論文

An Approach to Teaching a University
Level Reading Course

Jack Ryan

要

旨

大学でのリーディング授業（英語）の流れの説明です。
リーディングについて研究している学者が多いですが，一番良いリー
ディング理論（セオリー）は未だ書かれていません。しかし，効果的なリー
ディング方法は様々あります。人が書物を読もうとする時のプロセシング
方法は大きくわけて 2 つあり，そのプロセシング方法についてここでは詳しく説明しています。また効果的なアクティビティ（授業活動）とその例も多数挙げています。学生のモチベーションを上げるために，出来るだけ
ネイティブスピーカーが日常的に読んでおり，なおかつ学生が読みたい書物を教材として使うことも説明しています。

キーワード：reading（読書／リーディング），activities（アクティビティ／授業活動），
motivation（モチベーション），reading strategies（リーディング 作戦）
top-down processing（トップダウンプロセシング／事前にもっている知識と文脈からわかろうとする）
bottom-up processing（ボトムアップ・プロセシング／知識がなく文脈もわからないので字，文法，文などからわかろうとする）authentic material（学習者のために分かりやすく作られている物ではなくネイティブスピーカーが普段使っている物）― 105 ―

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言語と文化 No. 22

In many ways teaching a reading course at the university level in Japan can seem less daunting
than teaching a conversation course because most students will have had some experience withreading in English. Their previous English instruction will likely have taken the form of many
detailed grammar explanations and sentence translations among other activities.

However,on the other hand, teaching reading, especially intensive reading, is also a challenge because it
will probably involve re-training students to break bad habits and teach them new techniques
for reading in English. In this paper I will outline the elements I feel are necessary to design a
successful intensive English reading course. I will describe how I develop the outline of a unit
based largely on student self-selected themes and how to design activities around the respective
themes while teaching a number of important reading techniques. I will also include a number ofsample activities.

Background
In my current teaching context I am responsible for teaching an English elective course
in intensive reading. As I alluded to above, virtually all of my students will have had someexperience of reading and doing sentence translations in English. Most of them will not, however,
have had experience reading in English for pleasure. In fact, one of my goals in teaching a reading
course is to impart an enjoyment of reading. Many students will likely have a negative view ofEnglish reading as boring drudgery as a result of past unpleasant classroom experiences.

Motivation
A seemingly self-evident and important way to promote motivation and enjoyment of reading in
English is to use materials that reflect student interests. Teaching reading to promote enjoyment
and to encourage a lifelong interest in reading can be facilitated by using reading materials thatstudents have an interest in. If a teacher can successfully engender a lifelong interest in reading
he or she will have provided a benefit to students far beyond the discrete material they have
imparted in a semester long course. Research has shown that two of the most demotivating
factors for second or foreign language students are use of the grammar translation method in
instruction (Brown, 2001) and textbook related issues (Lynch, 1996). Therefore, I choose tominimize grammar explanations and do not use a course textbook at all. Ultimately, people learn
to read by reading and they are unlikely to read if they are force-fed material that has no relevance― 106 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

to their lives and that they have no interest in. A self-evident and critical part of a reading teacher’s job is to present appropriate materials to their students.

Authentic material
Using student-selected authentic material should ensure a relatively high level of motivation,
as students will feel invested in the course and at least partially responsible for lesson materials.
Each student will be responsible for bringing in one piece of text (no length, difficulty nor topics
are specified; students are given complete freedom) every other week for the first six weeks ofthe course. Students will be largely reading things they want to. I say largely because the course
material will primarily be drawn from what they bring in for homework. This means that inaddition to reading what they themselves have brought in they will be required to read what theirclassmates have brought in as well. For example, if a student is a movie fan and brings in movie
reviews they will read those articles but their classmates will also be forced to. Procedures forthis will become clear later in this paper.
An important benefit to using authentic material whenever possible is that students will nothave the luxury of graded material outside of the controlled, inauthentic environment of thelanguage learning classroom. Further, they outside of the classroom they will be reading what
they want to read and not what a teacher chooses for them. I can say from personal experiencethat I have often found myself brimming with confidence in my reading ability after comfortably
reading something in a Japanese class that my teacher has selected and modified for me.
Inevitably I am quickly brought back down to earth, however, when trying to read somethingungraded outside of class. Even so, an obvious concern related to the use of authentic material
is that ungraded material may be too far above the current level of student comprehension. In
addition to selectively grading material for students allowing students to self-select material thatthey are interested in reading is another way in which to deal with this problem. If the students
are reading what they are interested in and have chosen it themselves they might reasonably be
expected to have significant background knowledge on the topic and schemata to draw upon toassist in comprehension. Another factor the reading teacher would do well to consider is how
much culturally specific material to present. In other words, how much of the course readingmaterial should be concerned with Japanese culture? A benefit to using Japan-specific readingmaterial is that students will often have relevant background knowledge and schemata to draw

