Reading for Second Language Learners

It is a basic understanding that someone who can read has already mastered its awareness of phonemes. To be able to read a word, the reader must be able to identify the sound of each phoneme and understand the phonology that makes up a word. The word then must be comprehensible for the reader to make sense and interpret its meaning. Knowing the word will eventually make meaning according to how the reader understands or interprets its syntax. Depending on the reader's background, experience, vocabulary knowledge, and educational attainment, the reader decides on its explication.  

It is noted that a significant number of immigrants arriving in various nonnative countries and cultures are non literate in their native languages. (Brown, pp. 395) This is a major challenge in teaching L2 learners. Imagine all the issues that affect teaching when a teacher tries to do a Bottom-Up Processing approach with a Top-Down Processing Learning approach. The teacher will try to offer the most basic reading and listening approach as much as he/she can, while the learner is trying to understand the lesson using cultural, emotional, and experience based knowledge. Learners will definitely take its content schemata while the teacher ultimately hopes that as time, new culture, and new experiences set in, perhaps, a formal schemata will plummet. 

There are a lot of factors to consider in teaching reading to L2 learners.  Considering both content and vocabulary that is suitable to learners capability will help learners gain confidence in learning. Helping students build their own learning goals to motivate them to study will help encourage self-monitoring. As this happens, students will have the opportunity to reflect on their own individual learning goals. They can create their own learning strategy based on their prior knowledge or build a new learning habit that will help them succeed. As students continue to practise new acquired learning habits, they will eventually increase in fluency, automaticity and learn new vocabulary as they go. (13 Essential ELL Strategies to Support Students)

    

Second Language Learners reading materials should focus on the purpose of reading. It is more engaging and motivating if reading texts are something beneficial to the learners current situation and need. It is also important that they read texts at their current reading level. Learners are aware of their surroundings and they do reading most of the time anywhere they look: signs, billboards, building names, street names, text messages, emails, etc. They read consciously or unconsciously daily without thinking that they do practise reading. Learners may have different purposes of reading but they all have a main goal; to comprehend. As learners are presented with different texts, they will learn how to skim the text for main ideas, scan texts for specific information that they are looking for, mapping, guessing, analysing, and figure out information. (Brown, pp. 401-406)

As reading is practised and taught to L2 learners, it is essential to be mindful of the lesson’s purpose, the learners reading level, the comprehensibility of the text and the variations of reading materials for learning to transpire.