them into the direct strategies of memory (e.g., using newly learned vocabulary), cognitive (e.g., discovering meaning through morphology), and compensation (e.g., reading English without using a dictionary) and the indirect strategies of metacognitive (e.g., researching how to become a better reader), affective (e.g., talking about feelings while reading English), and social (e.g., learning about the culture of English speakers). Anderson (1991) groups 47 strategies into the categories of supervising, support, paraphrasing, establishing coherence, and test-taking. Bernhardt (1993, as cited in Romero-Ghiretti et al., 2007) divides strategies into text-driven operations, which include word recognition, syntax, and text structures, and knowledge-driven operations, which include the activation of schema, inferencing, and rereading (p. 46). Flowerdew and Peacock (2001) refer to macro skills, such as distinguishing the important from the unimportant, reading selectively for a particular purpose, and making notes, and microskills, such as recognising logical relationships, distinguishing fact from opinion, and identifying field-specific terms. As mentioned above, Zhang and Wu (2009) categorise them into global strategies (e.g., checking how content fits purpose and using typographical aides, such as italics), problem-solving strategies (e.g., reading slowly and carefully and visualizing information), and support strategies (e.g., underlining and reading aloud when text becomes difficult) (p. 58). A problem with these categorizations is that students, not to mention teachers, may not know how to categorise unfamiliar strategies into purpose, cognitive behaviour, or intended outcome. A more reader-friendly method, and the one employed in Yigiter et al.’s (2005) needs survey, as well as this curriculum, may be a pre-, while-, and post-reading format, since categories are based on the reader’s stage in the reading process.

Pre-reading strategies.

Yigiter et al. (2005) provide a list of reasons to study pre-reading strategies. These are to:

1. activate the students’ knowledge of the subject,

2. provide any language preparation that might be needed for coping with the passage,

3. motivate the learners to want to read the text,

4. help the students feel confident that they have prior knowledge about the text,

5. promote students’ engagement and interest by providing them with means to preview and anticipate the text,

6. comment on the visuals,

7. draw students’ attention to the new vocabulary,

8. set the scene,

9. talk about the title. (p. 125)

The pre-reading strategies addressed in this curriculum, in no particular order, include activating content and formal schema, previewing, predicting, reading with a purpose, adopting an alignment, as well as others.

Activating content and formal schema.

One extensively researched pre-reading strategy is activating schema. Bartlett (1932), in his seminal work Remembering, describes schema as “an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences” (p. 201). Expanding on Bartlett, Carrell (1987) suggests that readers possess both “content schema, which is knowledge relative to the content domain of the text” and “formal schema, or knowledge relative to the formal, rhetorical organizational structures” of the text (p. 461). Upon investigating the significance of these types on comprehension with groups of ESL students, she concludes that

when both form and content are familiar, the reading is relatively easy; when both form and content are unfamiliar, the reading is relatively difficult. When either form or content is unfamiliar, unfamiliar content poses more difficulties for the reader than unfamiliar form. (p. 476, her emphases)

As a result, teachers should help students learn strategies for building and activating their content, as well as their formal, schema.

Regarding content, teachers, as the “facilitators of the acquisition of appropriate cultural content knowledge” (Carrell, 1987, pp. 476-477), can provide students with strategies to activate and build on what they already know. Carrell et al. (1989) suggest semantic mapping, which

generally includes a brainstorming session in which students verbalize associations on a topic or key concept as the teacher writes them on the board. The teacher then facilitates the students’ discussion to organize or categorize the associations into the form of a map. (p. 651)

