Estrategias lectoras en Inglés de Escuelas Técnicas

Abstract

The teaching of reading is one of the main skills to consider when teaching a foreign language at technical colleges or wherever working with academic texts is needed. The individuality of the reading process makes it more difficult to present a universal methodology; nevertheless, our desire to be useful to the practitioners leads us to the following scheme (Nuttall, 1985): a) Strategies dealing with reading speed: skimming, scanning, extensive and intensive reading, reading for studying, etc. b) Strategies dealing with extra-textual information in the texts: indexes, titles, headlines, pictures, diagrams, etc. c) Strategies to facilitate the understanding of the new words: active and passive vocabulary, identification of grammar categories, knowl-edge of morphology, use of the dictionary, inference, deduction and prediction, etc. d) Strategies referring to text comprehension: cohesion and coherence devices, rethorical structures, types of meaning and interrelation between them. Simultaneously, as in a workshop, exercises on that will be carried out. The texts will be on an intermediate level and deal with topics, although specific, of general interest. These ideas will be easily transferred to other reading lessons. Participants will be encouraged to discuss and enrich the session with their own ideas and experiences.