Mar.8th - my answers on comprehension questions posted

<Comprehension Questions>

• Based on Actvity 1.2 what do you usally read in English? List up all the cases in which you read texts in English. ex) cereal boxes, street signs, textbooks etc. And also in your future what texts will you be able to read in English in what situations? ex) business emails, TIME magazines etc.
  
  The first thing came up in mind was texts used in my classes. Now I am outside of English-speaking countries, so limited accesses were provided to me, I realized. Others would be mails, internet resources, facebook, street signs, obviously this blog, too.
  I think I will be buried under professional documents and articles related to my field very soon. I must be able to comprehend those bunches of paper thoroughly and correctly. And also I guess I would have many opportunities to share informal textings, often full of slangs and abbreviations, to communicate with others. 

• What makes you English reading difficult? Analyze your reading process yourself and try to find your barriers to fluent reading.
  
  The biggest obstacle for me is my own idleness. I am a type of person who sincerely complete all the required readings and assignments with my best, however, often temptations and sudden impulses disturb me when reading. Especially for some boring texts, I often doze off, or dream of me going out and having fun. If I can concentrate my mind on reading, I think I will be a fluent reader in any texts.
  
• Refuse the idea "The readers is simply a receiver who plays a passive role in the written communication process." with as much contradictory evidence as possible from the chapter.
  Readers do not simply decode the message in texts. Readers keep looking for cues, making predictions, thinking on issues presented, filtering unnecessary information, as mentioned in page 10-11. Readers have their own purpose to read a given text. To achieve this, readers pave their unique way into the text. This fact means all readers are active in decoding messages in texts. Even though they are faced with problems, they have their autonomy to find out where the problem came from, how to solve it, making actual efforts to solve it. 

• Explain each term of "Reading Process"
  
• Schema: an abstract mental structure that is activated to help understanding in meaning. For example, "A young girl is eating a candy" can be interpreted in our minds with the help of schemata about "a young girl", "eating" and "candy". If the writer and the reader do not share similar schemata, the writer's message can be misunderstood because what they have in mind is different.
• Shared assumption: Certain things the writer and reader have in common. If you are reading this text, at least you have a same code with me. Maybe you are older than secondary schoolers, and the level in English is beyond intermediate level. Those things could be "shared assumption". The example presented here is somewhat broad, however, in professional fields, the share assumption would be much more.
• Presupposition: Conscious or unconscious guesses readers make about the text.
• Prediction: Expectations on a given text. It can be a word-by-word level to sentence, paragraph, or a whole text level.
• Explain three different unconscious reading processes
• Top-down: Taking a sight into the text in a broad sense. The purpose is to understand the overall purpose of the text, not to look for minor details.
• Bottom-up: The reader builds up meaning from words and letters to the whole. The purpose here is to carefully observe minor details.
• Interactive: Adopting the two methods at once. The reader constantly changes the point of view, in order to achieve his/her purpose.

• Explain the principles of teaching reading(Williams 1986).
  
  According to Williams, the principles are fourfold. First, the input given to students should cover likely purposes they would have on reading in outside world. The input should be interpretable in their current level, with some challenging points. In other words, the input should be meaningful itself. Second, students should be supposed to produce outputs related to the reading. Third, special attention on language should be given in reading classes. Last but not the least, students should be provided with ample resources to speed up their reading process.