This prepares students to “understand, assimilate, and evaluate the information in the material to be read” (p. 651). They provide a sample of a cloze version of a semantic map that students can fill in during pre- and post-reading (p. 661; see Appendix 4). Carrell et al. (1989) also suggest ETR, where students access their experience about a topic, read a part of the text, and then draw relationships between the content of the text and their outside experience (p. 654). Similarly, Ketchum (2006) presents a 3R model, where students recognize what hinders comprehension, research the necessary information to understand the text, and then relate the new information to the text. This model guides students “in the process of analyzing the relationship between practices and perspectives of another culture” (p. 31). Lawrence (2007) suggests Question/ Answer Relationships, where students answer a variety of questions and categorise the answers as right there within the text, implied within the text, or entirely in the students’ minds (p. 65). She also suggests that KWL charts can be used to determine what students know about a topic, what they want to know, and lastly, what they learned – “for language learners, much time should be spent on what they already know about a topic” (p. 64). Finally, as a total lesson, Drucker (2003) suggests relating the passages students will read to something familiar to them, providing a discussion question that will engage the students, and then providing an overview of the section they are about to read (p. 23).

Regarding formal schema, Carol (1987) concludes that knowledge of text types and formal structures can aid L2 comprehension when content and lexical knowledge fail. According to Grabe (2003),

students need to develop an awareness of text structure itself… They should be aware of the ways that coherence is signaled in texts, the ways that ideas are sequenced and linked effectively, the ways that larger units of information are combined to achieve the overall task goal, and the ways that texts open and end. (p. 256, his emphasis)

To develop awareness, students can be shown visually how texts are organised according to genre (Grabe, 2004, p. 53). Evans and Green (2007) suggest using visual aids to understand the outline of a passage, and paying attention to discourse markers (e.g., however, while, then, first) to comprehend a passage more effectively (p. 8). Shih (1992) recommends choosing “texts that exhibit discourse patterns and devices that students need to recognise. Readings should provide repeated exposure to organizational patterns commonly found in academic expository prose” (p. 297). Enright et al. (2000) provide the types of texts students need to be familiar with. Some include discourse structures such as expository, argumentative persuasive, historical/ biographical narrative, comparison/ contrast, cause/ effect, problem/ solution, and analysis, and rhetorical patterns, such as a definitions, illustrations, short anecdotes, descriptions, and classifications, and cohesive markers such as, as a result, the effect of, because, and consequently (pp. 23-27). With these strategies, students will become more able to attach discourse structures at the sentence, paragraph, section, chapter, and article level to their “permanent cognitive domain” (Brantmeier, 2001, p. 326).

Previewing.

Similar to the benefits of activating background knowledge, previewing “establishes the important topics and subtopics to be covered; reading will be easier because the reader knows the direction of the discussion and what concepts are important” (Shih, 1992, pp. 300-301). One previewing strategy advises that students, “before reading, examine only highly informative items: title and subtitle, introduction or first paragraph, section headings, material emphasized typographically, summary or last paragraph, and end-of-chapter material (such as study questions and vocabulary lists)” (p. 302). Auerbach and Paxton (1997) suggest “asking questions based on the title… [and] writing a summary of the article based [only] on previewing” (p. 255). Lawrence (2007) suggests that after students read a selection, they try to picture the scene within the mind and draw it. Students then discuss the different pictures, referring back to the text for further clarification and discussion (p. 64).

Predicting.

According to Yigiter et al. (2005), “predicting and figuring out the author’s aim in the reading material contribute to the overall understanding of the text” (p. 130). It is helpful because, as Nunan (1999) explains, when readers begin with a set of predictions about the meaning of a text, they have something to relate to as they read (p. 253). Time spent confirming and revising predictions may increase comprehension of overall meaning.

Reading with a purpose.

Purposive reading “starts the reading process and develops into the constantly self-revising impulse that guides selection, synthesis, and organization” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 1064). “Goals a reader sets can determine the knowledge he calls up” while he reads (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 7). A successful strategy for the student in Spack’s (1997) longitudinal study was to “read once, slowly, for a specific purpose” and then to read again for overall comprehension (p. 28). Students may want to ask themselves if they are reading to find specific information, to get a general idea, to understand the text structure, or to see how multiple readings connect.

Adopting an alignment.

