CAPES 7 : Four Skills - Reading

Moving between spoken and written language is difficult ; the latter is not simply the former in black and white. When pupils start to work on reading, this will have effects - both positive and negative - on their oral skills. Writing the words of the language may both help the learner retain and assimilate new material and mislead him.

The French learner of English must overcome at least two specific difficulties - apart from the difficulties intrinsic to reading as a skill in itself, which should not be forgotten (many children who arrive in 6e have not mastered the written code of French).

1. The relationship between the written system and the spoken word is different in English from in French. This is true of spelling, of phrase construction and of discursive techniques (young English students are always astonished by the formal nature of the Dissertation, for example, when they come to study in France).
2. The relationship between the written word and the spoken word is not straightforward and predictable. You do not know, simply by looking at a word, how it should be pronounced. The same is also true to some extent of French, but not of a language like Spanish, or of Welsh.

So learning to read may - particularly at first - have negative effects on the spoken language. The written word interferes with the spoken - think of the word 'chocolate'.

How to evaluate reading comprehension ; an attempt through MCQs. Approaches to extensive reading. Integration of top-down and bottom-up processes in reading comprehension.

Reading with a Purpose: Communicative Reading Tasks for the Foreign Language Classroom

(If you have a question of a comment, write to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com)