Reading: The Distance Delta

Reading
The Distance Delta
© International House London and the British Council

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Reading
Summary
You will find that much of what is said here links to what was said in the input on listening
and writing and both written and spoken discourse, but we will be examining issues that
pertain particularly to the skill of reading.
We will be focusing on what reading is, and what an effective reader is. We will be looking at
problems that reading can pose for learners, and at strategies we can focus on in the
classroom to help students become more effective readers. We will be evaluating
coursebook reading tasks, and discussing coursebook and authentic reading materials. We
will be identifying appropriately articulated overall and stage reading aims. Finally we will be
addressing the importance of encouraging reading outside of class, how that can be
achieved and the use of supplementary readers in particular.
Objectives
By the end of the input you will:
 Be familiar with terminology associated with reading.
 Be familiar with what effective reading involves and the problems that students are
likely to have with being effective readers in English.
 Have thought about why reading is taught in class, whether, in fact, we can ‘teach’
reading and what reading strategies are.
 Be able to articulate appropriate and principled reading aims.
 Have considered coursebook and authentic reading materials.
 Have analysed your own practice and thought about alternatives.
 Have thought about the place of reading in a historical context.
 Have focused on promoting reading outside the classroom and using readers.
 Have been introduced to current debates regarding reading.
1 © Copyright The Distance Delta

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Contents
1. A Definition of Reading
2. What Kinds of Reading Texts are there?
3. Why and How Do People Read?
4. A Brief Historical Perspective
5. Thinking about Text Exploitation
6. What Does Effective Reading Involve for any Reader?
7. What Affects our Students’ English Reading Ability?
8. Current Issues in Teaching Reading
8.1. A Definition of Effective Reading
8.2. Enabling Students: Skills or Strategies?
8.3. Atomistic or Holistic, Testing or Developing?
9. Articulating Reading Lesson Aims
10. A Reading Focus
11. Finding Materials for Reading
11.1. Authenticity and Authentic Materials
12. Types of Reading Tasks
13. Readers and Extensive Reading
13.1. Supplementary Readers
14. Conclusion
15. Terminology Review
Reading

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1. A Definition of Reading
When defining what reading is, it is likely that we can immediately agree on certain things:
1. It is an activity involving focus on written text.
2. The reader approaches the text with purposeful intent to extract meaning regardless of
any more specific reason for doing the reading.
3. The reader may respond to the content.
There are other aspects to a definition of reading as well, which are crucial to understanding
current thinking about reading:
4. It is a communicative activity with interaction between reader, writer and text.
5. The interaction is not necessarily easy or straightforward.
6. Reading is a process.
The first point is quite self-explanatory: in contrast to the historical definition, reading is no
longer considered a passive mental exercise involving eye movement. It is now accepted as
an active process. The reader may ask him/herself questions about the text; the reader may
formulate questions they want the text to answer; the reader may carry on a dialogue with
the author, etc. The author, on the other hand, has written the text to communicate
something with the reader. This may or may not be easily communicated, and it may or may
not be what the reader understands, hence the complicated nature of the interaction. Thus,
reading is a process of the writer attempting to communicate something with the reader
and the reader participating in the communicative process by trying to understand.
2. What Kinds of Reading Texts are there?

If you make a list of all the things that you have read in the last couple of days, you should
have an extensive list of different types of text perhaps including things like emails, texts,
newspaper and magazine articles, adverts, scholarly texts, coursebook and teaching
materials and readers, a novel, poetry, a recipe or an instruction manual.
These different text types are different genres and they have different vocabulary, grammar,
discourse and stylistic conventions. The important thing is that you can recognise differences
in genre and can identify characteristics of at least the most common. The characteristics of
different genres are not universal, and the linguistic, stylistic clues we use to interpret a text
are not necessarily obvious or known to students, thus increasing the difficulty they have in
understanding a text. The conclusion must be that helping students identify the
characteristics of a good range of genres is crucial to enabling their development as effective
readers.
Please look at the discussion and reading on genre in the input on Written Discourse as we
will not be discussing it further here.
3. Why and How Do People Read?

There are obviously a myriad of reasons for reading, and the reason you read something
may differ from the reason someone else reads the same text.

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As practising teachers you are aware that how you read the different texts was largely
determined by what you expected or needed to get out of them. We do not, for example
read a TV Guide in the same way that we read a newspaper article or a novel; in other
words, the way we approach and exploit different types of text will be different. We are
most likely to scan, to glance quickly through, the Wednesday evening TV schedule to find a
programme that looks of interest; once we find one we may well skim the write-up about it,
or read it quickly, to confirm whether or not we want to watch it. In the case of a newspaper
article we may read it just to get the gist, or overall/general impression of the writer’s
opinion or an understanding of what the writer is saying; we may also read it carefully to
identify specific arguments, facts or information in detail. When reading a novel, we may
well read carefully and in depth for meaning, or to appreciate aspects of the writer’s style.
This is another way of reading for specific information.
You will also have seen the terms intensive and extensive applied to ways of approaching a
text (see the input on Listening previously in the course materials). Historically, approaching
it intensively has been used to mean a careful scrutiny of the content of a short text usually
for specific information or for a specific language focus; an extensive focus has involved
reading long(er) texts. The use of the terms has changed somewhat. In the current
classroom, intensive reading relates to a focus on a shorter text in a variety of ways
(skimming, scanning) for a variety of reasons (specific information, gist) while extensive
reading happens outside of class time. Students are encouraged to read longer texts on their
own for pleasure, relaxation, specific information and/or gist; what is important is that
increasingly students are encouraged to make their own decisions about what they want to
get out of the text.
To recap then, how we read is informed by why we are reading and vice versa. This has
implications for the ELT classroom. It is important that we consider why our students wish to
read in English generally. Do they want to read for the same reason or reasons in English as
they do in their own language? What is their motivation for learning to read in English? Is
reading something they expect to do simply as part of the process of learning a new
language, something they need to survive, or is it something they have little opportunity or
expectation of doing outside school? The answers to these questions can then inform
decisions we make about encouraging students to read in the ways that they need, and
negotiating otherwise. Because reading is a purposeful activity, it is imperative that we find
answers to these questions so we can try to ensure informed classroom practice which has
relevance to our students.
4. A Brief Historical Perspective