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言語と文化 No. 22

upon when processing material. If too much material is concerned with things “non-Japanese”
or topics the students have no knowledge of they will be forced into an over-reliance on the text
for comprehension. This, in turn, is likely to push them into the unproductive method of trying
to fully understand every single word in the text; something that research shows good readers
simply do not do. While students will certainly have formal schemata, background knowledgeof the organizational structure of text types, they will often lack content schemata, backgroundknowledge of the content area of the text. Content schemata are the type that can be activatedand utilized by using material the students have some background knowledge about.

Good Reading Instruction
There has been extensive research about the reading process over the years yet despite this no
theory of reading has won general acceptance. Despite the lack of consensus on reading theory,
research has shown that good reading instruction often involves the following:
Giving students a variety of reading assignments in which no more than approximately ten
percent of the words are new to the students; Providing a variety of activities related to thosereading assignments; Familiarizing students with appropriate reading strategies and when to use
them; Ensuring that the material is interesting and relevant to the students; Providing plenty ofinteresting material for the students to read for pleasure at their own pace with no assessment.

Types of Processing
The reading literature often refers to “top-down processing” or “bottom-up processing.”
Essentially top-down processing refers to using our background knowledge or schemata tointerpret a text while bottom-up processing refers to using the text on the page at the sound,word, sentence etc. level and interpreting textual clues to understand the material. These terms
provide useful categories and a broad overall way to conceptualize how people actually use bothtypes of processing when reading. Research suggests that class time should be spent teachingboth top-down and bottom-up processing skills. For example, students may have strong topdown processing skills in their native language but often cannot transfer those skills to readingin another language and need at least some practice working on basic lexical and grammatical
identification skills. On the other hand, students also need practice reading for global meaning,making educated guesses and developing appropriate schemata to interpret different types of text.

― 108 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

Good readers read fast and poor readers often focus excessively on reading word for word which
severely limits their chances of understanding much of the text. This would seem to suggest thatafter having built up sufficient bottom-up processing skills good readers rely more on top-down
processing skills. My experience has been that Japanese readers of English tend to excessive
bottom-up processing so my courses place more emphasis on practicing top-down processing
skills. A discussion of how readers process text leads into the important matter of deciding whatstrategies to teach in a reading course.

Reading Strategies
There are a number of useful and valid reading strategies we all make use of unconsciously
when reading in our first language. A real practical challenge for a reading teacher of students ina second or foreign language is to determine which strategies to focus on. An extension of thatquestion is whether to teach reading strategies explicitly or implicitly. Explicit teaching would
involve announcing the name of the strategy, writing its name on the board, making a detailed
explanation of how the strategy works and how it can help the students and finally doing activities
making use of that strategy. Implicit teaching is more subtle and forgoes detailed explanations.
The name of the strategy may not even be mentioned and any explanations (if given at all) might
wait until after the strategy has already been attempted in an activity. The teacher would guidestudents to the use of the strategy without making any type of explicit explanation.
Currently I choose to teach the strategies of predicting, scanning, skimming and utilizing
schemata. Predicting involves using clues such as headlines, pictures, captions, subheadings etc.
to make educated guesses about the text. To teach predicting, texts could be revealed sentenceby sentence (or a picture or headline) while students are asked to predict what they think will
come next. Scanning involves looking for very specific information and is a skill we all use whenlooking at a train schedule for a specific train departure or arrival or a movie listing for the start
times of a movie we want to see at our local cinema. Skimming is something we do when weare looking for the main ideas or general meaning of a text and are not so concerned with all thedetails. Utilizing schemata refers to our use of our background knowledge about the world and/or
particular subjects when reading a text.

