How to teach reading?

How to teach reading?

1. Extensive and intensive reading

   • Extensive reading
     • Extensive reading materials
       • Students need to 'read a lot'; we need to offer them a programme which includes appropriate materials, guidance, tasks and facilities, such as permanent or portable libraries of books.
     • Setting up a library
       • We should code them for level and genre so that students can easily identify what kind of books they are. The role of the teacher in extensive reading programmes: most students will not do a lot of extensive reading by themselves unless they are encouraged to do so by their teachers. Clearly, then, our role is crucial.
     • The role of the teacher in extensive reading programs
       • Teacher needs to promote reading and by our own espousal of reading as a valid occupation, persuade students of its benefits. Having persuaded our students of the benefits of extensive reading, we can organise reading programmes where we indicate to them how many books we expect them to making it clear that the choice is theirs, but that they can consult other students' reviews and comments to help them make that choice.
     • Extensive reading tasks
       • Students should be allowed to choose their own reading texts, following their own likes and interests, they will not all be reading the same texts at one.
         • Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher
           • We need to work to create interest in the topic and tasks. There are further roles we need to adopt when asking students to read intensively:
             • Organiser: We need to tell students exactly what their reading purpose is, give them clear instructions about how to achieve it and explain how long they have to do this.
             • Observer: when we ask students to read on their own, we need to give them space to do so. This means restraining ourselves from interrupting that reading, even though the temptation may be to add more information or instructions.
             • Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we can lead a feedback session to check that they have completed it successfully. We may start by having them compare their answers in pairs and then ask for answers from the class in general or from pairs in particular. Students often appreciate giving paired answers like this since, by sharing their knowledge, they are also sharing their responsibility for the answers.
             • Prompter: when students have read a text, we can prompt them to notice language features within it. We may also, as controllers, direct them to certain features of text construction, clarifying ambiguities and making them aware of issues of text structure which they had not come across previously.
         • Intensive reading: the vocabulary question
           • A common paradox in reading lessons is that while teachers are encouraging students to read for general understading, without worrying about the meaning of every single word, the students, on the other hand, are desperate to know what each individual word means. The majority of a lesson may be taken up in this way. We need, therefore, to limit the amount of time spent on vocabulary checking in the following ways:
             • Time limit: we can give a time limit of, say, five minutes for vocabulary enquiry, whether this involves dictionary use, language corpus searches or questions to the teacher.
             • Word/phrase limit: we can say that we will only answer questions about five or eight words or phrases.
             • Meaning consensus: we can get students to work together to search for and find word meanings.
         • Intensive reading: letting the student in
           • It is often the case that the comprehension tasks we ask students to do are based on tasks in a coursebook. In other words, the students are responding to what someone else has asked them to find out.

2. Types of reading activities

   • A conventional type of reading activity or test consists of a text followed by comprehension questions.
     • Answering comprehension questions
       • Answering comprehension questions 1: The answer is that their vocabulary simply echoes the text, while the grammar of both text and questions is fairly obvious and corresponds neatly, so that if you recognize the grammar context, you can simply slot in the appropriate vocabulary.
       • Answering comprehension questions 2: Interpretative questions often have more than one possible answer and can be used as a basis for discussion.
       • Answering comprehension questions 3: Whether you found the reading text easier to understand is more difficult to judge, since your level of English is obviously too high for this example; but for a learner, the passage would probably have been easier simply because of the preparation of topic and vocabulary which was provided through the questions.
     • Reading tasks other than questions
       • An example of a task not based on comprehension questions might be: giving the learners a set of titles together with a set of extracts from different newspaper articles or stories and asking them to match the titles to the appropriate extracts.
     • Alternative reading activities
       • Make a list of further possible reading activities, using different kinds of texts. These can be for different kinds of learners, or for specific class you are acquainted with. There are some ideas for reading activities like Pre.questions, Do-it-yourself questions, Provide titles, Summarize, Continue, Preface, Grabbed text, Mistakes in text, Comparison, Responding, Re-presentation of content.

3. Teaching reading: a comprehensive approach

   • What is sometimes termed the transactional teaching approach to strategy instruction has several characteristics that deserve attention.
     • 1. It is embedded in a content area so that students are learning strategies while they are engaged in their regular reading for a variety of purposes.
     • 2. Strategies are taught through direct explanation, teacher modeling, and feedback. Students are never in doubt as to what the strategies are, where and when they can be used, and how they are used.
     • 3. Strategies are constantly recycled over new texts and tasks. The students encounter individual strategies and groups of strategies time and time again.
     • 4. Strategy use develops over the long term. It is estimated that it takes several years for L2 students to develop as strategie readers.

4. Classroom processes

   • General strategy discussion
     • in general strategy discussion, reading strategies and strategic reading are defined. The teacher explains and the class discusses why learning and practicing strategies are important.
   • Teacher modeling
     • A second important feature of strategy instruction is regular teacher modeing of expert behavior.
   • Student reading
     • Reading and thinking aloud presents a very high cognitive load for L2 readers, yet not an impossible one.
   • Analysis of strategies
     • Analyzing the teacher's modeling behavior. By discussing what the teacher did, they will be better able to incorporate effective strategy use into their own reading.
   • Explanation/discussion of individual strategies
     • The process of strategy identification and feedback entails the naming of strategies and repeated explanations on the teacher's or students' parts as to how to use the strategies.