In a Grammar Translation classroom, students’ language learning is based on texts which
they read usually aloud but also silently. The work is first and foremost language-focused,
but also with a focus on meaning as students work in both first and new language with the
text. Learning is assessed in terms of accuracy.
In a strict Audio-Lingual classroom, reading is discouraged, and students are expected to

learn by hearing and repeating target language and dialogues to a good standard of
accuracy.
At the start of the Communicative Approach, reading texts regain importance. Students are
encouraged to silently and selectively read texts to get information to complete tasks which
often involve working with other people.

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Later in the Communicative Approach, reading is used both to raise language awareness and
reinforce language passively and actively, and to practise/test students’ comprehension of
the information in the text. It is considered one of the four skills for learners to learn so that
their acquisition of the language is balanced.
In today’s classroom, reading is a skill with which learners are encouraged to be autonomous
so the focus of the classroom is on enabling students to be more effective readers.
5. Thinking about Text Exploitation

The previous task highlights how texts have historically been used to present or provide
practice of either grammar structure or, less commonly, vocabulary. This has carried on to
the present with the addition of some ‘reading skills practice’; we will return to this in more
detail in our discussion of tasks, in Section 12. We will now look briefly, however, at how
texts are often exploited in teaching materials at present. In order to make principled
decisions for students it is important that we are aware of what tasks are really asking
students to do.
Look at two coursebook samples below, the first from Reward Intermediate and the second
from New Headway Intermediate. Decide how they are being exploited: principally for
language or principally for increasing student confidence with reading, for example. If you
feel that a text is being used for ‘skills development,’ identify which skills are being
addressed. Is this part of systematic development of the skills or do the activities ‘test’
student use of the skills?

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Sample 1

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Greenall, S. 1995 Reward Intermediate Heinemann (pp38-39)

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This reading focus appears to be aimed at developing students’ reading ability. The students
do a series of language activities (vocabulary in particular) which would get them thinking
about the content and focus of the text generally i.e. the activities function to activate their
schemata related to the topic and more specifically their ideas about specific aspects of the
topic. Two of the reading tasks focus the students on forming an opinion about who the text
is written for, the writer’s opinion about the topic and the tone of the writing. The final
reading task falls between skills development and language work: it gives the students
practice of understanding unknown vocabulary in context, again a reading development aim,
but also develops students’ linguistic repertoire.
In general in this book, the texts are followed by a variety of activities, most often
comprehension. There is a regular, but not frequent, focus on working out the meaning of
vocabulary in context, but that appears to be the only regular developmental work. The
texts are always in units with an overt language focus, and they are often referred to in the
language focus, so that texts ultimately are almost always exploited for language and have
been chosen on this basis.

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Sample 2
Soars, L. & J. 1996 New Headway Intermediate Oxford University Press (pp56-57)
This text is used as a context for a language presentation/revision. While there are a few
questions to check students’ comprehension, the text is only exploited for language.
In general, texts are used two ways in this book: language is regularly contextualised in
reading texts and as above there is a comprehension check associated with this use of the
text; there are texts used for reading as well, longer texts with a comprehension focus.
There may or may not be a development focus in these texts. If there is, it often has to do
with developing students’ ability to guess at the meaning of new words in context; students

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may also be asked to form opinions/draw conclusions about what was said or to make
predictions. One reading focus in particular gives students a choice about what they read
and asks them to form questions they want the text to answer.
6. What Does Effective Reading Involve?

