Building Reading Literacy

A core goal of modern education is to cultivate well-rounded individuals who are ready to interact with the outside world, to self-education and self-development. Reading literacy is fundamental to achieving this skill.

Developing reading literacy in the classroom isn’t just about comprehension; it’s about fostering critical thinking, analytical skills, and emotional intelligence.

To help teachers put these principles into practice, Örken East Kazakhstan Regional Scientific and Methodological Center for Informatization and Education Development of Education Administration of East Kazakhstan region and Mara I. Mamiyeva, a senior lecturer of East Kazakhstan regional branch of Orleu National Centre for Professional Development JSC Institute for Professional Development of Educators, conducted a webinar for teachers of the Russian language and literature of the region.

The webinar focused on developing semantic reading skills in literature lessons in the 9th grade when studying the work of A.S. Pushkin “The Queen of Spades” as a case study. The participants worked through exercises covering different levels of reading literacy: information search and extraction, integration and interpretation, comprehension and evaluation.

The webinar’s content addressed common classroom issues: students struggling to extract key information from the proposed text, identify main points, and find it difficult to formulate the topic and idea of the text. To tackle this, the webinar featured exercises on text annotation, collaborative questioning using the “arch” technique in teaching students to formulate questions based on relevance, usefulness, and quality, and the “zoned reading” method for analyzing text.

Building strong reading literacy requires dedicated efforts and time. Employing diverse methods and approaches will enable students not only to read, but also to understand, analyze, and interpret information - essential skills for success in today’s world.