Depending on readers’ purposes, they may adapt an alignment or a particular stance before they read:

Adopting an alignment is akin to achieving a foothold from which meaning can be more readily negotiated. Just as a filmmaker can adopt and vary the angle from which a scene is depicted in order to maximize the richness of a filmgoer’s experience, so too can a reader… adopt and vary the angle from which language meanings are negotiated. (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 12)

Reading an article from the perspective of a student, researcher, teacher, grammarian, or anthropologist may all produce different impressions. Readers may also “choose to take an efferent or an aesthetic stance” with a text (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 1066), so they can summarise it based on either its information or how it makes them feel. Lastly, students can choose how critical to be when reading. If the reader

is too assertive there is a danger that he may distort the writer’s intentions and deny access to new knowledge and experience. If he is too submissive, he runs the risk of accumulating information without subjecting it to the critical discrimination necessary to incorporate it into the schematic structure of existing knowledge. (Widdowson, 1984, p. 226)

Other pre-reading strategies.

Other pre-reading strategies REGAP students may want to practice include skimming, scanning, consulting study aids, and as Anderson (1991) suggests, admitting their lack of background knowledge. After making use of the above ideas, students will most likely be more prepared for the actual reading of the text.

While-reading strategies.

Yigiter et al. (2005) provide a list of reasons to study while-reading strategies. The intention is to:

1. set ways for students to interact with text by providing directions and questions,

2. help understand the writer’s purpose and intention,

3. help understand the text structure and the logical organization in a reading passage,

4. clarify and comprehend the text content,

5. help students use inferencing and judging,

6. help students discover cross-cultural differences in reading,

7. survey the general information,

8. look for specific information,

9. find the answers of questions given at the beginning of the text (pre-reading questions). (pp. 125-126)

The while-reading strategies considered include comprehension monitoring and questioning, lexical inferencing, reading for meaning, visualising with graphic organisers (GOs), note-taking and marking text, and others.

Comprehension monitoring and questioning.

“Our monitor decides whether we have planned, aligned, drafted and/ or revised properly. It decides when one activity should dominate over the others” (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 19), as well as when a “fix-up strategy” (Shih, 1992, p. 303) should be used. Block (1992), in her study of proficient and non-proficient L1 and L2 readers, noticed that readers’ monitoring process seemed to be comprised of three phases and six steps: “the evaluation phase (problem recognition and problem source identification), the action phase (strategic plan and action/ solution attempt), and the checking phase (check and revision)” (p. 335), and that “control of the various stages of this process seemed to depend more on reading ability than on whether the reader was a first or second language reader of English” (p. 325). Block also concluded that “part of the strength of [the proficient readers’] reading was in being able to decide which problems they could ignore and which they had to solve” (p. 337). To help readers decide, Yigiter et al. (2005) suggest questions they can ask themselves:

• What is the function of this text?

• How is the text organized or developed?

• What content or information is to be extracted from the text?

• What language may I learned from the text?

• What may I infer or deduce from the text? (p. 134)

Lexical inferencing.

Hunt and Beglar (2005) conclude, “inferring vocabulary meaning from context is an essential strategy for developing reading comprehension [and] is commonly employed by successful language learners”; however, it can be difficult because of “learners’ lack of vocabulary, their failure to identify or process unknown vocabulary, [or] a lack of clues” (p. 37). To remedy this, they suggest a procedure to practice inferring: identify the unknown word’s part of speech, search for clues in the immediate context, make a guess, compare the guess to the dictionary definition, and if the guess is wrong, reevaluate the contextual clues (p. 38). Students should not be discouraged about wrong guesses, as “being sure that the word ‘makes sense’ in relation to previously read material… is more important than the exact definition of a word” (Allen, 2003, p. 336). Nevertheless, “when too many wrong inferences are remembered, there may be a cumulative effect” (Parry, 1991, p. 638).

Reading for meaning.

According to Ellis’ (2006) second principle of language teaching, “instruction needs to ensure that learners focus predominantly on meaning” (p. 211). In fact, Rosenblatt (1994), referring to her transactional theory, suggests that “only after we have selected a meaning can we infer syntax from it” (p. 1063). When meaning is understood, incomprehensible vocabulary becomes less important. As a caveat, however, Ellis (2005) suggests that readers should attempt to understand both types of meaning – the “semantic meaning (i.e., the meanings of lexical items or of specific grammatical structures)… [as well as the] pragmatic meaning (i.e., the highly contextualized meanings that arise in acts of communication)” (p. 211).

