Jackie Spencer has been teaching English for 21 years and has taught in several countries including the UAE, and a variety of contexts.  She has a Master’s in TESOL, CELTA and DELTA, Cert IV in Assessment and Programming and recently completed the IHCOLT. She has a special interest in helping students experiencing literacy and reading issues.  She currently works at UTS Insearch.

 

Why do it?

As teachers, we tend to start a reading lesson with a top-down approach to a text (e.g. prediction exercises, skimming for gist etc.). Instead, starting with a bottom-up activity (focussing on words, or even on letters or phrases) can be less confronting for students, and can also help students focus - in the same way that we find crossword or find-a-word puzzles meditative and refreshing.

 

What's the research?

There is a lot of research that suggests that a bottom up approach helps students improve their reading skills - I've attached two articles that inspired me. Eskey (see attachment) even claims that good readers activate schemata through a bottom-up perusal of a text, it's only poor readers that 'read around' a text (i.e. inferring meaning from looking at the title, sub-headings and visuals). One of the biggest advocates is Barbara Birch, through her book English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. There isn't a consensus though: there are just as many 'top-downers' as 'bottom-uppers'.

 

How to do it?

Spend the first five minutes of a reading lesson on a bottom-up activity, and only then move onto the more traditional top-down approach. This is something colleagues and I developed in the UAE - we had a lot of poor readers and unmotivated students in our classrooms and we found that after doing a bottom-up activity, the students had less 'text-fear' and were more ready to read. 

 

Four activities

I have covered four activities here. There are many more, some of which you probably use: find-a-word puzzles, running dictation etc. The key idea is to work with words from the text you are about to use in the reading lesson - don't look at random words. Here are the four activities:

 

1 Spelling dictation

I heard about this from a presentation by Mario Rinvolucri (he of the CUP book Dictation - New methods, new possibilities - but I don't think this activity is in the book). The procedure is:

1. Choose an important sentence from the reading text - don't waste anyone's time with an unimportant sentence.

2. Dictate it to the students letter by letter and don't pause at the word boundaries - you'll obviously need to take a breath so breathe somewhere there aren't any word boundaries e.g. 'dict atei ttot hest uden tsle tter byle tter andd on'tp ause atth ewor dbou ndar ies'
3. Students work in pairs to work out what the sentence is.

4. From here, move onto something top-down e.g. ask students to predict from that sentence what the text could be about.

 

2 Up and down activity

1. Ask students to turn to the first (or an important) page of the reading text.

2. Ask them to choose any word from the page and tell you what it is. Write it on the board.
3. Ask students how many letters are in the word. Write the number next to the word.

4. Ask students to look for a word on the page that is one letter shorter. Write that word and number on the board.
5. Repeat step 4, descending in word length, until you get to a one letter word (which will be 'a'). Don't accept any words that aren't from that page of the reading text.

6. Then ask students for a word that is one letter longer (a two letter word). Write it on the board.
7. Repeat step 6, increasing in word length, until you get to the longest word.
8. Now you have a board full of words. From here, you could look at new vocabulary or pronunciation, or ask students to predict what the text is about (which is a top-down activity).

 

3 Dominoes

1. Ask students to turn to the first (or an important) page of the reading text
2. Ask them to choose any word from the page and tell you what it is. Write it on the board.
3. Ask them to choose another word from the text that either ends in the first letter of the word or starts in the last letter of the word.
4. Repeat e.g.

5. Now you have a board full of words. From here, you could look at new vocabulary or pronunciation, or ask students to predict what the text is about (which is a top-down activity).

4 Reading bingo

1. You'll need to make bingo cards and probably a power point for this.
2. Use important words from the text in the bingo cards.
3. Show the text sentence by sentence (this is where a power point is good). So unlike a traditional bingo, you don't read out numbers or words, instead students scan a sentence for their words. I put only four words on each card - it's hard scanning a sentence for a list of words so keep that list really short.
4. Like a traditional bingo, students circle the words on their grid, and call out bingo when they have circled all the words.
5. Ask students to compare their bingo cards and predict what the text is about.

 

About spelling

I believe in the importance of teaching students the spelling patterns we all learned in primary school. I think this is a real shortfall in ESL practice - we assume students can spell phonetically (we accept phonetical spelling in our listening exam for example), but really, how sure are we that they were ever taught this? English spelling is often irregular, but I think as teachers we over-stress this. English spelling is in fact 70% regular so knowing the patterns is really useful for students (see Ch. 7 of Barbara Birch's book for more on this). I suggested that we have spelling tests, but on lists with similar spelling patterns (this is a phonics method of reading and spelling) e.g. 'speak, lead, read, cheat, read, teach'. Stick with high frequency words.

 

Any other ideas?

If anyone has any other ideas for activities, don't keep them to yourself, I'd love to have more activities to use and I'm sure everyone else would as well. Jackie.Spencer@insearch.edu.au

 

References

Anderson, D. 2005 ‘Bottom Up Strategies: Reading Literacy’ Abu Dhabi Men’s College

http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/documents/Reading%20Literacy-1.pdf

Birch, B. 2002. English

 L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers.

Eskey, D. 1993 ‘Holding in the bottom: An interactive approach to the language problems of second language readers’ in Carrell, P. Devine, J. & Eskey, D. (eds.)

Reading in a second language: Hypotheses, organization, and practice, Newbury House.

Rinvolucri, M. and Davis, P. 1988 Dictation - New methods, new possibilities, Cambridge University Press. 

 

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.