Ted Power
English Language Learning and Teaching

Teaching L2 reading

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Classroom activities: skills needed for reading different texts-types

A. PREDICTION:

  1. What is coming next?
  2. Anticipation questions (Give title: "Women in Africa". Ask students to anticipate the questions they think the article may answer.
  3. Pre-questions focussing on global function / most important aspect
  4. Surveying a book using index, chapter, paragraph headings (read topic sentences)
  5. Completing sentences: It was a lovely day so/but

B. SKIMMING (Rapid reading for overall gist and to extract specific information)

C. SCANNING (a passage for specific information) - timed activities with specific questions.

D. COHESION The way in which the forms of the language are used to tie ideas together, to build up stretches of text. Cataphora, Anaphora, Logical Connectors, Substitute words (different ways of saying the same thing), Related words

Related words (Lexical sets = collocation), questions about reference words, jumbled sentences, invent paragraph jigsaws (leave out one paragraph), Cloze tests are a good way of testing cohesion links within a text.

E. COHERENCE The way in which arguments are linked and developed in terms of the ideas they convey. See "From Paragraph To Essay". Organisation is * Chronological * Problem/hypothesis *Experiment/conclusion

F. INFERENCE & INTERPRETATION: students apply their knowledge of real world to what is stated as well as what is implied (but not stated).

QUESTIONS TO BE CONSIDERED:

  1. What do we teach? CAPITALS. TYPOGRAPHICAL VARIATIONS or HANDWRITING.
  2. How are we going to teach them to read? Whole word approach, phonics, I.T.A.?
  3. What is learning dependent upon?

Rules to bear in mind when planning the teaching programme:

  1. The law of experience: doing something makes it likely we will remember it. First impressions are the most lasting.
  2. The law of frequency: the more often we do, the more likely we will remember it.
  3. The law of recency: the more recently we have done something the more likely we are to recall it
  4. The law of relevance: select lesson content which is relevant to your student's immediate language needs
    (This assumes that you have discovered what those needs are, and have the resources to address them).

The teacher's job is to produce an interesting lesson respecting the maturity level of the student. Note: failure of many reading schemes to interest adults.

For a reading scheme with an acceptable maturity-level for teenagers and adults try:

  • Graded Readers (Oxford Bookworms) Headwords:
    Stage 1: 400 | Stage 2: 700 | Stage 3: 1,000 | Stage 4: 1,400 | Stage 5: 1,800 | Stage 6: 2,500
    Beginners-----Elementary-----Pre-intermediate----Intermediate---High Intermediate---Advanced

    • Useful books on the teaching of reading in English as a second or foreign language

    PREDICTION, SKIMMING & SCANNING

    Developing Reading Skills by Francoise Grellet (Cambridge University Press 1981)
    Teaching Reading Skills in A Foreign Language by Christine Nuttall (Macmillan ELT - 3rd edition: 2005)
    Practical Faster Reading: an Intermediate / Advanced Course in Reading and Vocabulary by Gerald and Vivienne Mosback (Cambridge University Press 1976)
    Reading in The Language Class by Eddie Williams (Macmillan Educational 1986)
    Reading and Thinking in English - Discovering Discourse TB by Tom McArthur (Oxford University Press 1979)

    COHESION AND COHERENCE

    Developing Reading Skills by Francoise Grellet (Cambridge University Press 1981)
    From Paragraph To Essay - Developing Composition Writing by Maurice Imhoof and Herman Hudson (Longman 1975)
    Cohesion in English by M.A.K. Halliday and Hassan Ruqaiya (Longman 1976)

    INFERENCE AND INTERPRETATION

    Reading in a Foreign Language edited by J. Charles Alderson & A. H. Urquhart (Longman 1984)
    See especially chapter 3 (Cultural Knowledge and Reading - by Maragaret S. Steffersen and Chitra Joag-Dev) and chapter 12 (Case studies of ninth grade readers - by Carol Hosenfeld)

    QUESTIONS TO BE CONSIDERED

    For SCRIPT-RELATED ISSUES, see this website's section on basic literacy

    For the laws of experience and frequency read the chapters on the behaviourist and cognitive approaches to language learning in
    Julian Dakin's The Language Laboratory and Language Learning (Longman 1973). Alternatively, read about the same approaches in
    Henry Stern's Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Applied Linguistic Research (Oxford University Press 1983) or consult the relevant chapters in Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2nd edition) by Jack Richards and Theodore Rodgers (Cambridge University Press 2001)

    For the law of recency, consult books on memory and study skills such as
    Tony Buzan's Use Your Head or
    The Speed Reading Book: The Revolutionary Approach to Increasing Reading Speed, Comprehension and General Knowledge

    For the law of relevance, ESL or ESP curriculum planners should be familiar with works on functional syllabus design:
    John Munby's Communicative Syllabus Design: A Sociolinguistic Model for Designing the Content of Purpose-Specific Language Programmes (Cambridge University Press 1981) and T.C. Jupp's and Sue Hodlin's
    Industrial English - An Example of Theory and Practice in Functional Language Teaching for Elementary Learners (ELT/ESP) (Macmillan Heinemann ELT; 2nd edition: Dec 1978)
    Two more landmark publications in functional syllabus design were the Waystage 1990: Council of Europe Conseil de l'Europe: Council of Europe Conseil De L'Europe and Threshold 1990 syllabus specification, by J.A. Van Ek and J.L.M. Trim (originally published by Pergamon Press in 1979/1980; revised and corrected edition Cambridge University Press 1998).

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