READING & WRITING SKILLS

course material # 1

Text as Connected Discourse

Reading is such a critical life skill, and more so now than ever before. We read practically
everything we encounter: traffic signs on the way to school, the nutritional value table on our
favorite snack, TV ads, even the gestures of some stranger we meet across the street. And even
though by definition, a text is composed of words on a page or notation on sheet music, reading,
as a form of language processing, is the complex cognitive process of decoding symbols (and
signs) to derive meaning. Therefore, bodily gestures as signs may also be read. They are part of
our everyday discourse, or interchange of ideas, a traffic much livelier than the ones we have on
the street.

So, what is this business about the text as a connected discourse?

Simply put, when certain symbols such as letters of the alphabet combine in a certain way to make
certain words, and such words combine into phrases, into sentences, into paragraphs, into
compositions, the text becomes a connected discourse. There is an infinite variety of compositions
that we can make out of all the words we have in any given language, but the particular
arrangement of those words will differ according to our purpose, or the kind of discourse we are
aiming for.

Take for example the content (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives) words chalkboard, fingernails, lyrics,
song, sound. When we put in function words (e.g. articles, conjunctions, prepositions) like a, of, on,
like, the and generate a sentence, it would probably look something like this:

The lyrics of the song sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Or you could also say: The fingernails of the chalkboard sounded like the lyrics of a song.
Or: The sound of the fingernails sang the lyrics on a chalkboard.

But the last two sentences would probably be out of place if you’re not writing a fantasy story. Certain
combinations of words create certain kinds of discourse, and therefore certain kinds of meaning.

It must be noted though that there is often a significant difference between the way words are
pronounced in isolation and the way they are pronounced in the context of connected speech. In this
case, content words often take more of the emphasis over function words.
Speaking vs. Writing

Speaking and writing are called active or productive skills in language learning because such
actions require learners to produce language. On the other hand, listening and reading are
passive or receptive skills because learners are on the receiving end of language.

Our course, Reading and Writing Skills, requires dealing with the literacy skills of language, that
is, reading and writing. Hence, it is important to differentiate between the productive skills of
speaking and writing, especially when it comes to the demands of each skill.

Below are some of the more important differences enumerated by the University of Westminster: As
you can see, because of the solitary nature of the writing process, it is crucial to write clearly and
well. Although editing and revision can be done, feedback may be delayed, or there may be none at
all, so most often, we only have one chance to get our intended message across.

REFRESHER

Writing skills are the ones most

often used by teachers to gauge the
learner’s language proficiency
level. Speech is
public and more often an issue of
confidence,
whereas,writing,
because it is in black and white,
reflects the learner’s level more accurately.
Reading Strategies
In 2019, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results created quite a stir when it
announced the 2018 results that the Philippines ranked second to the last among 79 countries in terms of
reading, mathematics, and science literacy. We had the lowest score in reading.
Of course, there are a lot of other factors that went into that rank. But that score also gives us a partial picture
of our reading literacy, especially our comprehension skills.

Comprehension has been so taken for granted that sometimes we forget the skills that go into such a process.
I am sure you are very much familiar with these strategies, ever since starting to learn English. But it would not
hurt to revisit them to see exactly how much they help us in reading practically anything.

Skimming
An IELTS Guide defines skimming as quickly reading a text to get only its main idea. And because it is one of
the strategies in speed-reading, you only need to read a part of the material, and not the whole of it. Here is a
picture of what to do when faced with a text:
Scanning
- Again, our trusty IELTS guide defines scanning as searching for specific phrases in the text to answer some
questions. The keyword is keyword. You have to look for those keywords in the text, underline them when
you can, and when you get to the questions after this, scan the text quickly to find the answers.

Context Clues
This is where we play up our inner Sherlock Holmes. Context clues are just that: clues that help you
understand the meaning of a word based on its context (the words surrounding it, its placement in the
sentence, etc.). A dictionary may not always be available and so we resort to these clues to help us out in
decoding the mystery of the unknown word/s.

