Reading Strategies Applied to a Reading Lesson About E-Commerce

Introduction:

After reading all the information regarding reading strategies, I decided to implement those guidelines in a reading lesson about E-Commerce, which I would use with my young adult students in the career of , since it was a topic they did not know much about and were interested in. So I designed some activities for them to learn new vocabulary, specific terminology as well as to understand the "e-method" of doing business.

Development of the Lesson:

I planned a lesson with four activities as learning process. To start with, we brought brainstorm ideas round the word "E-Commerce" onto the whiteboard in order to familiarize with the topic and get a general view of some new key words (such as e-marketing, computer networks, online transaction processing, electronic funds transfer, virtual banks, B2B, B2C, e-tailers, e-tails, etc) and relate them to vocabulary already known.

Secondly, I introduced the text to them and asked them to skim it so that they could have a general understanding of what E-Commerce involves. After that, I asked them some Yes/No short questions to check their comprehension of the whole text, for example: are E-Commerce and E-Marketing synonyms?, did E-Commerce start in the late 1970's?, is E-Commerce regulated?, etc.

Later, the students had to read the text again doing a bottom-up process to look for specific information regarding the types and business applications of E-Commerce, such as online shopping, order tracking, teleconferencing and online banking. With this information they answered True/False question using their thumbs up or down for each choice. Finally, they did a written activity in which they had to match each new term, phrase or expression with their corresponding technical meaning.

Students' Reaction & Personal Evaluation

At the end of the lesson, I asked my students their opinion about our class. I wanted to know how they felt, if they liked the way we worked, what they would change or improve of the lesson plan and what other topics made them burn with curiosity. Their response was very satisfactory and positive since they said that this was a practical topic to know about since by surfing the net, they always encountered different variants of E-Commerce. They also felt comfortable with the thumbs technique, especially those who are shy. They also suggested another topic to work on, INCOTERMS.

Conclusion

All in all, I believe that it was an interesting lesson because using Yes/No questions as a quick way to check their understanding enabled me to move on to the next level of comprehension, which I considered the most important, and where the thumbs technique worked fantastically.