Types of reading and reading strategies

It is known that teaching English comprises of four main skills and sub skills. According to Alderson, ‘The notion of skills and subskills . . . is enormously pervasive and influential, despite the lack of clear empirical justification’. As for the definition of skills, there are many different versions in the research literature and teaching materials. Richards and Schmidt provide a definition that seems to us to reflect current thinking in that a skill is ‘an acquired ability to perform an activity well, usually one that is made up of a number of coordinated processes’.

In language teaching, skills are often discussed in terms of four different modes – that is, reading, listening, speaking and writing. As a skill, reading is clearly one of the most important; in fact, in many instances around the world, we may argue that reading is the most important language skill, particularly in cases where students have to read English material for their own specialist subject but may never have to speak the language. English has also been the main driving language of the Internet. Though multimedia-based interaction over the Internet is becoming common nowadays in a resource-rich environment, basic Internet communication continues to assume reading skills as the primary mode of communication. Furthermore, from a language acquisition point of view, reading can be a major source of comprehensible input especially in countries where

English is rarely used outside the classroom. While conducting reading classes we should focus mainly on reading principles.

• 1)    Teachers should think over choosing reading passages that provide learners with the way of questioning and interacting with the text.

• 2)    Some reading materials are constructed along the lines that the learners bring not only background knowledge to reading but emotional (affective) responses as well, and will want to talk about their reactions to various texts

• 3)    One effective way of developing reading skills, which gives the learner a reason for reading, is to use the information gap principle often associated with communicative language teaching. In the materials that use information gap principle, the information required for the completion of a target task is distributed among two or more sources. Each subgroup only has part of the information required to complete the task. The subgroups consequently have to exchange their information so that the information gap is filled and the target task completed. This activity links reading with other forms of communication, for example, speaking/discussion or listening/writing, and can thus provide a reading-driven integration of the language skills.

• 4)    Practising specific strategies such as skimming/scanning with a particular text. The idea behind this is to enable the learner to read and select specific information at the expense of other (redundant) information.

• 5)    In some instances, depending on the learners and their proficiency, it is feasible to ask the learners themselves to provide reading texts or to research their own material for analysis and discussion in class, particularly in an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) context. Learners often need to read through a lot of material before they select an appropriate piece of material or article.

In some cases teachers may want to organize reading lessons and design their own material. Nunan (1999) considers five essential steps involved in designing reading courses:

• 1    Decide the overall purpose of the reading course within a wider pedagogical framework.

• 2    Identify the types of texts and tasks that the course requires.

• 3    Identify the linguistic elements to be covered (consider what is going to be important: grammatical items/lexis/discourse/specific purpose etc.).

• 4    Link reading to other language skills where pertinent (reading as a monoskill is only taught in some very narrow-angle library language situations. Hence, it is useful to think how reading can usefully be integrated with the other language skills. There two main types reading: intensive and extensive. Extensive reading can be defined as reading for pleasure. Teachers may encourage their students for extensive reading through different methods. Organizing readers’ club or setting up libraries is the best way to motive students for extensive reading. Intensive reading is when reading is conducted for improving reading skills. This type of reading is usually teacher-guided. There have been designed a series of activities for intensive reading. Here below we can describe some of them.

Wall reading. These reading exercises can be conducted in small groups with different reading passages. Starting from 3 to 8 pieces of reading text is hanged on the different parts of the wall of the classroom. Students are given a series of questions and they are told to go round the classroom in order to find the answers to the given questions. As soon as they finish, they compare their answers with peers. Next exercise can be filling in the gaps. Again, students go round the classroom to read the text and fill in the gaps. This kind of reading exercises is good for kinesthetic learners. Going around the classroom in order to read the text gives students a chance to move and it is better than sitting in one place.