reading comprehension through visualization and...

Running head: Reading comprehension trough reading strategies and visualization on short

stories

READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH VISUALIZATION AND READING

STRATEGIES ON SHORT STORIES

Henry Alexander Arias Rodríguez

Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas

School of Sciences and Education

Licenciatura en Educación Básica con Énfasis en Inglés

Bogotá

2018


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READING COMPREHENSION TROUGH READING STRATEGIES AND

VISUALIZATION ON SHORT STORIES

Henry Alexander Arias

A research proposal presented to fulfill the requirements to obtain the degree

LICENCIADO EN EDUCACIÓN BÁSICA CON ÉNFASIS EN INGLÉS

Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas

School of Sciences and Education

Licenciatura en Educación Básica con Énfasis en Inglés

Bogotá

2018


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DEDICATION

First of all, thanks to God, Ines, Sindy, Kaniel, Patricia, Nataly, Eliana and my family for all

the support and love. Thanks for being, for giving me the force of perseverance, responsibility

and determination; for all your efforts. From now I perform what I learnt in the classrooms of the

new generations.


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ABSTRACT

Reading in English without comprehension is an issue that has been studied during many

years. This fact makes difficult the learning process of EFL taking into account that reading is

one of the four skills necessaries for language learning. Teachers usually tend to develop reading

comprehension through decoding words from one language into another and comprehension of

the text is just achieved by the translation, losing too many ideas that are no explicit word by

word. Following this further, this action research aim to improve reading comprehension for

levels: literal, inferential and critical through visualization and reading strategies implemented in

the English classroom. The results were collected and analyzed through teachers` journals,

questionnaires and students` artifacts. The data revealed that literal, inferential and critical levels

of reading comprehension are improved with the implementation of these strategies.

Key words: Reading comprehension, Levels, EFL, reading strategies, visualization, improve,

literal, inferential and critical.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION .......................................................................................................................... iv

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... v

LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................... ix

CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................................... 1

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1

PROBLEM STATEMENT .................................................................................................... 3

JUSTIFICATION ................................................................................................................... 5

Research Question. ............................................................................................................. 6

General Objective. .............................................................................................................. 6

Specific Objectives. ............................................................................................................ 6

CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................................................... 7

LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................................................................................... 7

STATE-OF-ART .................................................................................................................... 7

READING .............................................................................................................................. 8

Reading Comprehension: Literal, inferential and critical levels: ..................................... 11

Reading Short Stories ....................................................................................................... 15

VISUALIZATION STRATEGIES ...................................................................................... 16


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TOP DOWN AND BOTTOM UP READING STRATEGIES ........................................... 17

CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................................................. 18

RESEARCH DESIGN ......................................................................................................... 18

Type of Study ................................................................................................................... 19

Type of Design ................................................................................................................. 19

Context and participants ................................................................................................... 19

Sampling. ......................................................................................................................... 21

DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENTS ............................................................................ 22

Teachers‟ Journals. ........................................................................................................... 22

Questionnaires. ................................................................................................................. 23

Students‟ Artifacts. ........................................................................................................... 24

VALIDITY, RELIABILITY AND ETHICS ....................................................................... 25

CHAPTER 4 ............................................................................................................................. 26

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN .............................................................................................. 26

Arising of the problem. .................................................................................................... 26

Understanding the language theory and visions. .............................................................. 27

Learning Theory and Vision. ........................................................................................... 29

Teaching Theory and vision. ............................................................................................ 31

An articulation between three theories and visions. ......................................................... 34


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METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................................... 35

Schedule. .......................................................................................................................... 36

Reading Approach ............................................................................................................ 40

Teaching question. ........................................................................................................... 41

General Objective. ............................................................................................................ 41

Stages of the Lessons and Evaluation Criteria. ................................................................ 41

CHAPTER 5 ............................................................................................................................. 43

DATA ANALYSIS .............................................................................................................. 43

CATEGORIES ..................................................................................................................... 44

Category 1: Acquiring literal comprehension of the text. ................................................ 44

Category 2: Attempting inferential comprehension of the story. ..................................... 44

Category 3: Assuming a critical position according with the main idea of the text. ....... 44

CHAPTER 6 ............................................................................................................................. 59

CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................. 59

Pedagogical Implications and Further Research .............................................................. 60

Pedagogical Implications ................................................................................................. 61

LIMITATIONS .................................................................................................................... 62

REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 62

APENDIXCES ......................................................................................................................... 66


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Appendix A ......................................................................................................................... 66

Consent Form ....................................................................................................................... 66

Appendix B .......................................................................................................................... 69

Teacher journal format ......................................................................................................... 69

Appendix C.1 ....................................................................................................................... 70

Questionaries .................................................................................................................... 70

Appendix C.2 ....................................................................................................................... 71

Appendix D.1 Artifacts ....................................................................................................... 72

Artifacts D.2 ......................................................................................................................... 73

Artifacts D.3 ......................................................................................................................... 74

Appendix E lesson plan ........................................................................................................ 75

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 …………………………………………………………………………………….45

Table 2 …………………………………………………………………………………….47

Table 3 …………………………………………………………………………………….58

Table 4 …………………………………………………………………………………….58

Table 5 …………………………………………………………………………………….59

Table 6 …………………………………………………………………………………….59

Table 7 …………………………………………………………………………………….60


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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The following paper is directed to an academic community and it describes an action research

carried out to find out the impact of reading strategies involving visual strategies to approach

students‟ reading comprehension skills. Thus, it looks into students‟ reading comprehension

levels reflected on their responses while being exposed to different reading comprehension

activities.

This study is realized in a public school in Bogotá Colombia in the downtown of the city. It is

focused on fifth graders and the lack of reading comprehension that was evidenced in the

practicums in this school. The practicums in the school were of one scholar year. In this time

were collected the necessary data to identify the problem, and to create this project.

The study of English in public schools in Bogota often seemed to be lacking in terms of

reading comprehension skill levels, as it has been evidenced in our personal experiences with

primary students during our practicums. We observed and were aware of this particular situation

because the majority of texts students worked with were students‟ text- books, solely focused on

grammatical explanations and vocabulary. It was necessary to come up with strategies in which

students developed not only their grammatical and vocabulary skills but also reading habits in

other kind of texts and printed materials1.

Acknowledging this problematic situation, we decided to propose a project for primary

graders, based on reading comprehension deeply delighted by the interaction and implementation

1Fundalectura, Ministerio de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación, DANE, CERLALC, Cámara Colombiana del

Libro, Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Turismo (2006) Hábitos de lectura asistencia a bibliotecas y consumo de libros

en Bogotá.