Texts can be difficult for a variety of reasons, and readers reading in their first language
commonly use a series of strategies to help them identify or interpret the meaning in the
text. Writers assume that they share certain experiences and information about specific
topics and the world with their readers. If these things are not shared or if they have been
experienced and interpreted in very different ways, the text becomes much more difficult
for the reader to understand. There is also an assumption that reader and writer share the
same script/characters, punctuation conventions, and knowledge of the same grammar,
discourse and vocabulary and stylistic conventions.
With assumptions about shared knowledge of a topic or the world and with a reason for
reading, a reader approaches a text with certain expectations of what they will find there.
These expectations enable the reader to make predictions about and to draw inferences
from the text as a whole and about specific parts of it. The predictions and inferences, in
turn, guide the reading and reduce the reader’s processing load as the reader ‘chunks’
information into manageable units. In other words, by having a good idea of what to expect
(predicting content) and by having an idea of what s/he wants from a text, the reader can
organise information into what is familiar and what is unfamiliar so that s/he can focus more
efficiently on what is unfamiliar.
Effective reading also involves the reader simultaneously moving between top-down
processing of the content to bottom-up processing of the language in the text as is
necessary. Top-down processing involves the reader focusing on getting an overview of the
text, on getting the “big picture”, on understanding generally what is being said rather than
looking at the text at a micro level. In bottom-up processing, the reader stops and looks at
individual words or structures to understand what the writer is saying to facilitate
understanding at a more global level. It is the interaction of these two forms of processing
that is important, and an effective reader reads different texts in different ways and moves
between these two ways of processing information as the text, the knowledge s/he has of
the topic and the purpose for reading changes. This type of reading, where both top-down
and bottom-up processing occurs simultaneously, is termed interactive reading.
Finally, the importance of prediction in reading cannot be overestimated. Looking at the

following titles, you would bring differing levels knowledge, and therefore confidence, to
each text as well as have different purposes for reading. Which texts would you process in a
predominantly top-down way and which in a bottom-up fashion?
 Mean, Statistics in Research
 An insurance document
 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
 Mills and Boon, Too Hot to Handle
 A recipe for salmon en croute
 New Headway Intermediate, Unit 5

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You might say that reading a Mills and Boon romance involves little bottom-up processing; a
poem from Birthday Letters may well necessitate a combination of both top-down and
bottom-up. The recipe will demand careful bottom-up reading if it is the first time that you
have made the dish; if you are making it for the umpteenth time, you will probably read the
recipe just to remind yourself of the key steps you need to remember to carry it out. Thus,
the more knowledge you share with the writer and have of the type of text you are reading,
the more familiarity you will have with the language and content you expect to find, the
more realistic your expectations are of what you do find in the text and so the better your
predictions are regarding that type of text; you are able to move between top-down and
bottom-up processing effectively and efficiently in order to achieve your reading purpose.
7. What Affects our Students’ English Reading Ability?

Let us assume that our students are reasonably proficient readers in their own language,
although this is not an assumption that you will always be able to make, and so employ the
strategies for interpreting and decoding text described above.
Your list may have included some or all of the following factors:
 Topics are unfamiliar and/or inappropriate.
 Students do not have sufficient background information.
 Students’ level of language is not high enough.
 Students may not be able to apply reading strategies from their own language.
 Students may not be familiar with the script.
 Students may not be familiar with conventions of layout, punctuation, paragraphing.
 Students may find reading in the classroom off-putting.
 Students may read word by word only.
 Students may mouth words as they read or, as above, subvocalize.
 Students may translate as they read.
 Students may focus or get stuck on what they don’t know.
 Students may panic when confronted with text and task(s).
Let us look in more detail at some of these factors.
Topic: As stated above, having even limited knowledge of a topic gives readers expectations
which they want to be fulfilled by the text, and it allows them to make predictions about the
content of the text. Together these two things enable readers to chunk information, and to
identify what needs closer scrutiny and what needs less attention.
Background: Background information is another factor in the expecting, predicting,

recognising and inferring chain of skills. When we read we use a network of general
background information to help us comprehend. For example what the text looks like (hand
written, bold type, small print, lots of space, pictures) gives us information; likewise, the
scene the text calls up in our minds (a bar in Paris at about 5 pm; a bus journey in the Andes;

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on a boat in a typhoon in the China Sea; getting ready to walk through Petra) allows us to
make predictions about what we will read.
Schemata: It is believed that we organise the experiences we have had into mental
structures called schemata (or schema in the singular); when we read, our schemata are
activated and we use our experiences to enable us to interpret the text correctly. The
general situation of a three-star restaurant will provide enough background information to
help many people understand ‘course,’ for example. However, even very competent
language users can have difficulty when, usually for cultural reasons, they cannot use or
even identify, the background information; furthermore, misunderstanding is likely to occur
if inappropriate or incorrect background information is called up. A North American reading
about a fair in London will expect that agricultural products and crafts are on show or are for
sale and that there will be things to buy to eat or rides and competitions to take part in.
They will be confused to find that it is more likely to be simply different rides.
For further reading on schemata and their role in reading, please see Nuttall, pp7 - 8,
Silberstein, pp7 - 9 and Wallace, Ch. 5 (5.2).
Gaps in students’ schemata, knowledge of topics and background information result in their
finding that texts contain too much new information. This results in a reader who is unable
to infer or predict effectively. This in turn can lead to readers paying undue attention at
word level when their focus needs to be on the larger context to help them infer meaning. In
short, less schematic awareness requires more bottom-up processing. Students may also
lack effective strategies for interpreting meaning; previous and current learning experiences
may have focused students exclusively or predominantly on finding information in a text, but
not on any interpretation of the text, for example. This strict focus on finding information
and ‘right-or-wrong’ answers discourages development of interpretive and risk-taking
strategies.
Language Level: Students’ level of language is clearly a factor in their attempts to read
effectively. They may find words in the text they do not understand, and this often has a
negative effect on their confidence and their comprehension. Equally, they are likely to
interpret ‘How long are you here for?’ as the same as asking ‘How long have you been here?’
Language here is being used very broadly to include grammar, all aspects of lexis (spelling,
collocation, prefixes and/or suffixes, etc.) and discourse. But it is not knowledge of individual
items that enables students to be effective readers; it is familiarity with patterns.
Expectations of what words go together, what word is likely to follow another, how words
combine syntactically and how the text unfolds, all make processing texts easier for readers,
and lack of awareness of these linguistic patterns reduces readers’ abilities to predict, to
have realistic expectations, and/or to infer.
Discourse: Linked to a student’s command of language is his/her understanding of discourse

