Teaching L2 Reading

Youblisher allows you to take PDFs and turn them into more easily accessible documents that can be read as book by turning pages. I think that this site has a lot of potential for both teacher-created materials and for learner generated texts. This could be useful in having learners create the type of group projects that are typical in content-based instruction.

This wiki describes technology ideas that can supplement reading instructional techniques.

Text 2 Mind Map is one of the most popular mind mapping tools on the web.

Text 2 Mind Map could be used for creating a concept map as a pre-reading activity in an L2 reading course. A concept map helps give learners the background knowledge they need in order to better process a text.

The site allows you to input outlines of a text to show organization of concepts in your maps. You can also dowload the image and the pdf of your map.

A list of 9 timeline creation tools available on the web. These are online tools that can be used to create timelines based upon the texts that learners read.

The lexile measure, similar in some ways to the Flesch-Kencaid and Coh-Metrix readability measures, has been used to assess the overall difficulty of specific texts. What differentiates it from other readability measures is how self-assessment is built in so that students will be recommended to books that are at their level of lexile measure. We have used this in our IEP to determine how difficult the texts we select for large-scale assessments and/or achievement tests are.

Glosses have been widely used in L2 reading instruction to help ELLs better comprehend a text without continually consulting learner or electronic dictionaries. This online gloss maker allows a text to be entered and the glosses created for specific vocabulary words.

This tool could possibly be used in collaboration with http://www.wordandphrase.info/ and http://www.lextutor.ca/

to identify which words are AWL words and perhaps at a higher level of difficulty. Both of these websites allow for texts to be copy and pasted for analysis of the lexical frequencies of words in texts.

Echo reading is a reading strategy for helping struggling readers read better. Echo reading activities focus on fluency, expression, and an appropriate pace while reading aloud.

I would add that it helps if echo reading for ESL/EFL students is centered around a text that learners have previously encountered.

This is an additional source for explaining how to do choral reading in the reading classsroom. There are also links to articles about choral reading, some of which include ESL.

A freely available, online-only publication of the International Reading Association (IRA), a professional organization of literacy educators. Its focus is literacy practice and research in classrooms serving students aged 5 to 18. “Literacy” is broadly defined to include traditional print literacy, as well as visual literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, and so on.

This could be a good resource for finding reading passages online by topic.

Preceden makes it easy to build simple, powerful timelines. 

What I like about this website is how easy it is to use and that the timelines can be converted to PDFs. This could work well with having learners create timelines and then print them out or email them to their teacher. Having learners create timelines would be an appropriate follow-up task for reading a more sequential and historical text.

Timetoast allows for the creation of timelines online. This could be used in an L2 reading course where students are reading more historical/narrative peices of writing that involve the sequencing of dates.

Students could possibly embedd these timelines into a blog/wiki as part of a class project for an alternative use.

The practice of partner assisted reading is described here for use in L1 classrooms, which is also used in L2 reading classrooms. It is necessary that this cooperative learning strategy is used during a re-reading of text that learners have worked with previously through in-class activities. The overall objective/purpose of this activity in an ESL classroom is to encourage reading fluency.

Xiangying Jiang's site provides a number of materials that can be used for teaching reading comprehension with graphic organizers. There are a number of example graphic organizers here and complementary texts. These example graphic organizers (GOs) can be important for creating a collection of sample GOs that you can adapt for different texts in the classroom.

Much of the information on GOs is tied to research conducted with William Grabe:

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/april2007/jiang/jiang.html

This website discusses the reasons for using choral reading and explains the instructional steps of this reading fluency activity.

This site features a number of research bibliographies that might be useful for both L2 reading researchers and teachers.