2/27 Emi


If reading-to-write issues are abundant in the learner’s native language, so they are in the learner’s L2. In fact, students don’t really start reading more than one-paragraph texts until the end of their second year (Intermediate II); and other more complex texts don’t appear until the third year studying the language.

When I was teaching Spanish Intermediate II, I always felt the fear and the pain in the students’ faces every time they had a reading assigned. They would come to class with their summary and their questions, but they were not even sure if they got the text right. In any case, we would dedicate and entire 50-minute class to break down the text, discuss it, question it, etc. In the end, students would leave the room with a better idea of what they initially had intended to read from home.

While those practices were very good for the students, it’s is also true that they were very time-consuming. And I don’t even think we applied a quarter part of the strategies suggested in the chapter.  That’s why, as I was reading the chapter, I thought the strategies being proposed were excellent, but I also was not sure how feasible they were to be put in practice all at once in the same L2 L2 context. One would probably need another course to put all these advice in practice, especially if we believe that  “reading skills develop slowly over time” (p.137). So I believe TIME is something that needs to be granted no matter what strategies we decide to use.


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