Context clues most come in these forms:

1. Synonyms
A material from Miami Dade College tells us that this includes a repetition of an idea expressed in
familiar words nearby. Example: This situation is a conundrum, a puzzle that's difficult to solve.
Another word for “conundrum” is “puzzle”.
2. Definition
Again, Miami Dade College lists these clues: use of “that is” or “i.e.”, commas, dashes, and
parentheses.
Example: His emaciation, that is, his skeletonlike appearance, was frightening to see. “Skeleton-like
appearance” is the definition of “emaciation.”

3. Antonyms
Words like “although”, “however”, and “but” may signal contrast or antonym clues.
Example: When the light brightens, the pupils of the eyes contract; however, when it grows darker, they
dilate. “Dilate” means the opposite of “contract.”

4. Explanation
In some cases, this may also be in the form of an example. Words like “including”, “such as”, and “for
example”, point these out. Example: Celestial bodies, including the sun, moon, and stars, have
fascinated man through the centuries. “Celestial” objects are those in the sky or heavens.

5. Word parts (affixes)

This is one of the reasons learning about prefixes and suffixes is so crucial in your grade school days.
Seeing those affixes in a word and knowing what they mean is like seeing a huge red truck with blinkers
on. Follow it, and you’ll know where the fire is, or in this case, the meaning of the word.

Kathy Glass tells us to break down the word into its component parts: the base word, and the affixes
(prefix, suffix) to get what it means. Example: Piscatorial creatures live in the coldest parts of the ocean.
The base word may look familiar to you as it is a cousin of the zodiac sign Pisces, which is Latin for
“fish”. The suffix -ial is usually attached to an adjective and means “of, relating to, or characterized by”.
Clearly, “piscatorial” means fish related.

Close Reading
According to Burke (n.d.), close reading is a thoughtful, critical analysis of a text that focuses on significant details or
patterns to develop a deep, precise understanding of the text’s form, craft, meanings, etc. It is the opposite of
speedreading in the sense that it requires you to stay with the text repeatedly to get its meaning as accurately as
possible.

Among other things, close reading includes:

1. focusing on the text itself and using the text to answer questions based on it
2. making marginal annotations (notes on the text)
3. repeated readings

There is no one way to go about close reading. But for a start, you may follow these steps (Burke, n.d.):
1. First read: Key ideas and details
a. Set your purpose in reading.
b. Read to get a general idea of the text.
c. Underline keywords that you can go back to.
2. Second read: Craft and structure
a. Focus on patterns: repetitions, contradictions, similarities (Kain, 1998). You may also look at
vocabulary choices and text organization.
3. Third read: Integration of Knowledge and ideas
a. Ask the how and why questions: how the craft and structure of the text are used
b. to deliver the message. Why does it have to be that way?
 c. Try to answer those questions using details in the text itself and your own synthesis of
the text.

By far, close reading is the most difficult strategy we’ve reviewed. And this is because it’s also possibly the most
important, not just for this course, but for every other text you encounter. It’s like New York: if you can make it here,
you can make it almost anywhere!
READING AND WRITING SKILLS
course material # 2

Techniques in Selecting and Organizing Information

In the previous lesson, we have managed to capitalize on the fact that wherever we go, whatever we do, we can never
get away from a text. To be able to read and discern texts which you need (as a student, as a member of the family, as a
member of the workforce), and want (as a friend, as a supporter of a particular fandom, as a taxpayer) is as essential as
breathing and eating. These that we read we must transmit effectively as discourse, which are cumulative snippets of
information that we encounter every day.

But with the plethora of information that we have right at the palm of our hands (or rather, at the pixels of our TV,
phone, and computer screens), how do we actually determine those that we need? And if we successfully do so, how do
we put them in their proper places, the way a school-age child would arrange their toys?

This is why we need Techniques in Selecting and Organizing Information. Techniques are approaches or methods you as
a writer may use to organize the information gathered to accomplish your desired aim in writing and to improve writing
craft. For us to systematize the means of selecting information, we need to use some techniques that will help hold all
our paragraphs together.

