Teaching reading comprehension strategies through a genre oriented reading course

Abstract

Reading represents one of the most important skills in any language. When a student develops high reading comprehension levels, He opens a door to have success in different fields of the life. This paper reports the procedure of collecting valuable data of the needs and reading comprehension problems of a ninth grade students of the Institución Técnica Industrial de Sabanalarga, in order to design and implement partially a syllabus on the basis of the Genre-based approach. Some important reading comprehension strategies have been described and practiced in the activities proposed in this course. This intervention involved the exposure and analysis of the structure and patterns of two types of narrative texts (fables and short stories), identifying some linguistics features, learning new vocabulary focused on the development of two Genre-based approach phases which are Modelling and deconstruction of the text. The results of this intervention showed that the use of suitable reading strategies in these genres increased the motivation and interest of the students in understanding what they were reading and showed that improved their reading comprehension level.