View Content #26837

By Tera Reid-Olds, PhD Candidate and CASLS Intern

When it comes to assigning texts, the most difficult question to ask myself is, “how do I create points of entry for my learners into a (con)text that is unfamiliar?” It often feels like I am the matchmaker and I have ten minutes to set the stage for a positive first encounter between my learners and the reading material I’ve selected. I believe that a learner can form a positive, meaningful relationship with any text – regardless of the specific topic at hand – provided they are given the appropriate scaffolding and support. To quote one of our favorite adages as language teachers, “change the task, not the text.”

I don’t think we can overestimate the value of pre-reading tasks in which activating students’ preexisting schemata can set the tone for class discussion and engagement with the material. As per B. Tomlinson (2003), we can ask learners to visualize, reflect on a personal experience, roleplay, or respond to an image that resonates with the text to be introduced (p. 113). Learners can generate the most provocative responses to an image, a title, a single word before they ever open the book, newspaper, or social media webpage. Pre-reading tasks encourage learners to create their own entry points into texts and to make predictions, a strategy that helps them to intentionally focus their attention while reading.

One resource that I return to frequently when I contemplate pre-reading tasks is T. Bell’s approaches to teaching literature (2013, pp. 127-139). One of her suggestions is to bring in several editions of a literary work with distinct cover art designs. Students can analyze the interplay of visual and verbal before they read, and subsequently compare their initial hypotheses to the text. This pre-reading task is one of many that invites students to predict, to be curious, to investigate. What sets this task apart is the way in which it raises learner awareness of their own complex understanding of visual rhetoric. They can read the relationship between image and text, color and depth, and draw conclusions about marketing and translation and visual representations of literary themes. This activity can be applied to non-literary texts as well: for example, giving students a photograph from the front page of a newspaper, an advertisement, a magazine cover, a meme, or social media icon. In my experience, this activity empowers students to reflect on their own capacity for interpretation and analysis. I can’t think of a better state of mind for my learners to be in – intrigued, encouraged, confident – when they approach a new text.

References

Bell, T. (2013). Innovative approaches to teaching literature in the world language classroom, In S. Dhonau (Ed.), MultiTasks, MultiSkills, MultiConnections: Selected Papers from the 2013 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (127-139). Eau Claire, WI: Crown Prints.

Tomlinson, B. (2003). Developing principle frameworks for materials development. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing Materials for Language Teaching (pp. 107-129). London: Continuum.