Visualizing with graphic organisers (GOs).

Tierney and Pearson (1983) define visualising as “a form of alignment… equivalent to eye-witnessing” (p. 19). As well as being an aid in pre-reading, “a conceptual map (also called a graphic organizer, semantic map, cognitive map, semantic organizer, and network)” can act as “a visual representation of the relationships between concepts in a text” (Shih, 1992, p. 307). Jiang and Grabe (2007) suggest that “text structures can be depicted in the form of GOs to represent the interrelationships among ideas and patterns of discourse organization” (p. 36; see Appendix 5) and “GOs constructed by students themselves were found to be more effective than those constructed by teachers” (p. 42). The student in Spack’s (1997) case study took advantage of such a strategy, called branching: the “theme, main ideas, [and] sub ideas make branches out to the bottom… the important thing is that ‘I have the big picture’” (p. 40). As Shih (1992) concludes, “conceptual mapping promotes comprehension, retention, and retrieval of ideas, especially ideas from expository text containing many new terms and complex relationships between concepts” (p. 307).

Note-taking and marking text.

Zamel (1992) suggests that “when we underline portions of texts, mark them up… or scribble marginal comments, we are using interpretive strategies that give us insight into our meaning making (pp. 470-471). Evans and Green (2007) suggest that students use their own words in note-taking and parse sentences by putting slashes (/) into sense units to aid comprehension (p. 8). Lawrence (2007) suggests that teachers initially guide students through highlighting, perhaps, first, by identifying main ideas or the author’s point of view (p. 66).

Other while-reading strategies.

Other while-reading strategies include identifying collocations (Hunt & Beglar, 2005, p. 34), speed reading, repeated reading (Nation, 2007, p. 7), identifying tense and parts of speech (Allen, 2003, p. 336), deciding on importance, looking for examples, considering and keeping context in mind while reading (Barnett, 1988, p. 156), separating main ideas from supporting details, discussing word meanings in context (p. 150), slowing down at the beginning of sentences, speeding up at the end, pausing at obscure punctuation, ignoring problems, reading on, looking back for clarification (Brown et al., 1995, p. 257), reviewing main ideas after each chunk, predicting the main idea of each paragraph, glossing, relating glosses back to the text structure, drawing pictures to show what is in the mind’s eye (Auerbach & Paxton, 1997, p. 259), recognizing loss of concentration, admitting success or failure in understanding a portion of the text, using cognates in the L1 and L2 to comprehend, paraphrasing, and relating stimulus sentences to personal experience (Anderson, 1991, p. 463). Ideally, these while-reading strategies “will help students to understand the message conveyed by author” (Yigiter et al., 2005, p. 131).

Post-reading strategies.

Yigiter et al. (2005) also provide a list of reasons to study post-reading strategies. These are to:

1. make connections,

2. extend the reading experience,

3. review the first two stages,

4. lead students to a deeper analysis of the text. (pp. 126)

The post-reading strategies considered include summarising, verifying and revising, sharing responses, and others.

Summarising.

Writing about what is read also improves students’ academic reading. More specifically, as “a means for working out a reading, writing allows insights that may have been inaccessible or inchoate at the time that the text was read” (Zamel, 1992, p. 472). Dunkelblau (2007) suggests using reader response journals – “informal literature logs in which students focus on their personal reactions to a story rather than on strict literary analysis” (p. 51). Furthermore, “giving students the opportunity to write about what they find interesting/ significant/ moving/ puzzling may help them realize that their understanding of complex texts evolves as they (re)read” (Zamel, 1992, p. 474). One of Zamel’s graduate students wrote that he tries to internalise his own meanings, so that the words become real to him (p. 474). Teachers can also respond to student summaries in the “role of participant and responder, not as evaluator or judge” (Dunkelblau, 2007, p. 52). Shih (1992) suggests that “writing a summary from notes is effective” (p. 307) and helps students prepare for tests (p. 307). With reference to Rosenblatt’s (1994) efferent-aesthetic continuum (p. 1069), teachers can help students look at the same text in different ways. To do this, they could get students to summarise with mainly an efferent stance and then summarise the same text using a mainly aesthetic stance, which “pays more attention to the sensuous, the affective, the emotive, [and] the qualitative” (p. 1068).

