Підготовка до читання у практиці викладання іноземної мови

Abstract

This article considers some types of pre-reading activities, which have successfully proven themselves in practical teaching of a foreign language; also, the effect of this preparation on the level of students’ reading comprehension is examined. Since the improvement of reading skills has a positive effect on other types of speech activity (listening, speaking, and writing), and due to the fact that a significant amount of educational material is in a text form, reading is one of the decisive factors for the success of students in learning a foreign language. The analysis of studies on this issue confirms the existence of two main approaches to teaching students to read in a foreign language (and both of them necessarily include pre-reading activities): in the first approach, pre-reading activities are mostly reduced to explaining unfamiliar words and complex grammatical structures to students, and in the second ‒ thanks to the relevant pre-reading activities, there is an interaction between the students’ existing knowledge and the new knowledge (from the proposed text) that they should master, resulting in the level of students’ reading comprehension increases. The peculiarity of this study is that it was conducted among the groups of Turkish students who studied a foreign language (English) in the program of pre-university training in a higher technical educational institution of Ukraine. The article highlights the traditions of teaching English in Turkey, the issue of its status in this country, and some national and cultural characteristics of Turkish students that should be taken into account by the Ukrainian teacher before starting teaching; it is emphasized that reading itself can become the lever with which the greatest effect can be achieved in this work. Among the types of pre-reading activities, such strategies as pre-questioning, pre-reading plan, KWL (know ‒ want to know ‒ have already learned), previewing, guessing, skimming, and scanning were analyzed. As the student survey showed (the total number of respondents was 30 people), all these actions were positively perceived by the Turkish students, while the vast majority of them felt that their speaking skills improved as a result of participating in the pre-reading activities.