Active strategies to develop comprehensive reading in an EFL classroom with children of seventh year of basic education at "Unidad Educativa Experimental La Llama del Valle", during the school year 2010-2011

Abstract

This work has the objective to design strategies that might improve the reading comprehension for children from seventh year of basic education of the "Unidad Educativa Experimental La Llama del Valle", located in Sangolquí Parish, Quito city. The ability to read is essential for successful functioning in society and therefore is one of the most important "survival" skills to teach a foreign language to our children. Basing on the fact that, the goal of reading is to identify the meaning or message of the text at hand. It can be said that it involves the execution and integration of many processes. These processes roughly fall into two main categories, those involved in translating the written code into meaningful language units and those involved in combining these units into a meaningful and coherent mental representation. In the context of teaching young children reading skills, the bulk of attention of researchers and educators has been on the first set of processes, those involved in decoding. The second set of processes, those involved in comprehension, has received less attention...