Wednesday, 10 October 2012

When the phrase 'readability of texts' comes to my mind, I think about the chosen words in that reading material, are they suitable for the proficiency level of students of English, are they too complex for a beginner student or too easy for an advanced student? These questions come to my mind I always consider the usage of many, many English words that we know and the comprehension of different levelled of English language studying students.  I know that the teachers should pay extra attention when it comes to choosing a reading material that could be sufficent for a particular proficiency group-they should not be too ridiculously hard for beginner, intemediate groups or simply easy for upper-intermediate, advanced groups.

Computers have always been by the side of the teachers in purpose of better education and there are some nice tools for teachers to check the readability of the reading materials.  What I would love to know is, what are these aiding tools and how teachers integrate them in their profession?

From the readability testing activity I understood that this tool would be a time saver for teachers that try to find the perfect reading text for the proficienct group that they are teaching, I think, the statistic numbers that give the level of the reading text is pretty easy to comprehend.

When I was looking through the concordances of the wikipedia text about Africa I tried to look for a word that was used as an adjective in one sentence, noun in another.  After trials and errors I came across the word Green that served both purpose in that given reading. ''BC, the Sahara had again become a GREEN fertile valley'' ''suspended states highlighted in light GREEN'' where the examples I could find.  Green in the first sentence is an adjective that defines noun, valley, in second sentence green is in form of noun that is defined by light.  As a teacher after my students see these two formations of green in the text I would provide simple examples that feature both in adjective form and noun form.  For example, to definte green as an adjective-
The green dress my friend bought was very eye-catchy

To define green as noun, I would give-
The toad was colored in darker tone of green

As my examples.

From what I could gather, all of these tools such as text document readability have commonground such as all of them were designed to aid the teachers in choosing which reading material they would use in a short amount of time.
I would when I become a teacher use these tools mainly to double check my choice of reading material, although I would be aware of my classroom's English language proficiency level, I would be cautious of my own thinking, asking questions such as-what if my students know these words? What if this text is too hard for them to understand? I would use text document readability to make sure what vocabulary items my students may need and the level of the reading material

Maybe relying on too much in computer based aidance may prevent my creativity as a teacher.  Since in our contemporary period the artificial intelligence became more and more beneficial in every part of human life, I would not want to be lazy by copying/pasting the reading I choose for the lesson and find its readability level and concordances.  In tight times though when I have more than one businesses to attend to and I want to double check my choice I would use these tools

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