Reflecting on Brown’s suggestions I’ve come to realize that in most of the cases I’ve given my students poorly
designed, multiple-choice, non-illustrated reading tests expecting them to answer
the questions correctly.
I have to admit
that I don’t usually ask myself if their answers in the tests are carefully
thought or just guessed. In my defense I have to say that it is not because I
don’t care about their learning process, but because I tend to forget that reading
is a very complex skill and that its tasks need to be very well designed, applied
and assessed.
In order to
explain the complexity of the reading process I will compare it with doing magic.
One may think that reading is as easy as putting words into sentences, throwing
them into a magic box and then with the help of the magic powder...voilà!, in the blink of an eye you have
the outcome you are expecting, which in this case is not the cute bunny but the
specific reading performance that you want to assess.
You may say,
come on!, That is not new, everybody
knows there are always secrets behind magic. Well, the same happens with
reading, there are so many things happening into our students’ brain, but we only
get to see the outcome.
The trick's success
depends on how well that “mysterious” process is made. In our particular case,
our reading comprehension depends on how well we use our linguistic knowledge which
involves morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic knowledge.
Our role as
teachers shouldn’t be limited to just being spectators who only watch for the
outcome (answers to test questions), we should care about what happens behind
the visible. In order to do this we have to teach our students strategies so
that they can improve their reading comprehension, and during reading tasks we
should provide them with the necessary input for them to activate all their
knowledge and fuel their brain’s engine so it starts working.
Just like in
any other skill, practice makes perfect, so I invite you to spend more time doing
meaningful reading tasks during your English classes.
