Activity for Teaching Reading and Vocabulary

TSL 3106 - Teaching Reading Skills And Vocabulary For The Primary Classroom

Activity for Teaching Reading and Vocabulary

Level

: Elementary Year 4

Theme

: World of Personal Relationship (Taking care of oneself)

Title

: The Perfect Fit

Time

: 8minutes

Focused Skills

: Reading (predicting, skimming)

Approach

: Word Attack Skills (using contextual clues and structural clues)

Materials

: Text and worksheets

Specific Aims

: - To train the students to make predictions and guesses with the meaning of unfamiliar words. : - To train the students to skim through the texts given.

Activity

: Classifying The Word 1) Teacher distributes the worksheet to the pupils. 2) Pupils need to skim the text to search out five verbs and five adjectives in the text. 3) Worksheets exchanged among the pupils and teacher discusses the answers.

TSL 3106 - Teaching Reading Skills And Vocabulary For The Primary Classroom

Worksheet:

Fill in the blanks with at least five verbs and five adjectives from the text given. An example is given as below:

NO.

VERB

ADJECTIVE

e.g.

makes

narrow

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Based on the task given, we had choose and adapted a text with the title of ‘The

TSL 3106 - Teaching Reading Skills And Vocabulary For The Primary Classroom

Perfect Fit’ as the text for elementary Year 4 students. We chose this text is because it is basically related to the students’ life with the theme: World of Knowledge. Students may use their background knowledge to proceed with this lesson. ‘The Perfect Fit’ is a text to help student choose their correct shoes, just to make sure they are comfortable while walking, running and others. Thus, in our opinion, this text is suitable to teach about their world of knowledge which is to find an appropriate shoe. We had adapted the text with the appropriate vocabularies according to the suggested word list of KBSR English Language Cucrriculum Specifications, such as both, before, changes, don’t, try and walk. The selected words will be use by students with high frequency and commonly. In fact, all the selected words can be used and recycled in different contexts and topics. In addition, we also added on some of the new vocabularies in order to make the activity run smoothly. In this activity, our aim to train the students with the word attack skills. By using this approach, indirectly we integrated the predicting skill and skimming skill. The aim why we used predicting skill is because we want to train the students to make predictions and guesses when they read the text. In our point of view, reading is an activity that involving constant guesses that are maybe later confirmed or rejected. This means, if the reader does not read the entire sentence in the same way, but relies on a number of words to get the idea of what kind of sentence, they will be lost and could not comprehend the idea of the text. In the other hand, why we choose this skill is because we want to train the students to skim through the text given. Through our viewpoint, we want them to read rapidly for the main points, take out the main point to get focus of the text. It is one way for them to get the quick clues in the any text when they are doing skimming. Therefore, predicting and skimming skill are suitable to be use while conducting the activity. As we all know, there are six basic strategies in the word attack approach: using configuration clues, using picture clues, using contextual clues, using dictionary, using structural clues and using phonemic clues. Word attack approach is implemented if the student has difficulties to read, or misread the words. It is the best way to help them recognize word and be able to read smoothly and also understands the meaning of

TSL 3106 - Teaching Reading Skills And Vocabulary For The Primary Classroom

words. In the selected text, we adapted it with the suitability of the student’s proficiency level. Students will using the contextual clues to guess the unfamiliar word’s meaning and to predict the possible message in the text. They may also use the structural clues to make their prediction. The knowledge of some common prefixes and suffixes, or even a comparative can help them make sense of unfamiliar words. For example, the words ‘comfort’ with added it prefix ‘dis’ as ‘discomfort’, the words ‘large’ and ‘larger’ are introduce in the text. Teachers need to guide the student and discuss with them after the prediction. In our opinion, it is important to have discussion because they can know whether they gave the correct prediction or not. If no, the teacher needs to play her role by shows the reason why their prediction is wrong. Vocabularies were introduced in this activity too. After the discussion of the unfamiliar words’ meaning, students need to complete the worksheet given with finding out at least five verbs and five adjectives in the text. Answers will be checked by exchanging the worksheet among the students. By this, students will feel more interestingly as playing the role of teacher, marking their friend’s worksheet. Besides, we also integrate reading skill with other skills such as speaking in our activity. At the very beginning of the activity, students required to read the text out and this enhance the speaking skill indirectly. Besides, during the discussion, students need to voice out his/her prediction of meaning of the unfamiliar words. In conclusion, we had chosen and adapt the text according to the suitability of the pupils. We also integrated the predicting and skimming skills together to make our activity going smoothly. Plus, new vocabulary will be introduced to enrich their word of English language. Through the suitability of adaptation of the text, the activity will run smoothly and efficiently.