Verifying and revising.

Tierney and Pearson (1983) suggest that “revising should be considered as integral to reading as it is to writing” (p. 19). Readers should examine their evolving interpretations and view their first impressions like a draft that still has to be shaped and revised. They suggest a bias exists towards rereading, as many people measure ability by how much can be comprehended in the shortest time possible (p. 19). The student in Spack’s (1997) longitudinal study reported reading a text once to get the main idea and then another time to focus on quotes and details. She called it a “‘reading-first-to-get-the-gist’ strategy” (p. 24). Lastly, “verifying predictions helps students to “understand, remember, and respond personally to text” (Brown et al., 1995, p. 256).

Sharing responses.

When readers share responses, they can compare their level of comprehension and what they felt were the main points, and thereby note “their own habits of selection and synthesis” (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 1083). When “reading becomes public” (Paris et al., 1994, p. 791), students and teachers can evaluate and build on others’ ideas. Spack’s (1997) case study student “emphasized how useful it was when lecturers ‘analyze’ the readings” (p. 35). Students and teachers can make “connections between course content and real life” and “relating course material to multiple social and cultural situations” (p. 52).

Other post-reading strategies.

Students can also “organize, reduce, and rehearse important information” to prepare for assignments and tests (Shih, 1992, p. 306), “synthesize main information across two or more texts” (Grabe, 2003, p. 257), and check effectiveness in strategy use (Zhang, 2008, p. 100). Auerbach and Paxton (1997) recommend “revisiting pre-reading expectations, reviewing notes, [creating] glosses… making an outline, chart, map, or diagram of the organization of the text, retelling what you think the author is saying, relating the text to your own experience, [and] responding to the text or critiquing it” (p. 259). A final post-reading strategy includes getting help. Students should be encouraged to “speak up when they do not understand and to make it clear that they expect their questions to be taken seriously, not ignored in the name of coverage or impatience with their pace of learning” (Benesch, 2001, p. 139).

With these text- and course-level strategies, students will be able, based on the above research, to increase their chances of comprehending the texts they come across as future undergraduate students.

Curriculum Evaluation

To keep the curriculum accountable to stakeholders (e.g., programme participants and sponsors), teachers should conduct a programme evaluation. A “programme evaluation is a form of enquiry which describes the achievements of a given programme, provides explanations for these, and sets out ways in which further development might be realized” (Kiely, 2009, p. 99). “Achievement assessments may be used as the first line of evidence that a language programme is achieving its stated goals” (Brindley & Ross, 2001, p. 149), but after this, goals and objectives, needs analyses, course texts and materials, assessments and the syllabus can also be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness toward achieving overall goals and objectives. Teachers may want to make a checklist to see if strategies taught were adequately learned, as well as hand out a survey to see what worked well and where improvements should be made.

Concluding Discussion

According to Nunan (1999), “reading is a process of reconstructing meaning rather than decoding form, and the reader only resorts to decoding if other means fail” (p. 252). With a strategy-based reading curriculum, students have many options to help them reconstruct meaning and comprehend. Grabe (2000, as cited in Grabe, 2004) cites an important study on L1 reading strategies conducted by the National Research Panel that concluded that knowledge activation, mental imagery, use of graphic organisers, text structure awareness, comprehension monitoring, question answering, question generating, mnemonic support practice, and summarization all have a “significant influence on reading comprehension” (p. 51). Within this REGAP curriculum, these strategies have been addressed and have also been provided with support from L2 research. Before teachers can implement them and others into a curriculum, however, some final considerations should take place, including potential problems with a reading-strategies curriculum, which strategies to implement, in which order, and future strategy-based learning research.

