Journal III

Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?  

     There are many things I have learned through this course. I simply expected that I would be able to learn some methods for teaching reading for the students, but I think there were more things which would be useful to myself. As I could learn various useful tips in reading, at the same time I felt that there is still a long way to go for myself to teach someone reading. I guess I should be ready with better reading ability with various reading skills before standing in front of the students.

     Among many things I learned from the lesson the most meaningful thing to me is that I realized that most of the time I’m doing the intensive reading. To be honest, I haven’t been a kind of person who enjoys reading. Even sometimes reading seems difficult and stressful task for me no matter it is in English or Korea. I simply thought the reason for this was because I’m not used to reading since when I was really young. I always thought the reading habit can be established only when people are very young. However I was wrong. In this class I found the real reason for my problem. It’s because I’m doing intensive reading and even using lower-level processing skills when I read. All the drawbacks of intensive reading I learned in the class can be applied to me. The reason I don’t like reading is that my reading speed is very slow and at the same time it’s hard for me to concentrate on reading. As I learned in the class because I pay too much attention on forms and text comprehension, my reading is being interrupted often which reduces the speed. Also I care too much to do the good reading, so the reading itself doesn’t seem fun to me. Thanks to this lesson I could finally find out the real reason for not liking the reading, and my slow reading. Now I find the reason so I think I can fix my problem. Moreover, in the class there were many activities and exercises for fast reading and extensive reading also so I think I can apply them to boost my reading speed and enjoyment of reading.

     There were many things I learned from this course. For example, I learned various kinds of reading skills and also made an activity to use some of the skills for students. Also I learned how to make a pre-reading question to activate schemata in a correct way, and in the process after making 3 bad pre-reading questions I could finally come up with the one good question. I think now I would not make a mistake in making pre-reading question. I learned how the reading strategies and skills are different too. I learned many things, and thanks to trying activities instead of just reading about the definition and characteristics of all of the leanings I could understand and remember them better. As I said earlier through this class I realize that I need to improve my reading ability first before teaching students, and also this class show me the way to do this too. Using various reading skills I learned in the lesson I will be able to boost my reading ability. I will practice some activities and exercises especially in the fast reading and extensive reading chapters so I can enjoy reading more than before.