READING
Reading 6 – T/F/NG
PRE-CLASS TASKS
Self-regulate: khả năng tự chủ = autonomy
Spontaneous: bất chợt
Initiate: khởi nguồn
Trivial : small, not important
Curtail :cut
Contracted = diagnose
Predictor = indicator : biểu hiện
TASK 2: T/F/NG comparison
Decide whether the following statements are T/F/NG
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1. Japan imports more meat and steel than France. NG
Passage:
At the turn of the 20th century, agriculture and manufacturing were the two most important
sectors almost everywhere, accounting for about 70% of total output in Germany, Italy and
France, and 40-50% in America, Britain and Japan. International commerce was therefore
dominated by raw materials, such as wheat, wood and iron ore, or processed commodities
such as meet and steel.
2. In experiments, rats who ate what they wanted led shorter lives than rats on a low- calorie
diet. T
Passage:
Scientists first recognized the value of the practice more than 60 years ago, when they found
that rats fed a low-calorie diet lived longer on average than free-feeding rats and also had a
reduced incidence of conditions that become increasingly common in old age.
3. There is a wider range of achievement amongst English pupils studying maths than amongst
their Japanese counterparts. T
Passage:
Large sample international comparisons of pupils attainments in maths since the 1960s have
established that not only did Japanese pupils at age 13 have better scores of average
attainment, but there was also a larger proportion of 'low' attainers in England, where,
incidentally, the variation in attainment scores was much greater.
2
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T/F/NG COMPARISON PRACTICE
4. Private schools in Japan are more modern and spacious than state-run lower
secondary schools. F
Passage
Lower secondary schools in Japan cover three school years, from the seventh grade (age
13) to the ninth grade (age 15). Virtually all pupils at this stage attend state schools: only
3 per cent are in the private sector. Schools are usually modern in design, set well back
from the road and spacious inside.
5. Computers are better than humans at detecting faults.
Passage:
Inspection technology allows more than 100 million measurements a second to be made
across the ribbon, locating flaws the unaided eye would be unable to see.
6. In 1970s, illiterate women had approximately the same levels of infant mortality as
those who had learnt to read in primary school.
Passage
In the late 1970s, the infant mortality rate for the children of illiterate mothers was
around 110 deaths per thousand live births. At this point in their lives, those mothers
who later went on to learn to read had a similar level of child mortality (105/1000). For
women educated in primary school, however, the infant mortality rate was significantly
lower, at 80 per thousand.
PRACTICE
READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILDREN'S PLAY
1. Capacity
2. Rules
3. Cities
4. Traffic
5. Crime
6. Competition
7. Evidence
8. Life
Brick by brick, six-year-old Alice is building a magical kingdom. Imagining fairy-tale turrets and
fire-breathing dragons, wicked witches and gallant heroes, she's creating an enchanting world.
Although she isn't aware of it, this fantasy is helping her take her first steps towards her
capacity for creativity and so it will have important repercussions in her adult life.
Minutes later, Alice has abandoned the kingdom in favour of playing schools with her younger
brother. When she bosses him around as his 'teacher', she's practising how to regulate her
emotions through pretence. Later on, when they tire of this and settle down with a board game,
she's learning about the need to follow rules and take turns with a partner.
'Play in all its rich variety is one of the highest achievements of the human species,' says Dr
David Whitebread from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. 'It
underpins how we develop as intellectual, problem-solving adults and is crucial to our success
as a highly adaptable species.'
Recognising the importance of play is not new: over two millennia ago, the Greek philosopher
Plato extolled its virtues as a means of developing skills for adult life, and ideas about play-
based learning have been developing since the 19th century.
But we live in changing times, and Whitebread is mindful of a worldwide decline in play,
pointing out that over half the people in the world now live in cities. 'The opportunities for free
play, which I experienced almost every day of my childhood, are becoming increasingly scarce,'
he says. Outdoor play is curtailed by perceptions of risk to do with traffic, as well as parents'
increased wish to protect their children from being the victims of crime, and by the emphasis
on 'earlier is better' which is leading to greater competition in academic learning and schools.
International bodies like the United Nations and the European Union have begun to develop
policies concerned with children's right to play, and to consider implications for leisure facilities
and educational programmes. But what they often lack is the evidence to base policies on.
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'The type of play we are interested in is child-initiated, spontaneous and unpredictable- but, as
soon as you ask a five-year-old "to play", then you as the researcher have intervened,' explains
Dr Sara Baker. 'And we want to know what the long-term impact of play is. It's a real challenge.'
