Tasks in Class : My 8th Discussion Forum

1. Are you a top-down reader? Or bottom-up reader?  When you read novels do you read top-down or bottom-up? What strategy do you use when you read new articles or 전공서적 (academic reference)

 I think my reading style is closer to bottom-up rather than top-down. It is because, recently, almost of my reading activities were for academic purposes which is more related to bottom-up skills for remembering the contents. Almost reading activities in high school, also required me to be bottom-up reader, because precise comprehension of each phrases or words took an important role in solving problems in KSAT (수능) Those experiences lead to kind of habit formation that made me become bottom-up reader.

  However, when I read novels, I usually become top-down reader because interesting contents make me read faster. But sometimes, I become bottom-up reader even in reading novels. There are a few parts that show grammatical complexity, or difficulty of comprehension. Those parts requires me to be bottom-up reader.

 On the other hand, when I read new articles, I become both top-down and bottom-up reader. First I read the new article fast with top-down skills for overview of texts and for distinguishing between important parts and relatively unimportant parts. And then I become bottom-up reader for comprehension of specific part that I think important.

2. What is ER (extensive reading)? How is it different from intentive reading which we have practiced in English classes in Korea?

 Extensive reading is reading as much as possible, for your own pleasure, at a difficulty level at which you can read smoothly and quickly without searching meanings of words or translating to Korean when you read. In other words, instead of spending long time decoding a tiny part of one book, you read many simpler books that are at or slightly below the level at which you read fluently.

  Then how it is different from intentive reading? We can find the differences by observing features of English classes in Korea. Reading materials selected regardless of students’ interests or reading level. And in many times, teachers let them read materials that is beyond their reading level. In this case, it doesn’t matter to search dictionary for unknown words. The length of text is also the difference. Only short texts are presented on the textbook because students can’t read the texts quickly due to the difficulty of it. But in extensive leading, long texts presented because students can read it rapidly with little difficulty.

3. How does technology assist ER? Give me one example.

 Selecting proper level of reading material having enormous significance in extensive reading. As I mentioned difficulty level is needed to be considered deliberately when you select proper texts for learners. Here, we can use concordancer for classifying texts into separated difficulty levels. If we have digital form of target texts, we can check its difficulty level through software like concordancer that can designate automatically divided levels for each materials. Then we can use appropriate material which fits well with each learner's reading level.