 Brainstorming List

One of the most effective ways to select the information you need is brainstorming especially if you are loaded with a
lot of information from various sources.

Originally used by the American businessman Alex Osborn in 1953 as a strategy for his advertising agents to pitch in
highly innovative marketing plans, brainstorming has made its way into classrooms, physical or virtual, to throw in
clusters of ideas, and select only what are needed, as dictated by the situation which you are in. As a matter of fact, it’s
also a good “game” to play of sorts during team-building activities at work, spiritual retreats at school, and even
sleepover parties in your mutual social circles. Contrary to what your teacher/party organizer may have told you in the
past, you can also brainstorm on your own. Osborn (1953) calls it simply, individual brainstorming. This is done through
the usage of a brainstorming list. If you’re the kind of person who processes information faster through textual means,
then just like the famed balladeer Barry Manilow likes to sing it, this one’s for you.

Generally, a brainstorming list consists of two parts. The first part is the problem that you are supposed to brainstorm
about, and the suggestions (things/concepts/ideas that you wish to contribute to alleviate the problem, if not solve it).
Always take note that you cannot solve the problem head on by just giving concepts or ideas as it will still have to be
executed. Just like First Aiders say it when they respond to a road accident, if you can’t heal the gaping wound
completely, you can at least “stop the bleeding

Strategies for brainstorming include cubing (examining viewpoints), freewriting (writing unlimited, uninhibited ideas
about the topic), listing (listing things associated with the topic), mapping (also called webbing or clustering where you
write down all ideas and map their connections to each other), and researching (discovering fact by investigation)
Take note that you can write as many suggestions as you can. Osborn (1953) is speaking to you: no matter how weird,
surreal, or exaggerated your suggestions may get, they are totally valid. This is exactly what he meant with “storming the
brain”, in which the word brainstorming came from.

 Graphic Organizers

A graphic organizer is a teaching and learning tool that is used to organize information and ideas in a way that is easy to
comprehend and internalize.

When you were in your pre-school days, your teacher loved to decorate your classroom with tables, charts, and
illustrations with words, numbers, and shapes inside them. Educational psychologists such as Edgar Dale have long
believed (and proven) that when children are fed with information that are arranged in a simpler, and visual, approach,
they may understand such data faster than when just giving them plain text, or even when listening to someone with a
monotonous voice. This is what your teacher wanted to achieve with you and your classmates by filling the walls with
colorful stuff… … and these “stuff” being pertained to are formally called graphic organizers (GOs, hereafter). They are
visual representations of a structurally arranged set of discourse elements (Wyson, 2018). To critically understand how
these things work, let’s chop the definition of GOs and extract the keywords:

Visual representations, since they usually take the form of tables, graphs, and charts, which stimulate the eyes;
Structurally arranged, since GOs help you compartmentalize the pool of data you have with you, make them appeal to
you and others; and Discourse elements, since only vital information should be compartmentalized, as discussed in the
previous Course Material, and not much of the supporting details (we will deal with these at a later CM). From pre-
schoolers to teenagers like you and even to grownups like your teachers and other professionals and laborers, GOs are
handy to know and understand, and handier to utilize and comprehend.

A graphic organizer is also known as a knowledge map, concept map, story map, cognitive organizer, advance
organizer, or concept diagram. It is a pedagogical tool that uses visual symbols to express knowledge and concepts
through relationships between them. The main purpose of a graphic organizer is to provide a visual aid to facilitate
learning and instruction. The simplest and most widely utilized GO is the table.