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of reading with visualization strategies. In other words, it is to approach students to interpretation

and comprehension of readings through different visual strategies as means of imagery

motivational, so students could reflect their understanding in terms of their responses throughout

the activities presented, such as drawings or short sentences/paragraphs evidencing what they

comprehend from the proposed readings.

In our personal experience, we have discovered that relating reading into meaningful activities

has helped us to achieve the language easier as well as the meaning of the texts we worked in

than just developing standard exercises or activities. Thereupon we thought in a series of

exercises and activities based on reading linked with visualization strategies which can be

evaluated by using students‟ artifacts.

The project‟s body provides us with the necessary tools to construct our wonderings and to

answer a research question with the appropriate material to consider the viability of the

articulation and implementation of reading strategies with interpretative competence in reading

comprehension. To use short stories,reading and visualization strategies as the main core of

reading texts; starting with the problem statement we seek to clarify the validity of our main

inquiry. Continuing by the proposal of the research guideline built up upon our wanderings

alongside with its respective objectives. Following this, there is a chapter which includes all the

literature support that strengthens our project, and in the same line a research and instructional

design were planned and applied including their respective pedagogical implementation,

furthermore we collected information based on the three main aspects (which form the core of

our project): Reading comprehension, reading strategies and visualization. This was done

with the purpose of gathering data in order for us to analyze it and be able to provide an answer


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to our main research question. Lastly findings are described including the implications of the

project carried out and its limitations for further and possible investigation.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Our main question aroused from our inquires on the work observed during the practicum, as

mentioned earlier, but more specifically performed in fifth grades on English classes in which

students were asked several times to follow a reading with not sight of comprehension of it.

Accordingly to this phenomenon, we realized that literacy sometimes was developed on

decoding words from one language into another, and, on the other hand, comprehension of the

text was just achieved by the translation of it to students‟ first language, forgetting the

importance of understanding the text from its context, framing the knowledge into a series of

process that students could not get through, because of their lack of grammatical structures and

vocabulary (semantics).

These observations made us reflect in the inconsistence of the curriculum in the classroom, so

we started to think about possible solutions to help students to enhance their reading

comprehension skills in English as a foreign language. The challenge lied on the questions: “how

to make students get interested in reading?” and specially, “what kind of activities and texts

could lead them to achieve better comprehension skills?”

We had to think carefully on the possible solutions to answer these questions, that is why we

thought in reading strategies which include visualization strategies alongside as the main bridge

to approach students to interpretative competences in reading comprehension. Visualization


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strategies, comprised as student‟s artifacts, could be applied in the classroom as a useful and

meaningful tool to evaluate students‟ interpretation of a text with many different activities;

according to Whitener-Lepardo and Harroff (2002). Thus, we realized that the core of our project

had to lie upon this premise and start to work with students from this point. The next step we had

to take was to identify the characteristics perceived by the students on reading and literacy to

understand their attitude towards it.

Firstly we take into account the observations done during the practicum performed in primary

and secondary in which students did not comprehend the complete texts and it was necessary to

switch codes to help them understand the proposed readings. Then during the last experience in

the teaching field we decided to apply the project proposed in this paper; and to begin with, the

lack of reading skills in students was perceived and demonstrated by the implementation of a

reading test, in which an extract from the text, “The cat in the hat” by Dr, Seuss (1957) (See

Appendix 1), brings up the misunderstanding from students when it comes to comprehend texts

and to follow paths and characteristics that permits to achieve the goal of interpretative reading

and comprehension skills.

Starting from the last point, we, as researcher teachers, must deal with the problem of how to

approach students to the exiting experience of reading leading our interest in enhancing students

to this practice. Moreover, we had to deal as well with the problem of knowing if students felt

any interest on the reading process, so we are going to apply a reading test at the end of our

practice (See appendix 2) in which students interest in the topic is going to be analysed and

related to the reading a visualization strategies implemented to approach and achieve a better


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interpretation or comprehension of the text. From this point the research question raised, being

the following:

JUSTIFICATION

A project based on visualization and reading comprehension strategies involving students

imagery represented on artifacts as a way to demonstrate understandings is for us a growth

experience in our professional field as language teachers. It provides us with the opportunity to

enhance the importance of reading in the classroom with the other disciplines or skills,

articulating the implementation of visualization strategies when reading to motivate students

imagery in English language learning process and reading comprehension; furthermore, in a

wide context our project might be a useful tool for those teachers who want to break with the

traditional ways to impart the subject.

Moreover, we intend to contribute with several strategies in which the classes are centered in

students and their autonomous development of the language through visualization strategies.

This is not focused just on visual aspects as its name suggests but in all kind of visual and

imagery products, such as drawings, writing, and inventing.

The research purpose of our project includes three different aspects as it is difficult to choose

just a single one being all of them relevant and important for us. The first aspect is related to

personal motivation (personal purpose) since, as stated earlier, this is a complete growth

experience for us. The fact of being able to participate and contribute in students learning process

and more importantly to generate in them a desire to read not out of obligation but for their own


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will and motivation, and evidencing that they are able to comprehend what they are reading

properly it is a really inspiring and fulfilling motive.

The second aspect deals with a practical purpose, as either way, both of us, as students and us

as teachers are trying to achieve a goal in a wide context, which would be to improve students

reading comprehension skills, contributing both with their development as students and ours as

better teachers; and lastly, the third aspect, which is more like a researchable purpose, focused

and bound to the fact of discovering, understanding and learning from every single aspect

occurring when performing our project. Yet if it is needed, considering our topic of interest, it is

possible to outline it within the particular research purpose of developing casual explanations,

keeping in mind our research question which seeks to know visualisation strategies evidenced

trough EFL students´ imagery reflect their comprehension and understandings in reading skills

Research Question.

How is fifth graders‟ reading comprehension enhanced when using visualization, top down,

and bottom up reading strategies in EFL?

General Objective.

To explain the effects generated when involving students in visualization and reading

strategies to contribute to reading comprehension skills.

Specific Objectives.

1. To explore the articulation between visualization and reading strategies to enhance

reading comprehension habits.

2. To describe EFL students‟ reading comprehension levels in activities focused on reading.


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3. To characterize students‟ reading comprehension levels.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Since the main purpose of this research project is to increase students interpretative

competence in reading comprehension trough three different reading strategies (visualization

strategy, top down and bottom up strategies) focused on short stories, mainly fantasy stories and

fairy tales, we collected a series of data to present the main concepts to be exposed in this work.

