Increasing Reading Rate
Tips and Activities for Improving Second Language Bottom-Up Skills
By focusing on bottom-up skills when teaching reading, teachers can help learners increase their reading rate.
The bottom-up approach to reading emphasizes learners’ understanding of the units of language: sight-word recognition, lexical recognition, parts of speech and structure, and the meaning of syntactic units (phrases and sentences).
In the past, the bottom-up approach to reading has often been cast into the shadows of the more popular top down approach. Research, however, is showing that EFL/ESL learners could benefit from having better bottom-up skills.
Why should teachers improve learners’ bottom-up skills?
By developing learners’ use of bottom-up skills, teachers help them improve the skills needed to decode a message. As learners become better at recognizing words and processing parts of speech, they become faster readers. As learners become faster readers, they begin to enjoy reading more. The more they read, the more practice they get, and thus the better readers they become.
How can teachers improve the bottom-up skills of their ESL/EFL learners?
Using activities that focus on a bottom-up approach will help English language learners refine their bottom-up skills. Following is a list of activities emphasizing bottom-up learning that can be done before, during, or after reading a text.
- Underlining a grammar structure/verb tense
- Scanning for specific information or a specific word
- Finding synonyms/antonyms or definitions of words in bold
- Making a timeline of events in a text
- Underlining the sentence/information in the text that answers a specific question (e.g. How old was the main character when she finished college?)
- Finding the phrases in italics in a text and then choosing the best meaning for them
- Correcting sentences to make them true
- Completing a chart with information from a story
- Checking from a list of questions the ones that the text answers
- Writing the number of the paragraph where you find the answers to certain questions
- Checking the places where you could do the things discussed in the article
- Matching sentence halves from the text
- Locating spoken words in a text (phonological recognition)
- Identifying word types (e.g. circle all adjectives and underline the noun being modified)
What are some activities that help with sight-word recognition?
Sight-word recognition can be improved through the use of flashcards. Teachers write a word or phrase on a large piece of cardboard and “flash” it at the students for one second. Students read out the word/phrase as it is flashed. Another activity is to write a list of words that have similar spellings (e.g. retrieve, receive, resolve, reserve, reprieve), where one of the words has been repeated three times. Students are shown the list for a few seconds and then asked to identify the repeated word.
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