Tables are highly versatile, whichever way you wish to use it. From the simplest tasks of sorting a pool of data into
similar characteristics, to the more complicated ones like plotting a sequence of events, tables are a good pickme-up in
organizing data, and an effective and comprehensible one, too. They are composed of columns and rows, where we fill
out specific information. Say you wanted to get something at a restaurant you usually patronize, and you observe that
the server handed you a menu which is arranged like this

Appetizers Main courses Desserts

Bread Pasta Cakes and pastries
Chips (nachos, potato Steak Confectionery
crisps) Pork (sweets, candies)
Salad Chicken/Veal Ice cream
Tea Seafoods and (gelato, softserve,
Soup fish sherbet)
Fruits

Venn diagram – used to compare and contrast ideas. It is one of the most commonly-used GOs used to display
comparison and contrasts of two (or more) sets of data, which in our case, take the form of concepts, theories, and
 facts. Again, when we talk about comparison, we are actually talking about
similarities of the two sets of data being scrutinized. Therefore, it’s not correct to
tell your friend to “compare algebra and trigonometry”, then point out their
differences. On the other hand, if we wish to point out the differences of the sets
of data given to us, the proper term to use is contrast.

Cause and effect (fishbone diagram) – a graphical tool for displaying a list of
causes associated with a specific effect.

Cycle – describes how a series of events interact as a set of results repeatedly.

Concept map – depicts suggested relationships between concepts. It is a graphical tool that
instructional designers, engineers, technical writers, and others use to organize and structure
knowledge.

Flow chart – used to show chronology of events in a narrative or stages in a process.

Plot diagram – used to map events in the story and analyze major parts of the plot

 Topic Outline

Outlining organizes information in a neat list, depending on your specific need for the information you just arranged.

Educational psychologists have long understood that learners have different learning styles to use for them to attain
their goals. Just like the maxim goes, “different strokes for different folks”. You may have observed that the usage of
Graphic Organizers may entice only the learners who love to deal with photographs and graphical designs. Now, we deal
with something that verbal learners would love to use when organizing the sets of data they have taken note of. An
outline is generally defined as a group of information structured in an organized list (Wyson, 2018). The keyword to
consider here is list. You are going to list down the essential information from a specific article you have read, or a news
report you have listened to or viewed.
The first type of outline we’re going to delve into is the topic outline. You use this outline when you want to sift through
the huge pool of information you have been recently acquainted with, because writers usually create one after being
exposed to such data. The defining characteristic of the topic outline is that you only use keywords and/or key phrases
in filling the outline.

One strategy to remember when you write topic outlines is that you hold the power as to what information to include in
the outline. Do you think this particular sentence in the news article is important for you in the future? Then include it!
Reread the article where the content of the outline came from. How do you think you would do it if it were given to you
right now as a task?

Another strategy in writing outlines is that you must be able to identify the main ideas of these articles (which we will
discuss in later CMs). But to give you a jumpstart, when you identify main ideas, you write them as the heading of the
1st Level of the outline. Simply put, all main ideas are discussed at the 1st Level in every outline. Nowhere else. At the
end of the day, the topic outlines you make will be a kind of “cheat sheet” the next time your teacher asks you to
summarize a particular short story in your 21st Century Literature course, or a particular reference to include in your
Review of Related Literature and Studies in either of your Practical Research courses

 Sentence Outline

We have banked on the argument that topic outlines are composed right after you are exposed to a pool of information
needed to be organized in a neat list. But what if the roles are reversed and the tables are turned? What if it’s from YOU
where all the information must come from? This is where the sentence outline comes in. Compared to topic outlines,
sentence outlines are used for the primary objective of preparing ideas to be used in composing an essay.

Since the essay is one form of discourse that we all encounter every day, surely, we must know where the information
came from, and more importantly, HOW they were organized in the process. Think of it this way: When you want to
surprise a friend for a birthday party, you (with a little help from your friends, so spoke The Beatles) would plan, plot,
and organize where to get the cake, the decorations, the food, and the entertainment, in an orderly fashion. You
wouldn’t want to surprise that friend by giving the cake on the exact day of the birthday, then give the balloons
tomorrow. That reeks of disorganization.

In sentence outlines, you are given the free hand to organize all of your thoughts, from topic sentences to supporting
details, before you are tasked to write the essay. That’s working smart! Also, when you compose and finish sentence
outlines, writing the essay itself will be a breeze, because all you need to do is to connect those sentences by using
transitional devices (which will be discussed in a later CM).