patterns, or in other words those connections between parts of the text above/beyond
individual sentence level. We will mention here a few crucial discourse features which
especially pertain to reading:
 Cohesive devices/discourse markers: the words that show relationships between

sentences such as ‘them’ ’those’ ‘her’ ‘the’ or ‘in contrast,’ ‘meanwhile,’ ‘afterwards’.
 Sequences: both of sentences and paragraphs which indicate relationships between

information and ideas. For example, ‘A storm blew up and the tanker sank’ indicates a
different relationship between the two actions compared with the one in ‘The tanker
sank and a storm blew up’.

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 Grammar: often has a discourse function and it is most obvious in for example, ‘I was in
pain. I’d slipped on the pavement and twisted my ankle as I fell.’ Here the second
sentence explains why the speaker was in pain; we know this partly because of the
sequence and partly because we expect the past perfect to be used to provide
explanations.
Being in Class: The classroom often has a strange effect on students. The strategies they use
in reading in their own language sometimes appear to be suspended, and the expectations
they would normally have about a text type they are familiar with do not seem to exist. This
is partly explained by the fact that reading in class is viewed as instructional, an activity that
the teacher focuses on and that students will be tested on. This results in different
expectations from those we have when we read for ourselves, and the summoning of
different schemata than what we normally use outside class when no one is monitoring our
reading or the correctness of our answers. It may also be that students regard reading in a
new language as necessitating new strategies.
The classroom has other effects on readers: there are distractions and tensions e.g. fears
associated with being asked questions one may not have the right answer to or reading to
time limits which are overly challenging.
Different Writing Conventions: Script and writing conventions including layout,

paragraphing and punctuation can increase student difficulty in understanding a text. Clearly
for students whose first language does not use Roman script, reading will be impossible until
they have some familiarity with it. For these students, hand-written texts can be especially
problematic although even printed text has sufficient variation in the form of some letters
(including capitalisation) that students can become confused between, for example, ‘g’ and
‘G’, or ‘a’ and ‘A’. Similarly, consider the difference in information conveyed between ‘My
sister, who works for Médecins San Frontiers, has a flat in Paris’ and ‘My sister who works
for Médecins San Frontiers has a flat in Paris’” In this case, the commas convey important
information to the reader about how many sisters the speaker has: one in the first sentence
and more than one in the second.
All of the above factors can result in our students having problems with reading in English;
once you have identified those affecting your students, it is obviously important to find ways
to help students overcome them.
8. Current Issues in Teaching Reading

8.1. A Definition of Effective Reading
Why do we teach reading?
 Because in class it adds to a balance of language systems and skills.
 Because learning a language means acquiring reading, as well as other, skills and
structure, lexis, etc.
 Because students expect to learn to read when they learn a new language.
 Because students need to learn to read in the language they are learning e.g. for their
jobs, to pass an examination etc.
 Because reading is a very effective means of learning language, and about language.

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 Because texts contextualise specific target language and this helps student
understanding.
Let us consider the last two points in the list in particular, however, as this is an area of some
debate in the ELT profession. There is no doubt that reading widely exposes the reader to a
range of language; it is generally held that this is an effective way of acquiring and/or
reinforcement of language. Readers see, and perhaps process, patterns of lexis and structure
which reinforce what they already know, or texts introduce them to new patterns. This view
has been summarised by Nuttall:
Language improvement is a natural by-product of reading, and a highly desirable one.
Nuttall, Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (2nd edition), p30
While improved knowledge of language may occur as a result of any reading focus, it should
not be the main aim of a ‘reading’ focus. There may be a language focus integrated, often as
a follow-up activity, so that language in context is highlighted; however, students read to
understand. It is unhelpful to have a first reading of a task focussing on language alone. It is
imperative to help students become effective readers, in other words to enable them to
make decisions about and to interact with the text, to understand the purpose of the text
and to extract meaning from it. Obviously, in order to do this, they will need to understand
language and how it conveys meaning. The focus on language is, as we have discussed
above, only one factor of the factors that affects students’ ability to read effectively.
Being an effective reader means being proficient with a process in real life i.e. outside the
classroom. It is a process of silently reading real and meaningful text with purpose, without
teacher assistance but interacting with the text by using textual and non-textual clues to
understand it, questioning, predicting, reacting, inferring, stopping and looking at things in
depth when necessary, and understanding what it is necessary to understand:
In contemporary approaches to reading, meaning is not seen as being fully present in a

text waiting to be decoded. Rather meaning is created through the interaction of
reader and text; developing metacognitive awareness is an appropriate goal of a
reading curriculum.
Silberstein, Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, pp7 – 9
Current thinking is that, as teachers, we cannot ‘teach’ effective reading. Rather, it is the
teachers’ responsibility to enable students to be more effective readers by making strategies
overt to students. Ultimately, it is the students’ responsibility to put into practice the
strategies they are made aware of or introduced to in reading lessons.
For further reading on this, you should read ‘A profile of an effective reading teacher’,
Richards, J. The Language Teaching Matrix.
8.2. Enabling Students: Skills or Strategies?

