Tema 8.- La lengua extranjera escrita.- Aproximación, maduración y perfeccionamiento del proceso lecto-escritor.- La comprensión lectora: técnicas de comprensión global y específica de textos.- La comprensión escrita: de la interpretación a la producción de textos.

In order to master a language, we need to understand their native speakers and also to make ourselves understood. This involves being able both to encode (speaking and writing) and decode (listening and reading) oral and written messages. Therefore, in order to communicate effectively, communicative competence is essential.

Since the 1970’s, the belief that language is a means of communication has inspired a new approach in English teaching: the Communicative Approach. Due to its influence, nowadays language is taught and learnt in a very practical way in the classroom and now our students practise the four basic skills from a communicative point of view.

Based on this view, the present essay aims to study the process of learning to read and write in both first and FL. For this purpose, the topic will be divided into three main sections. In the first part, we will present the notion of the four basic skills of language, highlighting those related to written language. In the second part, we will analyse how reading and writing is learnt in the first language, examining reading and writing teaching methods, skills and stages. In the third part, we will deal with how to read and write in a FL. To do so, we will first study the reading skill, considering the main strategies and stages to achieve global and specific reading comprehension. Then, we will analyse the writing skill, centring the essay on the strategies and activities needed to go from a controlled practice stage to a free production stage.

We deal with an essential topic since successful communication depends on the mastery of the four linguistic skills. In addition, the FL Curriculum for Primary Education highlights the significance of this topic by including in its objectives, blocks of contents and assessment criteria the development of reading and writing with a communicative purpose.

FIRST

Let us start developing the first part of this topic by establishing a distinction between the four basic skills of language. In order to use a language effectively, we need to combine different abilities or skills. We can identify four major skills when using a language to communicate: listening, speaking, reading and writing. According to Jeremy Harmer, these major skills can be classified according to the medium and the activity of the speaker. Speaking and listening are said to relate to language expressed through the aural medium whereas reading and writing are said to relate to language expressed through the visual medium. If we classify these skills according to the activity of the participants, speaking and writing are said to be productive skills since they demand some kind of production on the part of the language user, whereas listening and reading are receptive skills, since the language user is receiving oral or written language. In this topic, I will concentrate

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on the skills that are part of the visual or written medium. To do so, I will start by addressing briefly what the main features of written language are:

1. It is static and permanent. 2. It favours careful organisation and complexity in sentence structure.3. Lack of visual contact between the writer and the reader means that participants

cannot rely on extralinguistic clues such as gestures to make their meaning clear. 4. Its unique features include pages, lines, capitalisation, spatial organisation and

several aspects of punctuation, which make it more difficult to learn than oral language.

5. Written language tends to be more formal than oral language. Learning to read and write is one of the most important and powerful achievements in life. Learning a FL is a natural process, very similar to learning a first language because learners generally proceed from listening and comprehending to speaking and eventually to reading and writing. According to the Communicative Approach, the four skills must be worked on at the same time, but not to the same extent. Reading and writing are abstract activities, and children are not mature enough to deal with abstract concepts. Therefore, they must be reached at the end of Primary Education and this is why LOMCE 8/2013, December 9th has kept this in mind and emphasizes oral skills over written skills in Primary Education.

SECOND

Next, we will develop the second part of this topic by analysing how learning to read and write is carried out in first language acquisition. When children arrive at school, they experience a different linguistic world. They must use more frequently language to express ideas and facts and they also have to learn new skills, that is, reading and writing. In what follows, we will focus on the development of these skills separately. To do so, we will begin analysing the different reading teaching methods in a first language. Let us examine them:

Firstly, phonic approaches are based on the principle of identifying the regular sound-letter relationships in a writing system and teaching the child to use these to construct or decode words. Secondly, whole-word or look-and-say approaches are based on the principle of recognising individual words as wholes, without breaking them into individual letters. Lastly, reading teaching methods that focus on sub-skills are based on teaching different kinds of skills and sub-skills. In recent years, this has been the most popular method.

After having established the different reading teaching methods, lets concentrate now on how students learn to write in their first language. To do so, it is essential to consider the four different stages involved in the learning to write process:

- Firstly, students go through a preparatory stage, when basic motor skills develop and the general principles of the spelling system are acquired.