We explain here the process of reading, reading comprehension as an interpretative competence,

imagery, visualization strategies and fairy tales in order to give the reader the concepts that were

used in this project.

STATE-OF-ART

One of the first steps to frame this theoretical support is to present former projects submitted

in the Bachelor in English at Universidad Distrital to contribute with the present work. Lina

Maria Molina and Johana Trujillo proposed in 2008 a project work entitled: Visualization Inside

the Reading Process in an EFL Classroom. This project aroused from the observation and

interview done in a state school in which a lack of reading skills was appreciated. The

researchers saw that students, in this case primary level, were taught only vocabulary in

isolation, so they decided to work and focus on visualization, strategies and reading to help

students improve their reading comprehension process. These researchers could prove that

visualization strategy was a useful tool for students who started to apply it not only in the

English subject but in the other ones. At the same time they could identify through the data


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analysis that the use of visualization allowed students to be more opened in terms of reading and

built an articulation between image and meaning.

Other project presented was the one by Maira Patricia Rodriguez and Daniel Alejandro

Valderrama in 2008, entitled: From the Written Word to the Mental Image: A Study About

Students’ Reading Comprehension Through the Visualization Strategy. This project aroused

from researchers desire to share the reading process with their students comprehending this

process as a useful source of knowledge, information and entertainment in the language learning

process. They focused their project on the implementation of visualization strategy aiming

folktales. In their findings they identify that implementing visualization strategies to reading

comprehension allowed students to be imaginative, letting them enhance their reading skills. On

the other hand, they realize and identify that visualization allowed students to have a better

memorization of the language when relating what they read to their own process, at the same

time, students were aware of their own reading process improvement. They conclude that

visualization increased students‟ imagination to enhance reading skills, motivating them in the

process of language learning process.

READING

Since reading is an important gateway to personal development, and to social, economic and

civic life (Holden, 2004). It allows us to learn “about other people, about history and social

studies, the language arts, science, mathematics, and the other content subjects that must be

mastered in school” (Lyon, 1997). Hence, reading becomes into a tool to acquire and understand

all the things that surround them, creating a most, kind of comfortable and complete path of

knowledge.


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Literature supported a variety of elements that had affected reading achievement. Many of

these elements could be controlled or manipulated by the classroom teacher to help a student

achieve literacy success, these elements include: connections, assessments, motivation, teacher

relationships, and highly qualified educators; or even the students by their own could make a

strong pattern bound to their future achievements, in this case the literacy ones, which will turn

into their basis of understanding and interpretation.

Regarding recent research studies we went through considerable studies which had been

conducted during the last years in Colombia and mainly abroad. Major research themes

contained such concerns as reading strategies, strategy instruction and visualization strategy.

There are significant findings in this field by researchers such as Alfassi (2004), Dart (2001).

Now we are going to try to summarize all this aspects to create an atmosphere in which the

themes are going to be developed in an organized way following a line.

Firstly, it is pretty important to understand and to be conscious of what reading is, and which

are the elements involved within reading, according to Sloat, Beswick, and Willms (2007),

reading is a complex process with a wide range of philosophies and curricula on how to teach it.

Reading is also one of the receptive skills of language, in another words as Goodman (1982)

defined: reading is a receptive psycholinguistic process in which language in its graphic form is

the starting point; because then, it is the reader who brings to the text his/her knowledge of the

language, but as soon as he/she reads, there is something in the middle, there is an interaction

between written language and thought process such that reader moves from a language encoding

of meaning to meaning itself, and that is how reading is not merely the process of decoding


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words as everybody may notice; it goes deeper to an interaction between the reader and the text

itself, reading cannot be limited to the fact of “decoding over lines”.

From this perspective, we can infer that reading implies more than passing the eyes over the

lines. The reader has a more active and complex role. He/she is expected to have a reaction

towards a written text, to understand it as a piece of communication, so that‟s why reader cannot

stay or keep a passive role in front of a text. So, it is in here where Communicative skills takes

place, because teacher in first place takes the book and receive the message from it, and then

became the speaker passing the message to the receptor, in this case the student. When reading

the reader has a purpose, which is the constant attempt to understand the writer‟s communicative

intention (Wallace, 1992). In this way, we can notice a meaningful interaction between the writer

and the reader.

Williams (1994) defines reading as a process to obtain meaning from written text. That

construction of meaning is not only related to the text itself, but also to the individual perspective

and condition of the reader. Freire and Macedo (1987) explain better this idea when they affirm

that reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word of language; rather, it is

preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Thus, language and reality are

dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies

perceiving the relationship between text and context, being the text a bridge to get the message

across, making this a perfect example of what we were referring to before. The role of the

teacher in the classroom when teaching reading is to give the students the tools and strategies to

understand and analyze the text, to elaborate a comprehensive reading but taking into account the

importance of enjoy as well the reading itself.


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Reading Comprehension: Literal, inferential and critical levels:

Till the 60's majority of the research projects about reading comprehension were based on the

premise in which comprehension of the written language was the direct result of decoding, of the

visual recognition of words and of the comprehension of spoken languages; this perspectives

assumed that if students were capable to "read" the words, the comprehension will come after, in

an automatic way. This focus such as reductionist of the reading comprehension process led us

into two difficult situations: the first one in which: reading was seen merely as decoding in front

of reading as comprehension, and two, it also planted an order of teaching: first you learn to

decode and then you learn to understand, so that student could learn through reading: Hopefully

the decade of the 70's set its eyes on this problem, and its then when the meaning of the text

takes a real importance, pointing out that what the reader remember is not always determined for

the own lecture materials but for the context too, the cognitive structure of the reader and his/her

previous experiences, establishing the idea of an interaction between the text and the reader.

Many of the researchers supported the explicit teaching of reading skills. One research

group reported that teaching specific skills, in this case word recognition skills, quickly

improved students‟ reading comprehension (Torppa et al., 2007). One strategy to help emergent

readers with story recall is to connect dramatic play to stories and have students act out their

favourite books (Berk &Winsler, 1995; Rowe, 1998; as cited in Novick, 1999-2000).

Bearing in mind the previous ideas, it is possible to recognize reading as a complex process

where meaning from a text emerges because of the interaction of the reader and the writer. The

reader based on his knowledge interprets the message that the author is giving. Reader's reaction


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towards the text is an expected result in which comprehension is involved for the successful

fulfilment of the reading purpose, this reminds us a concept which is implicitly involved in any

reading activity: reading comprehension. In that sense, reading comprehensively needs the

development of linguistics, sociology and many other science in which the reader must apply the

theory of pragmatics, wherein the context of the text must be done to understand the message,

know the intention of the writer, how, when and where that message takes place, and its

importance in the reader. In other word read comprehensively is to perform a pragmatic

competence.