There may be some problems with a strategy-based curriculum, such as initial student acceptance, student fulfillment, and how to allot time. In Zhang’s (2008) study of Chinese high schools students’ readiness to accept strategy-learning, “[the process] did not always meet with success… Before students really saw the value of a strategy-based approach… their cooperation was not unanimous” (p. 105). Regarding student fulfillment, Auerbach and Paxton (1997) mention that “[the curriculum] felt quite mechanical at times (with the repertoire of strategies and tasks becoming almost overwhelming for students)” (p. 256). They reported that they were afraid they were “sending the message that process is more important than content – that reading consists of applying strategies rather than engaging with a text” (p. 256). Regarding how to allot time, Brown et al. (1995) reported that “some teachers are concerned about the amount of classroom time strategies instruction requires” (p. 258). They may feel that they do not want to lose reading time for the sake of learning alternative ways of reading. It should be noted that the effectiveness of this curriculum has yet to be researched, and as a result, it is difficult to tell what problems, such as the above, may arise.

Students and teachers must also decide on which strategies to learn, in which order. Referring to the nature of task-based analytic syllabi, Long (2000, as cited in McDonough & Chaikitmongkol, 2007), mentions, “there are no agreed-on criteria for selecting and sequencing tasks. As a result, teachers may rely on their intuitions to make decisions about which tasks to include in a syllabus and the order in which they should be presented” (pp. 108-109). The same problem arises in strategy-based syllabi, since strategies can essentially be presented in any order. Regarding which strategies to include, Carrell et al. (1989) suggest “the effectiveness of one type of [strategy] training versus another may depend upon the way reading is measured” (p. 647). To decide which strategies work best, students may want to try each one individually and then simultaneously with others. Ikeda and Takeuchi (2006), in their research on strategy implementation, found that “the students in the higher proficiency group tended to report on the use of more than one strategy,” while the lower proficiency students “were inclined to report on the use of a single strategy” (p. 388). The answer to these questions may be the same as what Mohseni-Far (2008) concludes in his search for the best vocabulary learning strategy: “the choice, use, and effectiveness of vocabulary learning strategies very much depend on the task (e.g., breadth vs. depth), the learner (e.g., cognitive and cultural styles of learning, motivation), and the context” (p. 134). It could be that, as Oxford (2003) emphasises, a useful strategy is “the strategy that relates well to the L2 task at hand” (p. 274).

Finally, future research regarding strategy-based learning could include “the interaction between reading strategies and learning styles” (Anderson, 1991, p. 471) and how strategy use affects meaning. Ehrman (1996, as cited in Ehrman et al., 2003) suggests that learners can be classified in terms of field dependency and field sensitivity (p. 316). Teachers may also view their students as visual, auditory, or tactile learners; however, there is no reason why learners cannot also be classified in terms of which strategies they prefer. For example, one reader may prefer previewing, lexical inferencing, and verifying to predicting, visualizing, and sharing responses. By knowing which type of strategies readers excel with, they could save much time when they study. Teachers may also want to consider if certain strategies elicit certain types of responses in readers. In a nod to Marshall McCluhan’s “the medium is the message”, the medium of various strategies may affect readers differently, similar to how impressions which arise from watching the news on TV differ from those which arise when reading the same information in a newspaper. Indeed, “how readers arrive at their interpretations is at least as important as what those interpretations are” (Parry, 1991, p. 629). As the above research suggests, there is still much to consider regarding how strategies affect learning.

In conclusion, the primary responsibility of strategy-based REGAP teachers is to help students determine which reading strategies work best for them so that they can prepare for life as undergraduate students. Through ER and Coxhead’s AWL, in conjunction with a varied set of pre-, while-, and post-reading strategies, it is the intention of this author that students not simply “passively receive meaning” as they read, but instead “actively create it” (Tierney & Pearson, 1983, p. 1).

References

Alderson, J. (2000). Assessing reading. New York, NY: Cambridge UP. Allen, S. (2003). An analytic comparison of three models of reading strategy instruction. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 41, 319-338.

Anderson, N. (1991). Individual differences in strategy use in second language reading and testing. Modern Language Journal, 75, 460-472.

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