Making connections, or les liens, is a reading strategy that I taught my class this week. It is important that students are able to relate to the text that they are reading. Making connections will help with reading comprehension, especially when students are reading in the target language because it will help them to understand new words without having to seek out the help of their French-English dictionary. I focused on three types of connections: text to text, text to self and text to world. For text to text connections, students have to take a passage of the text they are reading and relate it to another book, story or article they have read before. Text to self connections are when the student relates the text to their own personal experiences. Text to world connections ask the student to dig deeper into their schema and relate what they are reading to world events, places and different cultures. Together as a class, we read an article about endangered sea turtles. I had the class make a chart that has two columns. The first column was "le texte dit..." and the other column was "Cela me rappelle....". The students had to fill the first column with passages, ideas and main points from the text, and in the second column they had to make their own connections. As I was teaching the lesson, I focused less on differentiating between the three types of connections and more on the quality of the students' responses and how they can improve their answers by providing more detail and using descriptive language. The Rainbow District School Board in Sudbury, Ontario has a website that helps parents learn about reading strategies. This website is useful for parents who are looking to help their child with their FSL reading homework and includes a reference sheet on making connections.
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