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言語と文化 No. 22

Building up a Library of Material
One quick and easy way to build up a library of authentic material is to give students ahomework assignment to bring to class something they want to read in English. Over the years
I have taught this reading course that simple assignment has resulted in students bringing ineverything from music and fashion magazines, travel guides, motorcycle accessories catalogs andarticles on everything from baseball to costume play to global warming. I repeat this homeworkassignment every two weeks throughout the semester to build up the supply of reading material.
As the semester wears on I am able to develop quite an extensive inventory of authentic studentselected material to draw on.

Activities
To briefly illustrate some of the activities I might use to teach reading strategies I will
make use of an actual article about “cos-play” (Appendix 1) that was previously submitted as a
homework assignment for my intensive reading course. The article is about costume play and has
the benefit of being a topic all of my students will have some background knowledge about. On
the other hand, one drawback of the article is the relative complexity, length and likely numberof new words. The two most important reasons people read are to find out factual informationand for pleasure. Because this article has been brought in by a student who is interested in cosplay they will be presumably be reading for pleasure. Their classmates will be reading to find out
factual information about cos-play. To begin with I will show the students a picture (Appendix 1),
tell them we are going to read a newspaper article and that this picture is connected to the article
and elicit from them what they think the article is about. The next step is to give them a copy of
the article (Appendix 2) and a handout (Appendix 3). These activities are concerned with utilizing
the skill of predicting and activating schemata. The next handout (Appendix 4) is a gap-fillexercise to deepen comprehension of the first paragraph of the text. The next activity (Appendix
5) asks students to punctuate a paragraph (this can also be done at the sentence or whole textlevel) from which all punctuation has been removed. This activity would be regarded as working
on bottom-up processing skills, requiring students to work with the physical text on the page todecode meaning. The last activity (Appendix 6) is concerned with using both scanning (question 1)
and skimming.

― 110 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

Each reading passage may have activities similar to the above modified appropriately forthe various texts students have submitted for their homework. All assignments can be used towork on the targeted skills of predicting, skimming, scanning and building up and/or activating
schemata. Different length passages and different text types (newspaper articles, advertisements,
train/bus schedules, cinema listings, emails etc.) and material from different cultural contexts will
also be utilized.

Other Activity Types
There are many additional activity types that may be productively utilized depending on the
text type, length and difficulty. It can also be useful to have students determine the boundaries
between words in a passage from which word boundaries have been removed (again this can also
be extended from sentence to paragraph and text length). Cloze exercises focusing on specificlexical forms or key words are also useful in raising the consciousness of second language readers.
Having students summarize what they have read in one or more sentences is a good way tocheck comprehension and can be modified to be an especially useful way to test scanning ability.
Students can be asked to add a sentence or paragraph to a text. Afterwards, it can be instructive
to compare what the students have produced to the actual text for cohesion and coherence. It
is also often useful to have students produce a headline for a text, rearrange jumbled text into
correct order in a jigsaw activity, answer reading comprehension questions and fill in gaps in the
text among other activities.
Most if not all of these activities can be undertaken individually or in pairs or even groups. To
keep lessons moving smoothly I might frequently alternate among all these configurations anduse various of the above mentioned activity types in a single lesson with all the tasks supporting
the main course goals of improving the reading skills of building up and activating schemata,predicting, skimming and scanning.
While every reading teacher always has the obligation to provide quality instruction ultimately,
as mentioned above, people become good readers by reading.

By preparing and presenting theappropriate materials during the limited classroom hours the teacher can impart useful strategies
and guide students along the path to becoming more fluent readers. Allowing students to proactively participate in materials selection by choosing what they want to read is a useful way to― 111 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化 No. 22

promote motivation. Motivation as a key factor to encourage students to become good readers
can scarcely be overemphasized. Once our students finish a course and leave the classroom itwill be down to them to read enough to become fluent readers. Having a say in selecting theirown materials and being taught efficient strategies with which to approach different types of texts
can increase student motivation and increase the likelihood that they will continue their English
reading on their own long after they have moved on from our classrooms.

