This workshop is for upper secondary school teachers who teach reading comprehension in secondary schools. It is designed to broaden teacher knowledge of how cohesion in texts impact meaning and consequently empower their teaching technique and content for reading comprehesion lessons. This workshop will help the language teacher analyse the text-processing required to arrive at answers to reading comprehension questions. It will provide teachers with the tools to explain clearly to students with a step-by-step procedural method showing them literally the 'working' for the solution like a math question.This unique methodology is based  on research undertaken by Dr. Benjamin for an M.A in Applied Linguistics dissertation investigating the role of cohesive devices on the reading comprehension component of the Cambridge University ‘O’ Level English Paper 2. The reading comprehension questions and texts of the Papers were analysed to determine the linguistic skills involved in the text-processing required to arrive at the answer for each question. The findings demonstrated that knowledge of cohesive devices and how they impact meaning expressed in a text contributes significantly to  readers’ successful answering of comprehension questions. This workshop, the first in the series, is one of the most well-received workshops for participants who often marvel at the power of the approach.

AIM:

The aim of this workshop is to raise participants’ awareness of the role of the knowledge of cohesive devices as well as lexical knowledge and real world knowledge on the students' ability to answer reading comprehension questions in the ‘O’ Level English Paper 2 and consequently the implications to teaching of reading comprehension.

PROGRAMME OUTLINE:

1)  A review of related concepts.

2)  Presentation of sample analysis.

3)  Participants’ analysis and presentation.

4)  Presentation of research findings.

5) Pedagogical implications  & conclusion.