According to Vand Den Broek in Zuñiga (2001), comprehension is to predict what comes

next, to ask questions about what has been read, to remember experiences related to the text, to

make mental representations of the text. Similarly reading comprehension is the ability to

understand and retain the details, sequence and meaning from the written material; this implies

that for comprehension to take place any strategy is used by the reader. Learning to decode the

language as well as learning to use a strategy is part of learning to read in the specific case of

education the student is the subject of the process of learning to read as an act of knowing and

creating.

The student could be evaluated taking into account the next levels of reading comprehension,

according to T/TAC W&M (2014) defines “Comprehension is a key component of this literacy

initiative; facility in literal, inferential, critical, and creative comprehension skills is critical to

reading success and academic achievement in all content areas”, where literal, inferential and

critical are the main levels of comprehension in reading.


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Pearson and Duke (2002) argue “Comprehension improves when teachers provide explicit

instruction in the use of comprehension strategies. Comprehension improves when teachers

implement activities that support the understanding of the text that students will read in their

classes” (p. 247). Explicit instructions and implement activities are important to achieve a

comprehension of a text. The kinds of levels of reading comprehension to analyze in this

research are literal, inferential and critical.

Literal level:

This level involves what the author is actually saying in the text. The reader demonstrates the

comprehension of the ideas and specific information written in the text or story. This ideas could

be organized in categories where is reflected some facts, details, summaries or explicit moments

and actions in the text. The reader also locates information; identify the conclusion of the text

and the different patterns inside it. Some questions could be as follows:

What words state the main idea?

How does the author summarize?

Outlining the first idea of the story.

What happened at the beginning and last?

How are they different in the text?

Inferential level:


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It means what the author means by what is said. It is when the reader read between the lines

of the text and start to do some theories or inferences about actions in the text that are no directly

written on it. These kinds of inferences could be made following the main idea of the text by

drawing some conclusions, predicting some actions, etc. Some of the next questions can be used

for this purpose:

What does the author value on the story?

What is the theme of the text?

What effect does this character/event have?

How do you think this story will end (predicting)?

Critical level:

It is related to why the author says what she or he says. This is a level of comprehension more

complex than the others because the reader uses his or her experience to create a personal

criterion of the text with the purpose of evaluate the importance of the quality, text values and

generalizations. In this level the reader interact intellectually with the text. The next questions

could help to achieve this level:

Could this action possibly happen?

Is this argument in the text logical?

What alternatives are there in the story?

Do you agree with the author?

Does this problem have a solution?

In a conclusion, literal, inferential and critical levels are three different stages inside


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reading comprehension. These could evidence if the reader is a strong reader or a weak reader.

But all of the levels have an important point of comprehension that if they are good developed in

classroom, the comprehension of a text will be successfully. EFL may be evaluated according

with these levels. To identify the students reading comprehension levels.

Reading Short Stories

There has been a recent surge in the popularity of youth fantasy books (Center, 2001). Based

on this affirmation, this study is focused on reading comprehension with teenagers. Nowadays

fantasy literature has emerged and they are the most attracting books to engage students to read,

because, they, teenagers, adults, young-adults, escape from their reality into a world, in which

they can identify themselves with any character and also find out the plot and learn indirectly

many aspects, of folklore, fairy tales, mythology, legends, etc.

This linked to reading comprehension make students improve and develop their interpretative

competence, understanding the writer intention and giving themselves their own conclusion, and

understanding as readers, they go beyond the text, to understand the reality of the book that is

unreal in our world, defining fantastic places, relating them to creatures and characters to follow

the line of the story.

Thomas (2003) gives us two main reasons because fantasy literature is acknowledged in the

classroom, the first one because students like it and the second because it is a metaphor of the

human condition. That is the purpose of relating reading comprehension with fantasy literature,

more specifically with fairy tales, and overlook of the story and analysed with the reality and the

most important, that students feel comfortable with the text they are fighting with, learning form,


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and enjoying. It is a matter of motivating students to go through a book in which they are going

to feel confident than going through books which they really do not want and are interested.

VISUALIZATION STRATEGIES

Teaching has to deal with the question: How should I teach this or that? As we know there are

many teaching and learning styles which should be linked to create a harmonious environment of

learning-teaching classroom. The complex of this topic is the variation of learning styles in the

classroom and how it must be arranged to keep every student motivated and interested on the

class and try to guide their processes based on their styles.

Visual and verbal literacy or learning styles are the most common inside the classroom,

how the students need to express themselves with writing and art (Whitener-Lepardo and

Harroff, 2002), being writing the verbal and art the visual. Nowadays societies are becoming

more visual, in all different contexts, that means that as teachers, visual strategies might be

developed and improved to apply in our classrooms, and that they will provide us rich materials

and strategies to implement with our students linking the two learning styles. Sometimes students

perceive reading as a passive action, which is highly reinforced by the new technologies in which

students and people in general receive all the images, actions and sounds in a vivid form, in any

case, visualization strategies engage students to become active readers, to immerse themselves in

the reading process creating and expressing the way they interpret the printed words in such

diverse ways.

As teachers is our duty to give students all they need to develop critical thinking,

comprehension, analysis of the world they are in, and developing their different learning styles is


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one way to motivate them, a role play, a drawing or a sentence for example in which they

represent a current event in our society with the text topic is a way to evaluate their

comprehension, their analysis and creativity.

TOP DOWN AND BOTTOM UP READING STRATEGIES

Led by Goodman‟s (1979) work, the distinction between bottom-up and top-down processing

became a cornerstone of reading methodology, while in bottom-up processing readers recognise

multiple linguistic signs, and use their processing mechanisms to give an order to this signals, as

it will be described furthermore; on top-down processing or conceptually driven we draw on our

own intelligence and experience to understand a text.

Initially it was easier to imply that through bottom up methodology teaching reading could be

performed wonderfully by teaching symbols: grapheme-phoneme, correspondence syllables, and

lexical recognition first, and then comprehension would raise from the sum of the parts, yet it

was discovered later on that by joining top-down and bottom-up processing creating an

interactive reading was a primary element to teach reading successfully, “in practice, a reader

continually shifts from one focus to another, now adopting a top-down approach to predict

probable meaning, then moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what

the writer says”Goodman, K. (1982)

The purpose of applying such strategies was to lead students‟ achievement of the following

reading skills:

Recognizing the script of a language.

Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items.


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Understanding conceptual meaning.

Understanding the communicative values of sentences and utterances.

Understanding relations within the sentence.

Interpreting text by going outside it.

Extracting salient points to summarize.

Skimming.

Scanning.

CHAPTER 3

RESEARCH DESIGN

The following chapter comprises the guidelines on the research proposal, recalling the

research question and objectives to be able to convey the viability of our purpose, alongside with

its type of study. Likewise, it also provides a view of the context and setting in which the project

was carried out, and lastly but not less important a brief description of the sampling process and

the data collection methods used and processes followed.

The core of our project is students‟ achievement of reading comprehension skills through

visual strategies and bottom up and top down reading strategies, using as basis short stories from

literature. Thus it became necessary to apply a needs analysis to know the interest and

perceptions students have towards reading, as the kind of literature and tentative activities we

wanted to focus on.

When reading comprehension is brought in consideration, what we intent to highlight is the

importance of understanding the text and the meaning that each student can give to it. Therefore,

the articulation between reading comprehension and visual strategies is brought up, because each


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student will be able to demonstrate their understandings of the proposed reading autonomously

and creatively meanwhile the language is learnt intrinsically.

Type of Study

Our project is a qualitative study. According to Larseu-Freeman (1993), “the prototypical

qualitative methodology is an ethnographic study in which the researchers do not set out to test

hypotheses, but rather to observe what is present with their focus, and consequently the data, free

to vary during the course of the observation”. What we intend is based on the exercises, to

analyze the development of the learning process of our students and see how this learning could

vary depending on the different activities based on the visual inputs immerse within reading

comprehension strategies.

Type of Design

This study will be an action research. According to Gregory (1998) and Kemmis and

McTaggart (1988), this kind of study is based on the teachers‟ desire of increasing his/her

understandings of the classroom teaching and learning to bring about change in the classroom

practices. This approach is really useful for our project because it allow us to solve the problem

that puzzles us through different data collecting resources to gather the information that would

lead to the solution of the question.

Context and participants

The present work was carried out at a public School in Bogota located in the downtown,

surrounded by multiple type of buildings, comprising a museum, some universities close by and

plenty business and commercial establishments. Therefore its location makes the school


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accessible to many places of the city, though as usual, most of their students come from the most

nearby neighborhoods in which their socio economic status includes levels 1, 2 and 3.

Likewise, classroom and population in which this project was developed was a complete class

of fifth graders, from the morning schedule, a group conformed by students in a range of age

between 10 and 12 years old. The group is formed by 32 students from which most of the half

are women. The majority of the students are teenagers who grew up in a working class family

and few of them were led by a single mother, while most of them grew up with both parents in

an environment that lacked of English skills as their main focus subjects could vary being none

of those English. One of the most important characteristics of this group was its high desire to

work with images, short stories, thus with reading.

Even when school was relatively small to comprise full high school students population,

alongside with fifth graders due to the fact that the school was implementing educational stages

in which fifth graders needed to be alongside with secondary sixth graders to continue their

educational process, students classroom was large enough for students to be engaged on a class

and participate comfortably. The classroom itself was divided in 5 rows with 7 desks each.

Therefore there were always at least 3 spots available or more if students did not attend. (See

appendix A consent form).

Research Question.

How is fifth graders‟ reading comprehension enhanced when using visualization, top down,

and bottom up reading strategies in EFL?

General Objective.


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To explain the effects generated when involving students in visualization and reading

strategies to contribute to reading comprehension skills.

Specific Objectives.

1. To explore the articulation between visualization and reading strategies to enhance

reading comprehension habits.

2. To describe EFL students‟ reading comprehension levels in activities focused on

reading.

3. To characterize students reading comprehension levels.

Sampling.

From the group, eight students were selected as participants to carry out this research project,

using purposive random sampling as it is perhaps one of the most well-known of all sampling

strategies. Aa simple random sample is one in which each unit in the accessible population has

an equal chance of being included in the sample, and the probability of a unit being selected is

not affected by the selection of other units from the accessible population (i.e.,the selections are

made independently), while: “The logic and power of purposeful sampling lie in selecting

information-rich cases for study in depth. Information-rich cases are those from which one can

learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the inquiry, thus the term

purposeful sampling. Studying information-rich cases yields insights and in-depth understanding

rather than empirical generalizations”(Patton, 2002, p. 230).

If a researcher is interested in drawing a random sample, then she or he typically wants the

sample to be representative of the population on some characteristic of interest (e.g.,


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achievement scores). Purposive random sampling involves taking a random sample of a small

number of units from a much larger target population (Kemper et al., 2003).

DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENTS

In this qualitative research, according to the mentioned objectives, we decided to use three

different instruments to collect data that lead us observe the impact of reading strategies and

visualization strategies in the final students´ products or artifacts, and how those strategies can

help to develop student reading comprehension skills. This collected data is meaningful to

identify different categories inside the teachers´ journals, students‟ answers and students´

artifacts, and to see the importance of these kinds of strategies in an EFL classroom.

Teachers’ Journals.

This instrument is a useful tool to gather information. Hubbart and Miller (1993) refer to

them as cooked notes because they include teacher‟s reflections and observation notes. The

application of this instrument let us analyze students‟ process upon the proposed activities,

allowing us to reflect on the results it had and the limitations presented.

At the same time, students kept a journal in which all the activities they performed were

attached as well as a self-reflection of their own process and the activity. For this purpose, we

implement a format of teacher journals, where we included relevant information of each class:

date, context, teacher reflection, action and a research interest. The mentioned format is attached

in the appendices part (appendix B). Teacher journals had a purpose in our collecting students‟

data; we collected data about the development of reading comprehension trough reading and


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visualization strategies in EFL class on the fifth graders. The steps to collect the data for the

teacher journals were to apply the teacher journal in each English class during the practicums in

order to get data about students‟ attitudes, behaviors and the development of reading

comprehension according with the strategies used in classroom. These last facts were the main

units of data analysis in our action research.

Questionnaires.