A second area of discussion and debate in the literature has to do with the terms ‘skills’ and
‘strategies’; these words describe ways students approach texts and processes they might
apply to text to extract meaning. For some writers, including Grellet and Munby, the words
are interchangeable. You might like to look through the list of reading skills Grellet provides
in the first chapter of her book.

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Urquhart and Weir, on the other hand, seek to distinguish between them. They describe
skills as ‘text-oriented’ and strategies as ‘reader-oriented’. For them, skills are unconscious
ways of dealing with text; they are abilities which operate without the readers consciously
thinking about them. Strategies, on the other hand, are the conscious ways that readers
problem-solve while they read. When comprehension of the text breaks down, for example,
when the lexis becomes too complex for rapid comprehension, students employ strategies
such as inferring meaning from context, or breaking words down into their constituent parts,
in order to pick their way through. Strategies also define the decisions students make about
what to take from the text.
Wallace, on the other hand, presents evidence for a holistic view, i.e. one in which skills and
strategies cannot be separated:
Reading is a unitary (sic) process both because it cannot be adequately broken down
into separate skills and because we draw on similar processing strategies in the
reading of all languages, even where the writing systems are very different.
Reading, Wallace op cit Chapter 3, 3.3
The strategies adopted are determined by the context within which the reading takes place,
the type of text being read and the reader’s purpose and the strategies are used selectively.
In the end, Wallace suggests that rather than developing different strategies for readers in
their second (or third) language, as teachers we should:
ensure that text, context, and reading task give maximum support to the second
language learner’s current linguistic and schematic knowledge.
Wallace, op cit pp.42-43
Nuttall falls between both these points of view. She acknowledges the amount of research
that has gone into identifying reading skills and the relationships between them but says:
The issues remain controversial. In any case, it is generally agreed that, if individual
skills exist, they work together and are inextricably linked. Most people accept that we
can at least identify certain strategies which readers can make conscious use of when
reading difficult texts. Probably the best way to acquire these is simply to read and
read. However, there is evidence that strategy training helps.
Nuttall, op cit, Introduction to Part Two
8.3 Atomistic or Holistic? Testing or Developing?

Coursebooks from the 1980s onwards include activities to increase students’ confidence in
reading. These are often referred to as ‘reading skills development’ activities: students may
be asked to predict content of texts; they may be asked to guess the meanings of unfamiliar
lexis in context; they may be asked to identify the text type and to comment on stylistic
features. Much more commonly, however, students are asked to extract different levels of
information from a text within a given time limit; and this is often done in preparation for
exploiting the text for target language.
Because we set questions with right and wrong answers, and because we measure the
effectiveness of students’ reading by the proportion of answers they get right and wrong,
most reading activities test (or at best, practise) students’ reading rather than develop their
confidence and effectiveness as readers. Reading activities tend to approach text

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atomistically, from a bottom-up point of view if you will, rather than holistically. They tend
to emphasize the product, that is, answering questions about aspects of the text rather than
the process of approaching the text as a whole.
There is no doubt that on the one hand, testing is a necessary tool for measuring mastery
and progress and for identifying areas demanding remedial or teaching focus; also without
doubt is the fact that many of the task types used for developmental purposes can also be
used for testing. The teacher’s ability to first identify what the aim/focus of the task really is,
to evaluate whether that is appropriate to her students and then her lesson/stage aims is
crucial.
While the above issues are currently being debated, there are certain conclusions we can
draw about what constitutes an effective reader. Students need to be exposed to a range of
texts; they need to read and understand the whole text, the writer’s opinion, and/or the
writer’s vision, as well as focusing on how that meaning is communicated. Students may
need teachers to highlight strategies they can use to help them when they run into difficulty
interpreting the meaning, but reading effectively is ‘an integrated process’ (Nuttall, p41) in
which skills and strategies are applied only when and if necessary to facilitate understanding.
They may also need teachers to reassure them that L2 reading skills are the same as those in
L1, provided, of course, that the student is literate in L1. Taken all together, understanding a
written text involves having a purpose to read, activating schemata and strategies; it also
necessitates awareness of language. Reading, it would appear, is much more of a holistic
activity than previously thought.
9. Articulating Reading Lesson Aims

Let us start with a general overall aim. In a ‘reading lesson’ we seek:
To enable students to become independent, effective readers who are able to read real and
meaningful texts with purpose and to be aware of what it is necessary for them to take from
similar texts outside the classroom.
In order to enable students to do this, we may choose to develop meaning-oriented

awareness and/or highlight strategies. In order to do this we not only draw students’
attention to them but also to provide supportive practice. Thus aims in a reading skills lesson
might be:
 To develop students’ awareness of the importance of having a reason to read and

developing strategies for this.
 To develop students’ awareness of how to use peripheral information e.g. layout,

visuals, title, typeface, text type / genre, location etc. to get information about a text.
 To enable students to decide which new vocabulary they need to understand, and which
they can skip over, in order to better understand the text they are reading, with an eye
to being able to read similar texts more effectively in future.
 To enable students to read more quickly.
 To enable students to infer meaning of the text.
 To develop student awareness of pronoun reference and how it affects meaning. This
then enables students to read similar texts more effectively in future.