References
Alway, S. (Eds.), Research on Reading in Education (Vol. 47, p. 17―34). Case Western University Press, 2005
Ballmer, Mark. “ESL Reading” University of California Press, 1994
Carrell, Patricia L. & Devine, Joanne & Eskey, David E. Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading.
Cambridge University Press, 1998
Harley, Birgit, Allen, Patrick, Cummins, Jim, Swain, Merrill The Development of Second Language Proficiency.
Cambridge University Press, 1990
Krashen, Stephen D., Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Prentice-Hall International, 1987
Krashen, Stephen D., Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall
International, 1988
Lightbown, Patsy M. & Brown, Nina. How Languages Are Learned. Oxford University Press, 2006
Nunan, David Editor, Practical English Language Teaching, McGraw Hill, 2003
Richards, Jack, The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge University Press, 1990

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Appendix 1― 113 ―

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Appendix 2
COSTUME PLAY
From Underground Trend to Mainstay of Subculture
1 More and more young Japanese fans these days are dressing up like their favorite charactersfrom anime (Japanese cartoons) and video games. Costume parties are held regularly, and haveeven begun to be featured on television, as well as in major newspapers and magazines. The
practice known as “costume play” has gone from being looked at as just another fan-inspired craze
to an established trend in today’s Japanese youth culture.
2 Costume Players Themselves Become Stars
Costume play’s popularity began growing rapidly among young Japanese some years ago at manga(comic book) sales conventions sponsored by underground manga artists. Not just limited toclothing, costume players apply makeup, dye their hair, and even wear colored contact lenses inan effort to take on the likeness of their favorite characters. Every summer, Japan’s largest manga
convention is held for three days in Tokyo where anime and manga fans and costume players
gather from all over the country.
3

Costume play is no longer limited to manga conventions. Costume parties have started

cropping up all over Japan. The largest parties attract thousands of participants, who dance totheir favorite anime theme songs and pose in their costumes for photographs. Popular costume
players become stars in their own right, receiving letters from their fans. Some even put out theirown videos and photo collections.
4 Stores that supply character costumes have also begun to increase. An entire outfit can cost
anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 yen. There is one reported case of a female office worker
who placed a costume order for more than 1 million yen to ensure that she wouldn’t tarnish her
favorite character’s image with inferior apparel. There are even some specialty stores that design
costumes to order. Customers bring in a photo of their favorite rock artist, have the store tailor a
copy of the artist’s costume, and then wear it out to their idol’s concert.

― 114 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

5

Costume play has gone international, with costume contests featuring Japanese anime

characters being held in places as far away as France. With this kind of national and eveninternational appeal, costume play can no longer be looked at as just a fad, but a true fixture ofJapanese subculture.

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Appendix 3
1. Write the headline of this article here:
2. In two words, what is this article about?
3. Write the sub-headline here:______________________________________________________― 116 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

Appendix 4
Fill in the gaps in the paragraphs with the proper word. Choose from the words below. Each word
is used only once.
Costumetelevision

anime
1

More

culturemagazines

and more young Japanese fans these days arefavorite characters from

(Japanese cartoons) and video games.

held regularly, and have even begun to be featured onanddressing

up like their
parties are, as well as in major newspapers. The practice known as “costume play” has gone from being looked at as justanother fan-inspired craze to an established trend in today’s Japanese youth― 117 ―.

愛知大学

言語と文化 No. 22

Appendix 5
Punctuate the following paragraph. You must add capitalize the first word ineach sentence, capitalize proper nouns, add comma’s and apostrophe’s
where necessary and add periods at the end of sentences.
2 Costume Players Themselves Become Stars
costume plays popularity began growing rapidly among young japanese some years ago at manga(comic book) sales conventions sponsored by underground manga artistsnot just limited toclothingcostume players apply makeupdye their hairand even wear colored contact lenses in aneffort to take on the likeness of their favorite charactersevery summer japan’s largest manga
convention is held for three days in Tokyo where anime and manga fans and costume players
gather from all over the country― 118 ―An Approach to Teaching a University Level Reading Course

Appendix 6
1. How many paragraphs are there in this article?
________________
2. What are more and more young Japanese fans doing these days (paragraph 1)?
_____________________________________________________
3. Where is Japan’s largest manga convention held (paragraph 2)?
_____________________________________________________
4. What have started cropping up all over Japan (paragraph 3)?
_____________________________________________________
5. How much can an entire outfit cost (paragraph 4)?
_____________________________________________________
6. In what foreign country are costume play contests held (paragraph 5)?
____________________________________― 119 ―