Reading in Action

READING IN ACTION

Reading in Action is a series of books, authored by Marcelo Andrade, stemming from the project titled ‘English Reading Programme for Seventh-Grade Students with Texts Developed According to Their Interests,’ which was funded by the Research Office of Universidad Austral de Chile through the Innovation-Oriented Research Grant Programme in Education.

This project aims to implement the reading comprehension model known as Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), developed by John Guthrie et al. (1993), which is characterised by:

(1) granting students choices and control over their reading topics,
(2) offering hands-on activities,
(3) selecting topics that are engaging to students, and
(4) facilitating opportunities for collaborative work and learning from the texts they read.

In addition, when using the different texts available on this website, students will be able to develop reading strategies, such as activating prior knowledge about a topic, formulating questions, searching for information, summarising, using graphic organisers, and identifying the structure of the text.

Resources

On this website, Reading in Action offers the following resources for students and teachers:

Four books featuring texts developed according to the interests of seventh-grade students, as expressed in a survey conducted in various schools in the Province of Llanquihue.

All comprehension and reading activities designed to foster the targeted skills in the students, included in the books.

The theoretical framework supporting the interactive model of reading comprehension used in the texts.

Audio recordings for each text.

A methodological and didactic guide for English teachers, including guidelines for classroom work with the texts.

About the author

Marcelo Andrade holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Universidad Austral de Chile and a master’s degree in education. He has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in English Language Teaching in Puerto Montt, his hometown, and has served as a professor at Universidad Austral de Chile in the same city since 2014. He has been a presenter at both national and international conferences on English language teaching and has initiated projects aimed at fostering innovation in higher education pedagogy.

In the field of English phonetics and phonology, he is the author of the works Features of Connected Speech and Pronunciación del inglés.

In 2013, he received a scholarship from the U.S. Embassy to participate in the Young Adult Literature course at the University of Michigan.

He has been training teachers in various initiatives of the Ministry of Education through the English Opens Doors programme since 2004.

Marcelo has served as an examiner and team leader for the University of Cambridge English examinations through the British Institute of Punta Arenas for the past 16 years.

In this project, the author applies the experience gained from creating two previous graded readers: Myths and Legends from Chiloé and The Mapuche Culture, written for eighth and eleventh graders, respectively, and adds a new approach to the development of reading skills in English as a foreign language.