Reading Comprehension Essay
Reading comprehension has always been one of the basic language skills that is taught both to native and nonnative speakers. In the past, educators employed traditional methods, that is, those which did not require any additional materials except for the text. Recently, with the rise of technologies in the classroom has added new strategies for teaching reading comprehension skills. Apart from facilitating the learning process, technologies prove to create difficulties for teachers, who are nowadays required to know to use ICT (information and communication technology) but often lack the necessary skills. There is little information about educators’ perception of their competence in using ICT for introducing reading comprehension strategies; hence, this question needs to be properly studied to find out what modern teachers think about their technological skills and whether they find the latter useful for their work.
H. Brook Blair (2006, p. 72) claims that nowadays, workshops on technology are rather popular among language teachers. In fact, educators prefer attending ICT classes rather than receive training in teaching reading to students. This is the evidence of the groundbreaking changes in the contemporary system of education, but the author does not explain how ICT assists teachers at work and whether they think their skills are sufficient to apply it in teaching reading comprehension. P. Pualani Jackson (2016, pp. 38-39) states that teachers support using smartboards and other electronic devices in the classroom, but they do not point out their level of proficiency in using them.
Although teaching reading comprehension with the help of ICT is commonplace nowadays, there is little information on its effectivity. In fact, not every classroom in an American school is equipped with the computer, etc., which explains the lack of researches on teachers’ perception of their usage of ICT. Nevertheless, the tendency to use technologies in the classroom is growing, and in contemporary learning environments, educators have to be sufficiently competent in using ICT and be aware of their skills. Accordingly, it is important to encourage them to reflect on their effectiveness in using ICT at work.
References
Blair, H. B. (2006). Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Preparation to Choose and Implement Effective Methods for Teaching Emergent Readers (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). East Tennessee State University. Retrieved June 11, 2019, from https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2189
Jackson, P. P. (2016). Teachers’ Perceptions of English Language Learners and Reading Instruction (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University, 2016). Walden University ScholarWorks.