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 To develop student awareness of cohesive devices of contrast including: ‘although’,

‘despite’, ‘in spite of’, ‘though’, ‘mind you’ and ‘nevertheless’. This then enables
students to read similar texts more effectively in future.
 To develop students’ awareness of lexical cohesion and the role it plays in organising
texts and managing arguments. This then enables students to read similar texts more
effectively in future.
 To develop students’ awareness of chunks of collocations in text. This then enables

students to read similar texts more effectively in future.
 To develop student recognition of fore-grounded information by looking at clause order

in sentences. This then enables students to read similar texts more effectively in future.
Now look at the following reading aims and their evaluation to see why each is
inappropriate:
1. To develop the reading skill.
This aim is far too general. It gives insufficient information about what the lesson focus
will actually be.
2. To practise the skill of scanning a light-hearted magazine article for specific information.
The aim is probably inappropriate for the type of text being used.
3. To practise reading for understanding.
Again, this aim is very general. What depth of understanding? Is the focus on students’
having a global understanding or understanding detail in the text? What kind of text will
students be dealing with?
4. To practise skim reading a long text.
This aim gives us an idea of what students will be asked to do i.e., we have a good idea
regarding procedure, but we have no idea why. It is also possible that, again, the text is
inappropriate for the stated activity as we have no idea of the text being used.
5. To enable students to understand and use the present perfect continuous in the context
of a letter home.
This is a language aim, not a reading aim, and so it is inappropriate as the aim to the
reading focussed part of the lesson.
10. A Reading Focus

A reading lesson can be a whole lesson or simply part of a lesson. The following was part of a
longer lesson for a strong mid-intermediate class of mixed nationalities. Most of the
students were planning to study for and take the Cambridge First Certificate examination in
the following months. The teacher was working hard to improve students’ reading strategies
and to encourage the students to take more responsibility for their own learning.
Looking through the procedure below, it should be clear that the approach taken is focused
more on the development of strategies than on giving students practice of and evaluating
their reading comprehension. The teacher’s aim is to activate and encourage students’
making predictions, their bringing their knowledge of the world and their experience to the

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text, and their making choices of how they will approach a text and then reflecting on the
effectiveness of these choices.
The aim for this focus in the lesson could be articulated as:
 To raise student awareness of different ways of reading a text and give them practice in
making such a choice.
 To provide an opportunity for students to practise reading and understanding

information in a brochure about fire safety.
Lesson Procedure
Stage Aim Focus/Time Procedure
To encourage Ss to S-S/5-7mins Ss look at title in groups of 3. Discuss: What

articulate their do you expect to read?
expectations of the content
(lexis included) and activate What do you already know about this topic
schema.
To enable Ss to identify Ss alone Ss asked to look at the following ways of

different ways of reading a text after glancing briefly at text
approaching a text and to 2-3mins itself (OHT). Tell Ss they will be asked to
encourage them to make a answer questions re: the text after they read
decision for themselves it and they should be able to say why they
about the most appropriate chose to read the text as they did.
way of dealing with it.
Ways of approaching text:
To give Ss an opportunity to
put their decision into  Read text through carefully. Answer the
practice. questions.
 Skim through text. Look at questions.

Read text more carefully. Answer
questions.
 Read through questions. Scan text for

answers.
 Read through questions. Read text

carefully for answers.
Ss decide how they will approach the text.
Ss read and answer the questions in 4mins.
To give Ss an opportunity to T-S-T and S-S T asks Ss to evaluate their choice of reading
evaluate/discuss their 10mins approach (and why).
choice.
Ss discuss answers to questions.
To encourage discussion of
the content of the text. Ss feedback to T.

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Text
Nuttall, C. 1996 Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language Macmillan Heinemann (p238)
You may well find that the coursebook you use with your classes is not of great help to you
in developing skills and strategies; in the end, the developmental focus in most books is
quite limited. However, should you need ideas for activities to use with coursebooks or
other materials see Nuttall and Silberstein in the Reading section.
11. Finding Materials for Reading

If you consider the sources of English language reading text available to you and your
students, you would undoubtedly include coursebooks and supplementary books. However,
you may or may not have also considered: local and international English language
magazines and newspapers, novels and/or other books of various types, reference material
such as menus, timetables, maps, letters, cartoons, adverts, company brochures, readers
and a variety of material downloaded from the internet, amongst others.
The rationale for choosing texts may include consideration of your students’ age, sex,
interests/needs, their level, variety in the classroom and/or the quality of print of the text.
Teachers may not be given a choice; they may well be told what material they have to use.
11.1. Authenticity and Authentic Materials

Texts used in course books and on courses increasingly are authentic, or they are made to
look authentic, and there is increased emphasis on teachers’ bringing authentic material into
class so that students have more ‘real life’ exposure to native speaker communication.
Before going any further, let us pause briefly to examine the notion of authenticity.

