While reading Gee’s article titled Encouraging ESL Students to Read, I was trying to relate the author’s statements to my own personal experience. I can remember always liking to read, it was never a burden for me to read assigned stories or novel. I do not have much recollection of my elementary school teachers asking us to read, until I reached grade 6. I was then asked to either subscribe to an English magazine or to buy short books from Scholastik. I appreciated the fact that we could choose or reading material and enjoyed doing it. I do not believe there was any Response Process involved; we did not have any role sheet to answer or summary to write. When I reached high school, there was a lot more reading to do, however, we did not get to choose the novels. They were English classics such as: Animal Farm, Fountainhead, Brave New World…Some of them I enjoyed, others not, but I am overall glad I read them, because they are part of the English culture. Once again, I do not remember doing much elaborated open tasks. We definitely had reading comprehension test, and we were also asked, sometimes, to write summaries or opinion texts, but nothing comparable to Gee’s six C’s open tasks. I would have appreciated doing such task, and it might have helped some of my classmates who did not enjoyed reading at the time.
In his article Encouraging ESL Students to Read, Gee writes about the importance of reading and gives advice as how to encourage ESL students to read. He starts by stating the important connection between affect and reading and how motivation and affective aspects of reading are as important as the cognitive aspects. Gee also introduces the cycle that exists between reading and competence; competence promotes reading, because successful readers have a positive attitude towards reading and therefore read more and become better at it. In the same when, reading promotes competence, because the more a student reads, the better he becomes at it. In the second part of the article, Gee explains the six characteristics that make good open task; choices, challenge, control, collaboration, construct and consequences. The author is aware that it is hard to incorporate all six aspects in one single task, but he states that he considers them as he plans his activities and later finds that most are included. He then explains the importance of the material and of the environment; how these two aspects are also critical in the students’ attitude towards reading. The material needs to be appropriate for their level, and the environment needs to be adequate, both emotionally and physically. Gee concluded his article by saying that ESL teachers need to develop positive affective factors and foster a love of reading.
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