Learning to Read and Reading to Learn

Preparing students to take the Advanced Placement Spanish Language Examination involves dividing instructional time into listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities representing the four skill areas comprising the test. As students repeatedly commented that the reading comprehension section was the most challenging and difficult of the four subtests, it was evident that my approach to reading comprehension, rather than adding instructional time in that area, needed to be modified. Just as one learns to play the piano by playing, or to cook by cooking, so one also learns to read by reading. As a result of transferring this theory into practice, my Advanced Placement students were inundated with various genres of reading materials from the world. The method worked respectably well; however the students were expected to make quantum leaps in reading ability between the lower levels of language study and the Advanced Placement class. Prior to Advanced Placement, students' reading is largely confined to contrived stories with controlled vocabularies followed by several questions designed to assess comprehension. An accepted procedure for teaching reading in foreign languages has been to have the students read the passage silently or orally and then to respond to questions, usually in writing. Generally the questions are checked in class, and, if the students supply the desired responses, it is assumed that comprehension has occurred. However, is this a valid practice? Were these students really understanding what they read, or were they simply manipulating the text in order to respond to the questions? Were they getting any real meaning from their reading? Could they retell the text in their own Spanish words? The following passage is an excerpt from a second year Spanish text which illustrates the aforementioned

Bridging (networking) · Extensive reading · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Reading (process) · Computer Science · Literacy and Educational Practices · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies