HOW TO TEACH READING

HOW TO TEACH READING

1. This article is concerned with how to teach reading skills. It includes two main parts. The first part presents a theoretical background that deals with a definition of reading and the skills involved in this activity. The second part describes the procedures, techniques, and strategies used before, while, and after the students read the text.

2. Schema theory tries to explain how readers utilize prior knowledge to understand and get new information from the text (Rumelhart, 1980). The theory claims that written text does not carry meaning by itself. It only guides readers to retrieve or construct meaning from the structures or patterns of this prior knowledge.

3. Cognitive processing Top-down vs bottom-up processing

4. Top-down processing refers to the use of background knowledge to predict the meaning of the reading or listening text.

5. Bottom-up processing, however, relies on the actual words or sounds. That is, students construct meaning from the most basic units of language, including letters, letter clusters, and words.

   • To use the metaphor of the wall, with the top-down processing, you see the wall as a whole; you are not concerned with the different bricks that constitute the wall.
     • The interactive model
       • The interactive model (Rumelhart, 1977; Stanovich, 1980, cited in Abraham, 2000) stressed both what is on the written page and what a reader brings to it using both top-down and bottom-up skills
     • Intensive and extensive reading
       • refers to simply reading as much as possible, without concerning oneself with every detail. Occasional unknown words are not supposed to get too much attention because the focus is on the overall meaning.

6. How to teach reading skills In the classroom

7. Following the above theoretical background, while teaching reading skills we, as teachers, should respect certain fundamental principles.

   • Principles of teaching reading
     • 1. Reading is a purposeful enterprise
     • 2. Appropriateness to students’ level
     • 3. Vocabulary knowledge
     • 4. Integration of skills
     • 5. Reading skills
     • 6. Reading strategies
     • 7. Text type
     • 8. Reading a lot

8. HOW TO TEACH READING SKILLS

   • depends on which objectives the teacher aims at developing in his/her students and on how lesson plans are structured. To this effect, teachers must make decisions about the objectives of their reading comprehension lesson.
   • Pre-reading stage
     • According to the constructivists, we construct new knowledge by relying on our prior knowledge. Being able to decode the information from the text is insufficient. Teachers should encourage learners to utilize their own world knowledge and worldview to make sense of the text.

9. Brainstorming

10. Discussions

11. Pictures

12. Pictionary

13. Predicting