Dr Jenny Gibson agrees, pointing out that although some of the steps in the puzzle of how and
why play is important have been looked at, there is very little data on the impact it has on the
child's later life.
Now, thanks to the university's new Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and
Learning (PEDAL), Whitebread, Baker, Gibson and a team of researchers hope to provide
evidence on the role played by play in how a child develops.
'A strong possibility is that play supports the early development of children's self-control,'
explains Baker. 'This is our ability to develop awareness of our own thinking processes - it
influences how effectively we go about undertaking challenging activities.'
In a study carried out by Baker with toddlers and young pre-schoolers, she found that children
with greater self-control solved problems more quickly when exploring an unfamiliar set-up
requiring scientific reasoning. 'This sort of evidence makes us think that giving children the
chance to play will make them more successful problem-solvers in the long run.'
If playful experiences do facilitate this aspect of development, say the researchers, it could be
extremely significant for educational practices, because the ability to self-regulate has been
shown to be a key predictor of academic performance.
Gibson adds: 'Playful behaviour is also an important indicator of healthy social and emotional
development. In my previous research, I investigated how observing children at play can give us
important clues about their well-being and can even be useful in the diagnosis of
neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.'
Whitebread's recent research has involved developing a play-based approach to supporting
children's writing. 'Many primary school children find writing difficult, but we showed in a
previous study that a playful stimulus was far more effective than an instructional one.' Children
wrote longer and better-structured stories when they first played with dolls representing
characters in the story. In the latest study, children first created their story with Lego*, with
similar results. 'Many teachers commented that they had always previously had children saying
they didn't know what to write about. With the Lego building, however, not a single child said
this through the whole year of the project.'
Whitebread, who directs PEDAL, trained as a primary school teacher in the early 1970s, when,
as he describes, 'the teaching of young children was largely a quiet backwater, untroubled by
any serious intellectual debate or controversy.' Now, the landscape is very different, with hotly
debated topics such as school starting age.
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'Somehow the importance of play has been lost in recent decades. It's regarded as something
trivial, or even as something negative that contrasts with "work". Let's not lose sight of its
benefits, and the fundamental contributions it makes to human achievements in the arts,
sciences and technology. Let's make sure children have a rich diet of play experiences.'
*Lego: coloured plastic building blocks and other pieces that can be joined together
Questions 1-8
Complete the notes below
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-8
on your answer sheet. Children's play building a 'magical kingdom' may help develop
1 ...........................................
International policies on children's play Uses
of children's play
board games involve 2 ........................................... and turn-taking Recent changes affecting
children's play populations of 3 ........................................... have grown opportunities for free
play are limited due to
-fear of 4 ...........................................
-fear of 5 ...........................................
-increased 6 ........................................... in schools it is difficult to find
7 ........................................... to support new policies research needs to study
the impact of play on the rest of the child's 8 ...............
1. T/F/NG REGULAR PRACTICE
9. Children with good self-control are known to be likely to do well at school later on.
10. The way a child plays may provide information about possible medical problems. T
11. Playing with dolls was found to benefit girls' writing more than boys' writing.
12. Children had problems thinking up ideas when they first created the story with Lego.
13. People nowadays regard children's play as less significant than they did in the past.
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HOMEWORK
THE POWER OF PLAY
Virtually every child, the world over, plays. The drive to play is so intense that children will do
so in any circumstances, for instance when they have no real toys, or when parents do not
actively encourage the behavior. In the eyes of a young child, miming, pretending, and building
are fun. Researchers and educators know that these playful activities benefit the development of
the whole child across social, cognitive, physical, and emotional domains. Indeed, play is such an
instrumental component to healthy child development that the United Nations High Commission
on Human Rights (1989) recognized play as a fundamental right of every child.
Yet, while experts continue to expound a powerful argument for the importance of play in
children's lives, the actual time children spend playing continues to decrease. Today, children
play eight hours less each week than their counterparts did two decades ago (Elkind 2008).
Under pressure of rising academic standards, play is being replaced by test preparation in
kindergartens and grade schools, and parents who aim to give their preschoolers a leg up are led
to believe that flashcards and educational 'toys' are the path to success. Our society has created a
false dichotomy between play and learning.