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- Secondly, there is a consolidation stage, around the 7th year, when children begin to use the writing system to express what they can already say in speech. - Thirdly, there is a differentiation stage, around the 9th year, in which writing begins to diverge from speech and develop its own pattern and organization. - Finally, an integration phase takes place. This occurs when writers have a good command of language and they can vary their stylistic choices on purpose and develop a personal “voice”.

Moreover, learning to write involves different skills, which are motor, functional and linguistic. Motor skills, because the writer needs to distinguish sequences of letters, shapes, sizes, words, spaces, etc.; functional skills, because according to his purpose, the writer has to use the most appropriate writing style which can be expressive (feelings), transactional (logical statements) or poetic (imaginary experiences); and linguistic skills because the writer needs to develop the ability to use the structures of the language in an appropriate and mature way.

THIRD

Once reading and writing in the first language have been considered, we will focus on the third part of the topic, that is, how to read and write in a FL. For this purpose, we will study first the reading skill, considering the main strategies to develop global and specific reading comprehension as well as its stages and the activities intended to develop this skill.

Next, we will examine writing, and the strategies and activities needed to go from a controlled practice stage to a free production stage. Finally, we will address the main procedures of correction in written work.

Let us start with the reading skill. Reading can be defined as an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text, resulting in comprehension.

Reading must be introduced after students have some basic knowledge of the spoken language. There are two main approaches to teach reading in English:

1. Look and say (picture + word): Teachers often use ‘look and say’ as part of vocabulary teaching, so when children learn to say a new word, they learn to read it. The teacher can help children with whole word recognition by decorating the classroom with functional print: posters, words of songs, signs, labels, questions written in English...

2. Phonics: According to this approach, it’s advisable not to teach the names of the letters when starting to teach reading, as some of the letters of the English alphabet don’t match the sounds of the language. The teacher must teach the way in which letters sound, not the names of the letters.

Reading comprehension is a receptive skill and therefore shares common features with listening. The main common feature is that reading is an active process in which the meaning of graphs should be decoded so the student must develop some reading strategies. In other words, teachers can help their students to become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during and after reading. We can distinguish the following reading strategies: previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, guessing from context and paraphrasing.

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Previewing : reviewing the text to get a sense of the structure and content. Predicting : using previous knowledge to make predictions about content, the discourse, the writing style, etc. Skimming and scanning : Skimming consists of reading a text to get a general idea, while scanning consists of extracting specific information from the text while ignoring the rest. Guessing from context : Using the prior knowledge to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words. Paraphrasing : Stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information of the text.

These reading strategies should be used appropriately depending on the reading stage the student is at. Now, we will describe the main stages in reading activities, which are:

- Pre-reading stage may serve as preparation: assess students´ knowledge, give students the knowledge, clarify, make students aware of the type of the text and the purpose reading and motivate them. E.g. using the title, predict content, looking at pictures, skimming to find the main idea, brainstorming. The main aim during this stage is to develop the skill of predicting.

- In the while-reading stage, students check the comprehension as they read. The teacher gives the students points to search for: getting the general idea of the text or specific information. The first case is called extensive reading; the other is intensive reading. It may include suggesting a title, underlining the required information, answering questions and chart filling. The main aim during this stage is to develop the skills of skimming, scanning and inferring meaning from context.

- As for the post-reading stage, a follow-up work can be considered. The main aims are to internalize the language of the text and to integrate skills. Integrating skills promotes the learning of real content and is highly motivating for students.

According to Donn Byrne, in order to integrate the language skills in the classroom it is essential to use varied student groupings when designing integrated activities because they offer many opportunities for listening, speaking, reading and writing. Some activities in which skills are integrated are project work, role-play or dictations.

Once reading in a FL has been considered, we will focus on how to write in a FL.

Writing is more than the production of graphic symbols, as symbols have to be arranged according to certain conventions. It is the most difficult of the four skills because it demands a higher level of correction and it is different from oral language.

For a large part of the society, writing is not an everyday activity. However, teaching the writing skill in the English classroom is essential because it is a support for oral language, it increases the time of exposure to the FL and it is usually needed for testing.

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According to Matthews, we may distinguish five subskills related to writing: graphic skills, that is writing words correctly including aspects such as capitalization, punctuation and spelling; grammatical skills, the ability to use a variety of sentence patterns and constructions; stylistic skills, the ability to express precise meaning in a variety of styles and registers; rethorical skills ,the ability to use cohesion devices in order to link parts of a text; organisational skills, writing ideas with coherence and summarize relevant points.