This instrument is one of the most useful because it allows gathering information relatively

quickly focusing on different aspects. Basically this instrument allowed us to determine

effectiveness of our reading and visualization strategies in students‟ process in terms of reading

comprehension. According to Oppenheim, a questionnaire is an important research instrument

for data collection. Also it has its main function as measurement (Oppenheim, 1992). This

instrument may be used to generate qualitative and exploratory data (Dornyei, 2007). For this

instrument, we create a questionnaire for each short story seen in the classroom, where we

included relevant questions about a short story according to the reading comprehension levels

(literal, inferential and critical). The formats of the questionnaires are attached in the appendices

(appendix C). Questionnaires were applied once a month, after to implement the reading and

visualization strategies in classroom about a short story. The stories were changed for others

monthly. We collected data of eight students chosen randomly, analyzing the students answers

according with the three levels of reading comprehension and their progress. These data was the

main unit to analyze in our research.


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Students’ Artifacts.

This instrument allowed us to analyze students‟ performance in the class, taking copies of

their work as a support of the activities done in the classroom, as well as, to note categories in

students‟ work (Hubbart and Miller, 1993). Artifacts are samples of real life that students create

during a lesson (Falk and Blumenreich, 2005). For this reason, students produced some artifacts

according to the short stories presented in class by using a reading and visualization strategy,

after; those artifacts were collected by the teacher in order to analyze students´ reading

comprehension. For this fact, we designed two similar formats about a story “the cat in the hat”.

The first format was implemented at the beginning of our practicums. This format contained

questions about the reading, but in difference with the questionnaires, this format has the three

levels of reading comprehension in the questions (literal, inferential and critical), another

difference with the questionnaires was an extra point where students drew drawings about the

text to evidence their understanding. The second format was implemented at the end of the

practicums. This format also contained questions and extra point about the reading. These

artifacts or formats were created with the purpose of obtain data of reading comprehension levels

at the beginning and at the end of the process of the implementation of reading and visualization

strategies. These mentioned formats are attached in the appendices. (Appendix D). These data

also is one of the main units to analyze in our action research.


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VALIDITY, RELIABILITY AND ETHICS

As part of our research project there were several aspects that needed to be considered prior to

submit the whole document. Such aspects rely on the premise of questioning the core of the

entire project, considering its validity, reliability and most importantly, bearing in mind the

study, as it is developed with specific participants from a public school. Therefore, the ethical

implications of carrying it out needed to be considered. In order to these ethical implications we

implemented a consent form, securing the information of the data was collected from fifth

graders for this action research. This consent form is attached in the appendices (appendix D).

According to grant such trustworthiness and credibility, we also present the Triangulation

process we did, as defined by Freeman (1998), “including multiple sources of information or

points of view on the phenomenon or question” (p. 98).

Likewise, since triangulation has different layers, by bringing up our study and objectives, we

decided to use triangulation at the level of data sources, kept in mind by having different sources

and ways to gather data. This triangulation contributed to create stability as we could compare all

gathered data and analyze whether they can corroborate each other (Burns, 2001, p. 163).

By means of the ethical implications, to be able to complete the project successfully, we

understood from the beginning the importance of guaranteeing all the participants their rights,

thus we referred to the school as Marauders‟ State School in order to protect school privacy, also

we changed the original names of the participants for pseudonyms. As we mentioned before we

chose 8 participants randomly, so the pseudonyms we used were participant 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8

to refer to the students of fifth grade.


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CHAPTER 4

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

The present chapter aims to describe the instructional design proposed and applied in a

State School in Bogota known as Marauders‟ State School. The chapter arises from the statement

of the problem, in which the main concerns of this monograph paper takes place, informing how

the problem emerged and how it was identified, then a path is delighted starting from the theories

and visions of language, learning and teaching followed and applied in the present paper and

how they articulate between each other to fulfil the methodology proposed to be followed,

leading to the pedagogical intervention including the implementation stages, teachable questions

and objectives, the instructional unit that highlights the methodology and assessment To achieve

a better understanding of the process to be followed, a description of the course, content and

criteria to evaluate and implement in the intervention will be presented, closing with a

chronogram of activities.

Arising of the problem.

As it is presented in the first chapter of this monograph work, reading is seen as an

important aspect in anyone‟s development, it is the bridge that leads to the achievement of new

knowledge and shapes and improves old one. The lack of reading skills in students is perceived

and demonstrated by the implementation of a reading test, in which an extract of a text, The cat

in the hat, by Dr, Seuss (1957) (See Appendix 1), brings up the misunderstanding of the students

to interpret texts and to follow paths and characteristics that permits to achieve the goal of

interpretative reading. Starting from this point we, as researcher teachers, must deal with the

problem of how to approach students to the great experience of reading, leading our interest in


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enhance students to this practice. Furthermore, we had to deal as well with the problem of

knowing if students felt any interest on the reading process, so we applied a reading survey (See

appendix 2) in which students‟ interest in the topic where analysed and related to a possible

strategy, we consider could work: reading strategies and visualization strategies to achieve a

better interpretation of the text.

Understanding the language theory and visions.

The role of a language teacher involves different aspects that determine the quality of

processes that he or she carries out inside the classroom, such as the way he or she interacts with

the students to simply present a topic or to respond in front of the classroom seeing language as a

social action, but moreover considering we are language teachers, it is necessary to understand

the role of the language itself in and out the classroom and the implications it has in the learners

and the teacher.

Language is an important aspect on human beings, because it is through it that we express

inner emotions and thoughts, and communicate with others expressing needs, allowing us to

make several connections that lead to the social construction of culture. Anyway language must

be seen not only as verbal production, but as well as nonverbal, such as body movements, arts

and reading, in that sense language is orally, visual and written, being its main purpose to

communicate complex thoughts.

Sociolinguistics approaches on the field of language learning deals with the assumption

of interaction; these approaches as Swain and Lapkin (as cited in Cardenas, 2008) describes that

language learning is a collaborative dialogue. In other words, that language learning does not

occur out the performance, but in it. The achievement of the input is accomplished by the use of


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the language with others, helping the learner to put in practice in social and meaningful context

the language, building an awareness of the different uses of the same that leads learning to occur.

Sociolinguistic theorists understand interaction as a co-construction of knowledge in the second

language between the interlocutors to organize their cognitive process as Lantolf (as cited in

Cardenas, 2008) describes.

One important aspect that is considered in the language theory exposed in the present

monograph paper is the importance on first language. As it is stated by Lantolf and Thorne,

(2006), “In SLA the use of the L1 as a mediating tool has been examined to explicate how L1

use allows learners to work at higher levels of understanding without the restrictions that the use

of only the L2 encompasses” (p 67 – 109)

Following the assumptions sociolinguistics approaches have in the language development

of learners, we consider the scaffolding, a term that refers to a higher level learner that enhances

another into communicative situations in which the last one would not be able to so without the

assistance of the first one (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006). Relating this last two aspects, the use of

the first language and scaffolding, permits an interaction between learners that makes the

learning process richer, giving them opportunities to cooperate with each other.