Through play, children learn to regulate their behavior, lay the foundations for later learning in
science and mathematics, figure out the complex negotiations of social relationships, build a
repertoire of creative problem-solving skills, and so much more. There is also an important role
for adults in guiding children through playful learning opportunities.
Full consensus on a formal definition of play continues to elude the researchers and theorists who
study it. Definitions range from discrete descriptions of various types of play such as physical,
construction, language, or symbolic play (Miller & Almon 2009), to lists of broad criteria, based
on observations and attitudes, that are meant to capture the essence of all play behaviors (e.g.
Rubin et al. 1983).
A majority of the contemporary definitions of play focus on several key criteria. The founder of
the National Institute for Play, Stuart Brown, has described play as 'anything that spontaneously
is done for its own sake'. More specifically, he says it 'appears purposeless, produces pleasure
and joy, [and] leads one to the next stage of mastery' (as quoted in Tippett 2008). Similarly,
Miller and Almon (2009) say that play includes 'activities that are freely chosen and directed by
children and arise from intrinsic motivation'. Often, play is defined along a continuum as more or
less playful using the following set of behavioral and dispositional criteria (e.g. Rubin et al.
1983):
Play is pleasurable: Children must enjoy the activity or it is not play. It is intrinsically motivated:
Children engage in play simply for the satisfaction the behavior itself brings. It has no
extrinsically motivated function or goal. Play is process oriented: When children play, the means
are more important than the ends. It is freely chosen, spontaneous and voluntary. If a child is
pressured, they will likely not think of the activity as play. Play is actively engaged: Players must
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be physically and/or mentally involved in the activity. Play is non-literal. It involves make-
believe.
According to this view, children's playful behaviors can range in degree from 0% to 100%
playful. Rubin and colleagues did not assign greater weight to any one dimension in determining
playfulness; however, other researchers have suggested that process orientation and a lack of
obvious functional purpose may be the most important aspects of play (e.g. Pellegrini 2009).
From the perspective of a continuum, play can thus blend with other motives and attitudes that
are less playful, such as work. Joan Goodman (1994) suggested that hybrid forms of work and
play are not a detriment to learning; rather, they can provide optimal contexts for learning. For
example, a child may Unlike play, work is typically not viewed as enjoyable and it is
extrinsically motivated (i.e. it is goal oriented). Researcher be engaged in a difficult, goal-
directed activity set up by their teacher, but they may still be actively engaged and intrinsically
motivated. At this mid-point between play and work, the child's motivation, coupled with
guidance from an adult, can create robust opportunities for playful learning.
Critically, recent research supports the idea that adults can facilitate children's learning while
maintaining a playful approach in interactions known as 'guided play' (Fisher et al. 2011). The
adult's role in play varies as a function of their educational goals and the child's developmental
level (Hirsch-Pasek et al. 2009).
Guided play takes two forms. At a very basic level, adults can enrich the child's environment by
providing objects or experiences that promote aspects of a curriculum. In the more direct form of
guided play, parents or other adults can support children's play by joining in the fun as a co-
player, raising thoughtful questions, commenting on children's discoveries, or encouraging
further exploration or new facets to the child's activity. Although playful learning can be
somewhat structured, it must also be child-centered (Nicolopolou et al. 2006). Play should stem
from the child's own desire.
Both free and guided play are essential elements in a child-centered approach to playful learning.
Intrinsically motivated free play provides the child with true autonomy, while guided play is an
avenue through which parents and educators can provide more learning experiences. In either
case, play should be actively engaged, it should be predominantly child-directed, and it must be
fun.
Questions 32-36
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In
boxes 32-36 on your answer sheet, write
YES/ NO/ NOT GIVEN
32 Children need toys in order to play.
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33 It is a mistake to treat play and learning as separate types of activities.
34 Play helps children to develop their artistic talents.
35 Researchers have agreed on a definition of play.
36 Work and play differ in terms of whether or not they have a target.
Questions 37-40
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes
3740 on your answer sheet.
GUIDED PLAY
In the simplest form of guided play, an adult contributes to the environment in which the child
is playing. Alternatively, an adult can play with a child and develop the play, for instance by
37 ........................................... the child to investigate different aspects of their game. Adults
can help children to learn through play, and may make the activity rather structured, but it
should still be based on the child's 38 ........................................... to play.
Play without the intervention of adults gives children real 39 ........................................... ; with
adults, play can be 40 ................. targeted.......................... at particular goals. However, all
forms of play should be an opportunity for children to have fun.
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