Application of Bloor’s approaches in the classroom

Developing reading skills is necessary to improve and reach a competitive level of academic writing. Therefore, teachers should encourage reading in the classroom. According to Bloor (1985; as cited in Jordan, 1997), reading in academic contexts can be approached in at least four different ways. Some real-life examples for each approach are listed as follows.

The psychological approach is aimed at students’ practice of the processes involved in reading (Pintos, 2008). This can be done by means of exercises that focus on simple word recognition, and interpretation. An interesting activity is to give the students a list of nouns and ask them to find appropriate verbs in the text to match the collocation.

In the linguistic approach, the aim is to draw students’ attention to the words and sentences of a given text. Exercises are related to overt grammatical practice. Thus, students could be asked to recognise sentences in passive voice and in active voice.

The content-oriented approach has, as its main assumption, the idea to give students a specific purpose for reading to stimulate their habit. Consequently, students could be expected to read a short story and put some statements that summarize the events in the plot in the correct order. Students could also be given some pictures illustrating the sequence of events instead of sentences.

In the pedagogically-oriented approach, learning theories play an important role to motivate reading. Students are presented with self-access materials which they can use at their own pace (Bloor, 1985; as cited in Jordan, 1997). Accordingly, students could choose a short story and read it to summarize the plot and tell the class about it.

Bloor’s (1985) approaches can be applied by means of different activities. It is the teacher’s responsibility to offer a wide variety to lead students to become expert readers so as to grow as writers.

Reference

Pintos, V. (2008). Lengua Inglesa Especializada I. Unidad 1. Buenos Aires. Universidad CAECE. Retrieved September 2009, from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/mod/resource/view.php?id=2730