INTRODUCING READING PHENOMENA FOR COMPREHENSIVE LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY FOR SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS - THE STUDY

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ENGLISH)

Abstract : English Language occupied a distinguished position as an international and link language to unravel the scientific, academic, business and economical pursuits of intellectual knowledge. Technology has created an easy access of learning the innovative and creative methods of wide usage of latest techniques in variant fields of Medicine, science and Technology, Business, space exploration etc., to update our knowledge with global market competition. The incorporation of Multimedia technology such as CALL (Computer assisted Language Learning) combining pictures, videos and audio files etc., has become the latest trend of teaching communicative language teaching to suit the learner needs with more advanced technology. The mastery of English has become an essential element of global market especially in the spheres of spellings, grammar, lexical and syntactical structures of word formation etc., for a clear and expressive manner. Extensive reading which is mostly done in and out of the classroom hours enrich the students to read a wide variety of books to scan as many books as possible with lots of pictures, animated Short stories, Magazines, Comics, Biographies etc., graded at their level of learning. Reading is defined as an interactive process of individual activity to assess the length of the materials and the capability to utilize relevant skills and strategies. It is a process where the reader constructs the meaningful insight of learning the unconscious language input with active participation of free voluntary reading in a tension free environment. Reading facilitates the readers to activate their Cognitive and Meta-Cognitive skills such as fast reading, Skimming, Scanning and to decode the features of the language through graphic signs and symbols, tables, pictures etc., The more the student reads, the more process of learning takes place to fix their attention on the specific areas of pronunciation, Spellings, Morphological and syntactic structures of word usage through visual and mental processing of higher frequency words to deal more advanced texts with deep understanding. This paper tries to focus on the students reading habits to activate their self learning techniques and adopt suitable skills and strategies to their pace of learning. The main objective is to create a positive attitude of reading culture. The findings of the study was conducted on Engineering Graduates at B. Tech level on various aspects of practical teaching through Multimedia ie., CALL (Computer assisted Language Learning) combining the audio and Video files, paper presentations and give them the tasks of reading graded materials with simplified vocabulary with interesting characters, lively dialogues, plots etc., to motivate their background knowledge. The sample consists both the levels of students who opt English as Second Language and the students with English as the First language as medium of instruction. The research study clearly stated that the students with English as Second Language tried to focus on simplified texts with easy vocabulary with lots of pictures, animated Short stories etc., On the other hand the students with English as the First Language tried to comprehend the texts to pick out the usage of words, collocations and grammar with a reasonable sense of learning the target language. The readers realize that reading facilitates to explore the essence of intellectual literary excellence through incidental learning of various shades of words in different contexts in Short stories, Magazines, Biographies etc., The study on Extensive reading gives an ample scope for the students to build their self confidence, purpose of reading, set goals and implement the relevant skills and strategies such as to predict the content of the story, title or chapter headings through quick visual insight of words, phrases and syntactical structures etc., to become self- reliant and life-time readers and writers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.