Bearing in mind previous approach guidelines, the vision of language suitable for it and

for our research project is the perspective of language as self-expression (Tudor, 2001). For

sociolinguistic approach, language is an important aspect on human beings, because it is through

it, that we express inner emotions and thoughts, and it is under those terms that language can be

seen as human self-expression (Tudor, I. 2001) as means of achieving pragmatic goals. For

example, reading specialized material and performing professional or academic tasks, but it


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cannot be limited to those aspects, because it is through language that we build up personal

relationships, expressing our emotions and aspirations.

Learning Theory and Vision.

The main role in and out the classroom is to give learners the appropriate instruments to

help them in the learning process, but what is learning? Klein (1991) defines learning as “an

experimental process resulting in a relatively permanent change of behavior that cannot be

explained by temporary states, maturation, or innate response tendencies” (p. 2). Upon this

definition, the author makes the distinction of three main components, being the following:

First, learning may produce a change in behavior; however, to achieve this change is

necessary that the learning process presents a motivational aspect, because these changes are not

immediately attained. The process of transforming learning into behavior is deeply mediated by

the motivation to make this learning go further. Second, a behavior adopted by learning is not

always maintained; these behaviors could be forgotten, stopped or being exhibited. Third, not all

the behaviors could be crossed by motivational aspects.

Usually these behaviors are temporally and disappear when the motivational aspect does as

well, Klein gives an example in which the motivational aspect is hungry and the behavior is

eating, but once the person is not hungry, the behavior is stopped. This last one distinction on

behavior change could be defined as a temporary state.

Now, before continuing going further with our teaching and learning theories, we would

like to highlight the importance of humanistic approaches that could be both applied as support

to our teaching focus and learning focus as well. In this sense, as we mentioned once, while

applying some initial behaviorism aspects, we can pull out from it that a child learns because he


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or she is inwardly driven, and derives his or her reward from the sense of achievement that

having learned something affords. This would differ from the behaviorist view that would expect

extrinsic rewards to be more effective. Extrinsic rewards are rewards from the outside world;

intrinsic rewards are rewards from within oneself, rather like a satisfaction of a need. This is

directly related with the humanistic approach, where education is really about creating a need

within the child or instilling within the child self-motivation. Behaviorism is about rewards from

others. Humanism is about rewarding yourself. On the other hand, humanist teacher´s role should

be considered as a facilitator, not a disseminator, of knowledge. Participatory and discovery

methods would be favored instead of traditional didacticism.

Now, to understand the humanistic approach better, we are going to begin saying that it is

based on the work of humanistic psychologists, most notably Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

and, in a more general sense, the term includes the work of other humanistic pedagogues, such

as Rudolf Steiner, and Maria Montessori. All of these approaches seek to engage the whole

person: The intellects, feeling life, social capacities, artistic and practical skills are all important

focuses for growth and development. Important objectives include developing children's self-

esteem, ability to set and achieve appropriate goals, and development toward full autonomy.

Humanistic approach involves some basic principles such as:

Value humanity as a self-actualizing process; value creativity.

Use science to discover the conditions that best lead to the above.

Individuals or groups should be self-motivated. Set their own goals.


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Students become self-responsible, make progress in self- actualization, flexible,

creative. Because they have autonomy.

All this creates a social system - (Values, knowledge, adaptive skills, concept of science) - all

these would continually change and grow.

The vision for learning consisted of enhancing humanistic approach with learning as

Habit formation (Tudor, 2001). Learning vision seen as a constructive role for habit formation

indicates habit-formation based learning can help learners develop more fluency and

communicative confidence by helping them to be able to use more predictable or high yield

language elements without conscious reflection or planning, contributing not only to humanistic

approach in which learners feel self-motivated to produce and construct knowledge, but also to

self-expression views of language.

Teaching Theory and vision.

The role of teachers in the classroom was essential because he or she was the mentor

helping students to get knowledge. An effective teaching lays decisions about teaching functions,

reflective practice, aspect of instructional decision making, reflection. From a constructivism

approach, individuals construct knowledge from an already known knowledge or prior

knowledge and applying it, he or she could be enhance to new situations (Burden and Byrd,

2010). In a constructivism classroom teachers looks for ways to approach students to the

understanding, in that sense, teachers must look for alternatives that permit students to refine or

revise these understandings proposing spaces in which students are asked to ask questions,

research, get new information and encouraging students to face new knowledge.


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The main principles highlighted by Burden and Byrd (2010) are:

Teachers seek and value their students‟ points of view

Classroom activities challenge students‟ suppositions

Teachers pose problems of emerging relevance

Teachers build lessons around primary concepts and “big” ideas

Teachers asses students‟ learning in the context of daily learning.

As we can observe in these principles, the role of the teacher is to keep students motivated

in the classroom providing them with meaningful context that permits them to achieve the new

knowledge, always keeping in mind students‟ needs. This teaching theory supports the ability of

students to accept challenges that leads to understanding knowledge giving them opportunities

to investigate, and at the same time, teacher must perform a reflective position to be aware of

what is useful and what is not in the classroom to find solutions and new alternatives to enhance

students in the process of learning, being these, students, the centre of the learning process.

Teachers must be aware of the following aspects in the classroom to construct their

teaching role (Burden and Byrd, 2010):

Planning and preparing

Demonstrate knowledge of content and pedagogy

Selecting instructional goals

Demonstrating knowledge of resources

Designing coherent instructions

Assessing students‟ learning.

The classroom environment


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Creating an environment of respect and rapport

Establishing a culture for learning

Managing students‟ behaviour

Instruction

Communicating clearly and accurately

Using questions and discussion techniques

Engaging students in learning

Providing feedback to students

Professional Responsibilities

Reflection on teaching

Contributing to the school and district

Showing professionalism

The teaching process in the classroom is a process that demands responsibility and

innovation, students‟ needs must be fulfilled and knowledge is presented in a challenging way to

let students reflect and develop learning strategies.

To introduce teaching vision let us bring up what constructivist approach suggests: From

a constructivist approach, individuals construct knowledge from a prior knowledge and apply it

in new learning situations. In a constructivism classroom the teacher look for ways to approach

students to the understanding; in that sense, teachers must look for alternatives that permit

students to refine or revise these understandings proposing spaces in which students are asked to

pose questions, research, get new information and face new knowledge.