Writing correctly in a language requires a lot of practice and is a slow ability to acquire. For that reason, in Primary Education it should be done in a guided way. The strategies that a student should learn are, among others, writing words and elementary linguistic forms correctly, writing appropriately according to the context and writing with coherence.

In the early stages of learning English, students will generally write very

little.Moreover, the youngest ones may be still coping with some features of the

writing process in their native language. Therefore, we must be especially sensitive to the different writing demands which we may find in our classroom and the different strategies of supporting their writing. It is highly recommendable that students will spend most time completing tightly controlled written exercises to practice their English, such as completing sentences, unscramble words/sentences, gap-filling or dictations. Like many teaching techniques that go out of fashion for a while, dictation is making a comeback, especially due to the revision undertaken by Paul Davis and Mariano Rinvolucri, who looked at the subject and found dynamic alternatives to the dictation of large chunks of uninteresting prose by a boring teacher. Sometimes students will also be encouraged to produce free writing, although they will need a lot of support.

Let us consider some of the stages at this level:

- Copying: students copy material provided by the teacher: texts, sentences, etc. Copying is of great pedagogical value because it helps students reinforce spelling or sentence structure and it also helps them to retain words. Some examples of copying may include listing, classifying words, etc.

- Practice:

It must begin as a guided copying at word-level: making a list, a personal dictionary, crosswords, matching labels to pictures, anagrams…

Then progress to sentence-level: writing speech bubbles for cartoons, sequencing sentences and copying, correcting mistakes…

Finally, if we want our students to write fluently, they will have to learn how to write paragraphs . This is commonly done by providing a model from which to work, e.g. our students see a text and then use it as a basis for their own work. Jeremy Harmer calls this exercise “parallel writing”.

- Production stage: Students will be encouraged to produce writing. At this level, this skill will demand sentence, text structure, organization of ideas…

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According to Jeremy Harmer, at this stage, we can distinguish six different types of communicative activities:

Relaying instructions: one group has information for the performance of a task and they have to get another group to perform the same task by giving them written instructions.

Exchanging letters: one student writes a letter to another one and then receives a reply.

Writing games: students can write descriptions of famous people or places. Then they have to read it aloud and the rest of the class has to guess it.

Fluency writing: they have to write a story about a series of pictures in a established period of time.

Story constructions: we give individual students partial information which they must put together with other students to write a coherent narration.

Writing reports and advertisements: we deliver to some students questionnaires, based on the students´ field of interest. They have to analyse the questionnaires and then write a report based on the results.

At this point, it is interesting to underline correction of written work.

When analysing or correcting children´s written work, it is very important to have a clear approach towards the correction of mistakes. Many teachers are over worried about mistakes and the result is usually a paper full of red marks in which no attention is paid to creativity or interesting information. Apart from this, the student gets a negative interpretation of his performance. Thus, a selective approach to mistakes has more advantages, especially if we know how to involve the student into his own process of learning.

In this sense, it is recommendable to show students where the work was effective and where it was not. According to Donn Byrne, we can follow four main correction procedures:

Firstly, correcting all the mistakes. This is very time consuming for the teacher and discouraging for the student. There is too much teaching involved but very little learning.

Secondly, correcting mistakes selectively means the attention is focused on some areas because students need help in those areas or the teacher finds it necessary for curricular reasons.

Thirdly, indicating mistakes so that students can correct them involves the teacher using for instance symbols to indicate where the mistake is (sp=spelling, wo= word order...)

Finally, letting the students identify and correct their own mistakes. Students can get in pairs and try to correct each other´s mistakes.

Conclusion

To conclude, we would like to remark that, as proven in this essay, the written language is a vehicle of communication, which in addition, complements oral language. As far as the FL learning-teaching process is concerned, the comprehension and the production stages are closely

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linked. Therefore, teachers should gradually train students from global to specific comprehension when reading texts and from guided production to free production when writing in the FL. In this topic, we have started by presenting the notion of the four basic skills of language, focusing on those related to written language and its main features. Then, we have analysed how reading and writing is learnt in the first language, considering some teaching methods. Finally, we have examined how to read and write in the FL, paying attention to the main strategies and stages involved in these processes.

In order to develop this topic, the following bibliography has been used:

DONN BYRNE: “Teaching writing skills” Longman, London 1988.BREWSTER, J. et al. (2003): The Primary English Teacher’s Guide. Penguin English. HARMER, J. (2003): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (2003): Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press.

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