Abstract
<p>Any instructional practice must be derived from a teacher’s knowledge base for teaching, which can be acquired by training, study, or practice. While much attention has been paid to teachers’ practical content knowledge in real educational settings, comprehensive syntheses of expert knowledge on a particular teaching task for a specific group of teachers are still scarce. This paper tends to synthesize ESL/EFL teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of reading strategy instruction through learning the expertise conveyed in literature. Drawing on related studies in the field of reading strategy instruction either in general or in ESL/EFL contexts, this argumentative article first proposes a synthesized reading strategy instruction model which consists of one key component and two general principles, all of which create and are created by a safe and risk-free environment where students learn to use strategies actively and consciously with motivation and assistance. This article then elaborates on eight instructional strategies using summarizing instruction as an example in terms of three types of knowledge: declarative, procedural, and conditional. With the enrichment of the pedagogical content knowledge on strategy instruction, ESL/EFL teachers might teach reading strategies effectively both <em>with</em> metacognition, i.e., consciously planning, monitoring, and evaluating their teaching, and <em>for</em> metacognition, namely, to affect their students’ metacognitive awareness of strategy use in reading.</p>
Highlights
Knowledge of how to teach reading strategies in general can be classified as part of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) according to Shulman’s typology of teachers’ professional knowledge. Shulman (1986) considered a solid knowledge base a precondition to effective teaching, and conceived the knowledge base for teaching as an amalgam of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that underlies a teacher’s capacity to teach successfully
Drawing on related studies in the field of reading strategy instruction either in general or in ESL/EFL contexts, this argumentative article first proposes a synthesized reading strategy instruction model which consists of one key component and two general principles, all of which create and are created by a safe and risk-free environment where students learn to use strategies actively and consciously with motivation and assistance
This article first gives a brief review of Pressley’s General Outline for Strategy Instruction (1990), Almasi’s Strategy Instruction Model (2003), and Chamot and O’Malley’s CALLA (1994), focusing on generating the critical components of effective strategy instruction valued in these three approaches
Summary
Knowledge of how to teach reading strategies in general can be classified as part of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) according to Shulman’s typology of teachers’ professional knowledge. Shulman (1986) considered a solid knowledge base a precondition to effective teaching, and conceived the knowledge base for teaching as an amalgam of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that underlies a teacher’s capacity to teach successfully. ESL/EFL teachers’ formal pedagogical content knowledge of reading strategy instruction can be developed through learning the expertise conveyed in literature. Such learning helps the teacher generate a reading strategy instruction approach suitable for ESL/EFL learners. This generation might derive resources from the effective strategy instruction models and approaches that already exist and have been repeatedly applied to teaching either native English-speaking learners or ESL/EFL learners. The key components serve as guidance to elaborate ESL/EFL teachers’ formal knowledge of cognitive instructional strategies to teach reading strategies. Taking summarizing strategy instruction as an example, such elaboration is carried out along with the three categories of knowledge – declarative, procedural, and conditional
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