I find this assignment to be challenging because it is my first time reviewing a textbook with no experience teaching reading in a classroom. I selected the National Geographic Reading & Vocabulary Focus 1 textbook because I was drawn to the beautiful and vibrant National Geographic images and the rich global content. One of the strengths of this textbook is the use of vibrant and real-world images. Each unit opens with a stunning National Geographic image that taps into the students’ background about the world (top-down models) and three questions about the image. The image serves as a preview to the unit content.
After the two-full pages of the image, the next page is subtitled, Reading Preview. This page has a pre-vocabulary section that …show more content…
The topics are interesting to me, but will the students enjoy them? After scanning Grabe and Stoller’s book, they wrote, “Students know that reading development is a hard task, thus, they need effective motivational support from teachers and the curriculum itself.” This serves as a reminder for me that it is not just the textbook, but also the role of the teacher to motivate the students to read. If I find these topics interesting, when I am teaching, I can motivate the students by sharing why the topics are interesting to me, bringing relevance into the curriculum, and encouraging active participation from the students. This textbook does a great job integrating content and language learning objectives by providing many opportunities for extended reading, challenges to match growing skills, and choices in reading materials, which all lead back to motivating students to read and learn. This reminds me of a Dr. Seuss quote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Hopefully, the integrated content and language learning objectives will stimulate the students’ curiosity to read …show more content…
One thing I really like about this textbook is it incorporates an essential reading skill to each reading passage and provides students the opportunity to apply the skill. This will save a teacher time to come up with a task for each skill. If the teacher doesn’t like the activity, he/she can adapt the material or create an activity to go along with the reading skills. Overall, I think reading teachers (ESL reading teachers and regular reading teacher) may find the layout and content of the book helpful to their syllabus and students will most likely be engaged in some of the global topics and diverse images. Along with the reading passages in the textbook, the teacher can assign extensive reading materials with an appropriate text length and level that align with the unit topic to promote word recognition, create opportunities for comprehension skills practice, build students’ text structure awareness and reading fluency, and motivate students to
After the two-full pages of the image, the next page is subtitled, Reading Preview. This page has a pre-vocabulary section that …show more content…
The topics are interesting to me, but will the students enjoy them? After scanning Grabe and Stoller’s book, they wrote, “Students know that reading development is a hard task, thus, they need effective motivational support from teachers and the curriculum itself.” This serves as a reminder for me that it is not just the textbook, but also the role of the teacher to motivate the students to read. If I find these topics interesting, when I am teaching, I can motivate the students by sharing why the topics are interesting to me, bringing relevance into the curriculum, and encouraging active participation from the students. This textbook does a great job integrating content and language learning objectives by providing many opportunities for extended reading, challenges to match growing skills, and choices in reading materials, which all lead back to motivating students to read and learn. This reminds me of a Dr. Seuss quote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” Hopefully, the integrated content and language learning objectives will stimulate the students’ curiosity to read …show more content…
One thing I really like about this textbook is it incorporates an essential reading skill to each reading passage and provides students the opportunity to apply the skill. This will save a teacher time to come up with a task for each skill. If the teacher doesn’t like the activity, he/she can adapt the material or create an activity to go along with the reading skills. Overall, I think reading teachers (ESL reading teachers and regular reading teacher) may find the layout and content of the book helpful to their syllabus and students will most likely be engaged in some of the global topics and diverse images. Along with the reading passages in the textbook, the teacher can assign extensive reading materials with an appropriate text length and level that align with the unit topic to promote word recognition, create opportunities for comprehension skills practice, build students’ text structure awareness and reading fluency, and motivate students to