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Authenticity, like skills and strategies, is a matter of discussion amongst academics.

Widdowson, Breen, Meinhof and Davies argue variously that once material is in a classroom
it is no longer authentic; authenticity arises from reader interaction with the text rather than
being inherent in the text itself; and authenticity comes from a reader’s understanding of
the text. (See Reading, Wallace, Chapter 9, 9.5; Reading in a Foreign Language, Davies in
Alderson and Urquhart, Chapter 9). This is quite theoretical, however; authentic texts are
usually regarded more pragmatically by practitioners and they are unadapted or
unsimplified texts originally designed to be read by native-speakers. Thornbury in Beyond
the Sentence 2005 places less emphasis on authenticity or lack of it and instead
distinguishes between what he terms texts and ‘non-texts’. The former have a clear
communicative purpose, are of recognisable types, are coherent and appropriate to their
contexts of use. Non-texts would be the opposite and could include contrived display texts
designed to illustrate particular points of grammar. Specially written materials can be
produced, and so-called authentic material can be simplified/graded for learners. So long as
the materials ‘still resemble the original in terms of either syntax, discourse structure,
vocabulary or content’ (Silberstein, p102), they maintain their integrity in providing an
authentic language experience.
Silberstein goes on to provide a thoughtful approach to this question:
It is possible to get carried away with concerns that edited texts deprive students of
authentic reading experiences. Students need to read. They need to read as much as
possible, often as quickly as possible, to build up a store of textual knowledge and
reading experience. Reading passages should be authentic in the sense that they
resemble the ‘real-world’ texts students will encounter and that they require the same
approaches to reading. Editing or ‘simplification’ will sometimes be required for the
sake of accessibility. Careful adaptation that preserves the essence of text along with
the redundancy of natural language provides access to authentic reading that students
might not otherwise have. At all proficiency levels, we want students to be engaged
with texts that are ‘authentically’ similar to those which represent their reading goals.
Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, Chapter 7, p102
There are advantages to using both types of texts with students. Compare the advantages of
authentic and specially designed text in the table below:
Authentic texts: Specially-written texts:
Familiarise students with the way language Can be constructed to highlight specific
really works, especially connected meaning features and/or to eliminate overly difficult
in written discourse. or irrelevant language.
Build confidence if the task is manageable Build students’ confidence because they are
and students are successful. left feeling they have understood (almost)
everything.
Motivate students because they are May motivate students to read at the next
working with real material. level.
Help reduce the artificiality of the Reduce stress while preparing students to
classroom. deal with the real world.

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There are also potential disadvantages of both authentic and specially written texts as
shown in the table below:
Authentic Materials Specially-written Texts

It is impossible to control the language. They may give students a false sense of how
Especially at lower levels, there can be too language works. They may not give students
many distractions (new language) for a realistic sense of how discourse really
students. works.
The materials may lower student Students may suffer loss of confidence when
confidence and increase student anxiety if confronted with authentic materials outside
they feel overwhelmed. An achievable task the classroom; they may also lose
would of course make all the difference confidence if they feel the teacher thinks all
here. they can cope with are graded materials.
Materials may decrease motivation if Students may lose motivation if they feel
students feel they cannot understand a they are stuck on material written for a
good amount of it. specific level.
Some say that authenticity is lost as soon as Students may feel that they are being
it comes into a classroom. treated as school children rather than adults.
The other possible source of materials is teachers producing their own texts; this is not
something we will be looking at. However, if this is something you would like to do, need to
do or already do you see Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, Silberstein, for
practical guidance.
12. Types of Reading Tasks

We will return now to the discussion started in Section 5. We are all familiar with a standard
set of reading tasks: true/false, matching, comprehension questions, sentence completion or
ordering events, for example. We may set students other less common tasks such as filling in
a graph or relating parts of text to pictures; we may link a reading to a discussion or
listening. For the most part texts in coursebooks are used as a basis for language focus with
an efficient check of students’ understanding of the text, or texts are used to give students
practice in reading and understanding with comprehensive tasks which largely ‘test’
students’ ability to perform well. Look back at Section 10. What do you notice about the
tasks given to students? How would you describe them: as testing or developmental? As was
discussed above, there is a mixture in this plan. In fact, the only ‘traditional’ task is the
comprehension questions which students eventually answer.
Many of the strands of this section come together here: the importance of teacher clarity
regarding what it means to be an effective reader and how we can enable our students
towards it, clarity regarding lesson/stage aims and the aims of tasks, and the importance of a
developmental focus to work on effective reading rather than simply text-based language
and/or comprehension work.

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13. Readers and Extensive Reading

So far, the focus of this section has been on reading in the classroom with the aim of
developing students’ confidence and effectiveness in understanding both the meaning in the
text and how it is produced. The broader aim of the reading we do with students in class is,
however, to enable them to function independently and effectively outside of class. Reading
longer texts without the guidance of a teacher, most often now done outside class, is called
extensive reading, and it is often a neglected aspect of a systematic and thoughtful reading
development programme. (If you would like to revise the difference between intensive and
extensive reading, see Section 3).
Why is it so important to provide students with an opportunity to do extensive reading?

