Topic – Reading Difficulties in a Foreign Language
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1. Students who are weaker in the vocabulary will find it difficult to understand the context of the text. They need to understand the whole text in order to get the right meaning.
2. Some students tend to scan for words that they recognised and ignore those they don’t know; this could lead to wrong meaning.
Thank you, Janice! This is the very reason why, as teachers, we need to raise students’ awareness that it is important to infer the meaning of unknown words from the context. Students often panic when they are faced with unknown words- this does not have to be the case and we can help them build their confidence and skills in using the context to work out the meaning of words they are not familiar with.
This is the exact reason why students can’t read – because they need to understand the whole text, all words from it, to get the meaning. And if some words are unknown this could lead to wrong meaning. Thank you for your explanation, Janice!
Some students try reading a book in English, they end up reading the dictionary more to find out what all those new words mean. I understand it can be frustrating for them, and they stop trying to read in the language they are learning after only a few attempts. Reading in a foreign language is certainly a challenging exercise, as you come across a larger range of vocabulary that perhaps you wouldn’t have come across when listening to people in that language.
I noticed the students prefer reading short paragraphs rather than long ones, they are focus and it is easier to understand the content.
Also, disinterest and boredom cause students not to pay attention to what they’re reading.When English is a second or third language, the vocabulary can be limited, mainly with specific language. Students, sometimes omit new language and guess the context of a text rather than understanding it. For longer paragraphs, they can’t keep up with the storyline and they lose interest.
Thank you Alexandra! Very good points.
Using the context to work out the meaning of the text and new words, is actually a very useful reading skill and we need to encourage this in the classroom.
You are so right about students’ difficulties with longer texts- the use of pronouns, articles, etc. to refer back to something mentioned earlier in the text, is often difficult for students, and they sometimes really struggle to follow the main ideas in the text.
I strongly agree with your point. On some occasions, students choose to focus on the not-so-relevant words because those are the ones they know, and that can lead them to a wrong comprehension of the text.
On the other hand, there are also students who are afraid of inferring meaning from context, they often believe they don’t know enough to do it and that leads them to look up many words in a dictionary, so that makes reading slower and tiring.
Not everyone reads books/articles in their L1. Personally, I read short articles and up to 240 characters in my L2.
Americans might struggle to read a book or article that is written specifically for an Irish audience so choice of material is important.
When I have a long text to read in my L2, I use google translate. 😬 😳he he he. I am so happy you have brought up the use of google translate here! Imagine, if you will, that a student questions practising reading skills in class, saying ‘What’s the point, it is a waste of my time because I can just use google translate’. How could I reply to this?
Google Translator is not the most reliable friend. Of course I used it a lot in the past to translate faster but unfortunately it´s no the most accurate resource. Aditionaly I learnt, that by using it I was not really learning or improving my language level at all.
That’s a very good point, in my opinion we sometimes overlook the original target audience of a text and don’t stop to consider whether that is actually an appropriate reading material for our students.
1. Students may not be familiar with the Roman alphabet
2. Weak general literacy skills in L1There are different reasons why students have difficulties in reading. One of them is their wish to understand every word. They are not always able to understand that it is not important to know the meaning of EVERY word. Thus, they keep on looking the words up in the dictionary. The second reason is connected with the motivation. Students who have poor results may be reluctant to read because they are afraid of their inability to understand the text.
That’s a point I share in, familiarity with words is very important, hence teachers should select materials carefully. People with certain backgrounds are familiar with certain examples whiles those with different backgrounds find difficulty with understanding text as a result of not being familiar with certain words or examples.
1) They may not recognise some words and get stuck.
2) They feel that if they don’t know some words then they loose track of the ideas in the text. They usually tend to feel that they need to know and understand each and every word they read, and if they don’t, they assume they are doing it wrong.There are so many reasons why students face challenges in reading. Some of the reasons include:
1. Inability to recognise words. There are students who suffer from dislexia or do not simply recognise words. This kills the will to read in such students.