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On the other hand reading approach was implemented hand by hand with this

constructivist approach as it is part of our methodology to include topics that had been worked

every lesson so they were not just familiar to students, but that students could use that prior

knowledge to understand the new one.

An articulation between three theories and visions.

After we have given a look to the language theory, learning theory and teaching theory, it

is necessary to find and understand how the three of them articulates and relates to overcome to

that process called education. An articulation between the three theories gave us sight of the

principles to be followed during our intervention. Taking into account the social and interactional

aspects of the learning and teaching process we were able to provide activities that allowed

students to use the language in a complete communicative way.

Language as it was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is the main bridge that

allows teaching and learning articulate their principles and goals into the educational field. In the

concrete case of language teaching it becomes an important aspect of it the role of learners, who

are the ones who are expected to manipulate the language, they were challenged to express their

emotions and thoughts on different readings, non-just verbally but artistically, becoming the

learning process in an experiential process in which they were faced to relate their reality to the

“reality” of imaginary worlds.

Throughout the we prepared, it was really comforting to notice students positive

reactions towards the methodologies we used implementing certain approaches. Initially as for

the language approach (sociolinguistic) considering what it suggests: seeing language as a very

important aspect on human beings but not only as verbal production but as well as nonverbal,


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such as body movements, arts and reading. In that sense language is oral, visual and written, and

it contributed to the development of our classes. When we used readings to teach English,

students expressed their needs interacting with the texts presented; in this term, sociolinguistic

approach described that language learning is a collaborative dialogue or that language learning

does not occur out of the performance, but inside. The achievement of the input is accomplished

by the use of the language with others, helping the learner to put language into practice in social

and meaningful context permitting an awareness of the different uses of the same that leads

learning to occur, and that is what some reading activities offered to our students, as they needed

to be involved on the reading to be able to understand it and learn the language.

On the other hand, as for the learning and teaching approach (humanistic and constructivism,

respectively), as it can be evidenced in the lesson plan schedule (See Appendix E), we used as a

tool the new material presented, so students could use it, in the development of the class to

construct the meaning from the text (using also their prior knowledge) while through some

questionnaires a need to learn was created on the students, so they can do their best using all

necessary tools to be able to answer accordingly to what they were asked.

To conclude, it is important to highlight that these three theories were seen and articulated,

and that they were the main concern of our education process, anyway, furthermore these three

theories were applied into a deeper context, relating them with the visions named before.

METHODOLOGY

The main approach worked in this instructional design was the reading approach, which

lied upon two main aspects, being the most important reading strategies and the second one

visualisation strategy, to be able to support our research interest.


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Schedule.

Week /

Date

Reading Activity Evaluation

1st Week /

August 30th

The cat in the

hat

Diagnostic activity

Stories everywhere! Review

of topics seen the previous

semester (Present Simple,

Present Continuous)

First test

Questionary

Literal inferntial

and critical levels

Doubts

solving and

joining gaps in

the previous

topics

Students were encouraged to ask questions to reinforce their knowledge and to recall

prior given information, using what they knew

2nd

3rd

and 4th

Week /

September

6th

13th

and

20th

The tale of

the three

brothers J.K

Rowling

Share previous

knowledge/ideas of the

characters

Comparison between the

story and their background

Drawing and

descriptive

sentence about

the story


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knowledge

As part of a constructivist classroom teacher was a mediator, providing initially some

bases to students so they could understand the topic and story, and then bring up the tale

and the rules

5th

Week

/ September

27th

The Weeping

woman

Building the story, story will

be created in English as students

know it already in Spanish.

Alternative

fragments from

the tale will be

suggested by

students

Though story was familiar to students vocabulary on it was adequate with similar

vocabulary seen before using it as a tool, for students to understand the whole story in

terms of grammatical aspects

6th

and 8th

Week /

October 4th

and 18th

(vacations

week in the

middle)

Athena and

Medusa (Due to

missed class

same reading

took 3 lessons)

Storytelling (teacher)

Role play(students´ guessing

from the tale read)

Sharing

opinions about

the story, once it

is completely

explained

Both humanistic and constructivist approaches were highly influencing this lesson, as


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students were asked to share their opinions and communicate their new ideas, they were

requested to construct a new ending using existing information already given

9th Week

/ October

25th

Hallowe

en

(Celt

story)

Guessing about the origins of

Halloween

Fill in the gaps regular

activity

Making

Maracuya

“Pumpkins” of

Halloween, share

ideas from

Halloween

Humanistic approach and self-expression vision can be reflected when designing this

lesson, as students are interacting constantly with each other and they‟re expressing what

they learn physically (making the pumpkin)

10th

Week /

November

1st

Dracula

(folklore short

story)

Sharing opinions of creatures

from Dracula context and which

of them they would be

Matching icons with the

creature ex: silver and

werewolves, tombs and

vampires

Invent a

character from

your favorite

creature and

create a story for

it. (Vampire,

werewolf, hunter

etc

Prior knowledge will be used to engage meaningful descriptions to construct a new story


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11th

and

12th

Week /

November

8th

and 15th

The

Legend of

Thor

Nordic

Legend

Comic stream incomplete

students will give an end to the

comic. Comparing the comic

with the legend

Looking for

Norse gods and

goodness and

making up a tale

Input is given with the comic stream uncompleted so students can be self-motivated to

continue and learn presented theme

13th

Week /

November

22nd

Anastasia

Romanov

Russian

Tale

Talking about canonic

princesses and princes,

comparing them with

Anastasia‟s role

Spotting the mistake

Drawings

with their

descriptions of

Anastasia´s

role as princess

and canonic

princess

By this point habit formation should have influenced them so students understand easy

the class methodology and feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts

14th

Week /

November

29th

The cat in

the hat

Final test

Sharing their wishes

Organizing the pictures

depending on the correct order

Questionnaire

final test with

literal inferential

and critical

questions.


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40

of the tale

Students will

write the moral

of the tale and

will share their

opinion

As language is seen as a social action opinions will be shared, reinforcing prior topics

and doubts solving

Reading Approach

Considering reading as a main bridge to enhance meaning of different issues such as

social, political, economic, and cultural. We, as researcher teachers, decided to apply in the

classroom an approach that articulates the meaning construction of the written text but also,

looking to engage students into the reading process in a meaningful way.

Therefore, we searched for an approach that fulfil our research interest, which was the

reading approach, and it contained some characteristics that were applied in the reading process;

as part of our methodologies, using this approach, it was mandatory to consider the following

aspects:

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