Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching.

In my fifth podcast I have to answer some questions about the reading process, which are:

• Question one: What is reading?

It is a written receptive skill which activates a chain of cognitive processes like, for instance, drawing inferences and construct interpretations, that allow us to make sense of the text.

• Question two: Choose ten genres normally “consumed” by children and explain their reasons for reading.

Bus schedule and train timetables in order to get to school, public signs and web sites to get information, advertisements and Internet to satisfy curiosity about a topic, chat messages to talk with their friends, jokes and plays to have fun, videogames subtitles to understand the story of the game, comics and short stories for just enjoyment and academic books to pass the exams and do the activities.

• Question three: What types of knowledge are required to read a text?

The types of knowledge required to read a text are: syntactic knowledge, morphological knowledge, general world knowledge, sociocultural knowledge, topic knowledge and genre knowledge.

• Question four: Explain bottom-up and top-down processes providing examples of each process.

· Bottom-up process: The readers start decoding the most specific levels of the language and they organise them in order to form the most general ones. So, the reader first recognises individual letters which, when articulated together, form words, then form phrases, clauses, sentences, texts… And all of this before making sense of the text. One example of a bottom-up activity can be making words by letter combinations or discriminating minimal pair sounds which can help him/her to have a good phonological memory. · Top-down process: The readers don’t need to decode every single word in the text to figure out the general meaning. In this case, the readers start from the higher level of processing (inferring, hypothesising, contrasting…) and they combines what they already know with the new information from the text to achieve a personal interpretation. An activity to develop top-down strategies can be deducing from context since the context of the text may provide enough clues to guess the meaning of a lexical item. · What does the “interactive process” mean?: In an interactive process, the readers, depending on their purposes, the type of text, etc., activates different strategies which shift from bottom-up to top-down and viceversa.

• Question five: In the fifth question I propose two activities:

· The first one is an intensive reading of a short text which has to be scanned, searching information like names, dates or key concepts with the objective of gaining a full understanding of the meaning of the linguistic text. · The second one is an aloud extensive reading of a book’s chapter only for the purpose of enjoyment although it also helps to improve the reading competence.

• Question six: Design a reading session in which before, during and after reading tasks are included:

· Pre-reading task: Trying to figure out the topic, the story and which characters may the book includes just looking the cover, the title and the style of it. · While reading task: Trying to understand figurative language and unknown lexical items using the context of the text. · Post-reading task: Making up new endings for the book.