2. Lack of vocabulary: Some students do not have a lot of words in their vocabulary bank, hence they do not understand most of the things they read. This also makes them feel reluctant to read.They may not have a wide range of vocabulary thus find it difficult to keep up with the texts
Also, reading can sometimes be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to take in. The English language has many similar words so might confuse the studentsYess in English we have a lot of similar words and we also have words which have so many different meanings.
I think the reasons why students find it difficult to read is because of pronunciation problems and lack of lexis. I remember when i was learning English, it was difficult for me to have the right pronunciation of a word that i do not know. At the end i become lazy about reading in English. And also as the first module explained, there was not a connection between the reading activity and the right reading sub-skill.
Its difficult for students to read even though they know many different words and grammar because it can be difficult to group words and understand sentences. In addition, they may also be some words they not familiar with so they are unable to understand the full sentence. It can also be overwhelming to read large texts as it might make them believe they don’t know much.
When students are reading and they find words they do not understand, it makes their reading not lively. Again when students are leaning to read they always want to start with short content not an overload content. Overloaded content can make them lose interest in what they are reading.
Students may not know some of the words and infer meaning of the text incorrectly. Spellings/phonics code can be confusing – eg the ‘ough’ grapheme has several different pronunciations. The activities need to be carefully gauged to ensure students are kept motivated.
In my opinion, it’s important to start with simple reading activities, and then move on to more complex activities. If in the process, students learn, then it is no longer important how many times they use the dictionary. I think it could help them to strengthen this competence if we as teachers diversify the reading activities in different formats. For example, by giving them to read a newspaper article on a current topic, etc.
Students may learn new vocabulary but it can still be difficult to understand what the words mean in the context of what they’re reading. Students should be working their way up through reading levels to ensure that they are not overloaded with new vocabulary, and to slowly build their confidence as they master their reading skills.
They may lack vocabulary, especially in contexts like news articles that use specific language and styles. They also may struggle with long sentences or new, complicated grammar structures in longer texts, especially creative or literary ones. Finally, they may be intimidated by large blocks of text with no images to help with context.
The longed for answers have already provided so I wanted to provide some alternative answers.
I have been teaching myself Italian for 7 years and I still cannot read a book without translating each word into english and then trying to rearrange the sentence in English. Part of this is because I often misread words so get confused with tenses. Another reason is that I need to hear it, to be confident when translating a word or phrase. In english, I just ignore the words that I don’t know. I can read all of the other words in the sentence so I can work out the meaning of the sentence without having to lookup a word. I cannot do this in Italian so I have to look up every word and this becomes very time consuming. It’s about having confidence in my ability.Another reason is because teaching yourself to speak a language is not the same as learning to read it or write it. I can speak Russian but after speaking it to a colleague, she brought in something for me to read and was so shocked that I couldn’t read a word of Cyrilic that she spent an hour trying to teach me. I can understand enough of what is being said so I can watch films or listen to music but I can’t read it if it isn’t phonetic.
I also have learning disabilities and this has massively impacted on my ability to speak any language, even English at times. Reading and actually understanding can be challenging for me as it is very difficult for me to process information, regardless of the format. It comes down to- do I have enough ability in L2 to get by? If yes then I have less motivation to continue improving because I know that it will be very time consuming.
Sometimes people can assume the meaning of a word especially if there is a similar word in their first language and that prevents them from properly understanding the meaning of the text. Small issues like these can compound together to create a feeling of frustration, leading to a reader potentially giving up on reading in a new language.
The main problem is the time consumption. Trying to figure out the meaning of each unknown word takes more time than usual, so reading and understanding in a L2 is something that requires time and patience.
some times students feel quite confused when it comes to reading a passage with a couple of unknown words in the passage. they should learn that knowing every single word is not necessary at all to understand a text.
1. Students with weak vocabulary may face difficulties with understanding the whole text, it may take them long time to check every unknown word in the dictionary. So the process looks quite tiresome. z
2. Students should learn how to scann the text and get the main idea assuming that some words stay unknown for them.
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