Consider the following reasons and add any that you feel are important:
 It encourages students to read in a ‘non-school’ context.
 It gives students exposure to lexis, structure, discourse etc. in different and meaningful
contexts.
 It is important that students read longer texts, not only short ones.
 It provides an opportunity for more of a top-down focus, perhaps to balance the more
typical in-class bottom-up focus.
 It offers students meaningful choices: reading what they are genuinely interested in,
getting out of the text what they want, for example.
 It can help encourage learner independence.
 It increases the amount of time students are exposed to English.
 It can be motivating for students to complete a reading outside of class. It can provide a
sense of progress and achievement.
 Extensive reading can be integrated into class work.
For further reading see Nuttall, Chapter 8. There is an in-depth discussion about promoting
an extensive reading programme and practical information about setting up a library in the
first two-thirds of the chapter.
13.1. Supplementary Readers

Extensive reading libraries nowadays could, and should, have a range of materials both in
electronic and traditional paper-based formats available for students to choose from. These
could include ‘native-speaker’ novels, plays, poetry and subject texts which students might
be interested in but we will confine our discussion here to readers as they are commonly
available in schools and are often the backbone of school lending libraries.
There are many reasons for deciding to invest in them and for providing them for use: they
look like real books; there is a range of books available for each level; there is a good variety
of titles/genres; they are of manageable length; they are comparatively inexpensive; and
they are quite easy to get hold of. There are, however, drawbacks to consider: there may be
cultural limitations and/or appropriacy issues to take account of; the language can be overly
artificial especially at lower levels; students may not perceive them as authentic and so find
them uninteresting; they do not last long and so need to be constantly replaced thus
increasing their expense.

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There are different ways that you might choose to use readers. It may be that you want
students to read different books independently and then participate in some sort of project
e.g. a presentation or written summary, etc. it may also be that you use a reader as a set
book with everyone reading the same book.
If, however, you encourage students to read the book of their choice rather than a class
reader, you can incorporate the reading into class time in different ways: through a report
back task e.g. a 2-3 minute presentation to the class about the book and whether they
recommend it or not and why; a poster project; designing a cover for the book and justifying
the elements included; a radio/videoed review of the book. You could also encourage
student writing on what they have read. The key, as Nuttall says, is to ensure the reading
experience is enjoyable and so any follow-up should not be perceived by students as hard
work or ‘testing’. You might encourage them to write a review of what they have read to be
put into the books, or even on a school website, for other students to read to help them
decide whether they want to read the book, for example. Alternatively, you may choose not
to base any class work on the reading being done extensively; you might simply keep track of
the number and/or titles of books students read over a set period of time and then to
incorporate this information into tutorials or reports you are asked to produce on the
students.
Nuttall highlights the following useful points about using a set book:
 Stress is on ensuring reading remains enjoyable even though there is overt classroom
focus on the book.
 Choice of book is essential to ensure student interest.
 Choose a book at a level slightly lower, rather than higher, as students will not have the
same teacher support reading it and the experience should not be discouraging.
 Ensure the class finishes reading in good time. If it takes too long to get through the
book, students will lose interest.
 Reading should be done out of class and reading aloud in class should be avoided.
 Exploit the book in class in interesting ways. Try not to ask simply comprehension
questions. Get students thinking about characters, relationships, giving their opinions
and activities which help students see the book as a whole reading experience.
14. Conclusion
The purpose of this part of the section has been to prompt you to reconsider the way you
approach reading in your classrooms: to encourage principled reflection and evaluation of
your current practices, to highlight current thinking about reading and what it involves for
foreign language learners, and to encourage principled change to your current practice.
15. Terminology Review

The definitions below all refer to ‘parallel’ concepts from this input. For 1 – 3, can you
differentiate between the terms given? There is an example provided.
Example: Skimming versus Scanning

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Skimming involves reading a complete text quickly in order to gain an overview of the
meaning of the whole piece, such as reading the back cover of a book to see whether it
appeals to us. Scanning requires reading a text in order to extract salient details but not
necessarily an overview of the whole text – what we do when looking for an item on a list,
for example.
1. Developing skills versus Testing skills
2. Atomistic versus Holistic approaches to reading
3. Schematic Knowledge versus Systemic knowledge
Suggested Answers
1. Developing Skills in class requires the teacher to show the students how to read better.
It may involve asking them to process a text in a particular way and then reflect on what
they did and how effective it was. Testing skills involves getting the students to provide
answers based on (say) comprehension questions from the text in order to assess their
proficiency in reading.
2. Atomistic versus Holistic approaches to reading. The former approach views that reading
can be broken down into discrete sub-skills which can, and should, be developed
separately, whereas a holistic view of reading, posited by e.g. Catherine Wallace says
that the skill cannot be fragmented.
4. Schematic Knowledge is a reader’s knowledge of the wider world and of different

situations, contexts and genres, and how these are likely to influence the development
(and language employed) in a text. It is vital for top-down processing. Systemic
knowledge, on the other hand, is a learner’s knowledge of lexis and grammar which
helps them interpret a text and is imperative in bottom-up interpretation.

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Reading:
Although not essential to your Module 1 preparation, if you would like to explore this area
further we suggest the following:
Suggested Reading
Nuttall, C. 2005 Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (3rd ed.), Macmillan
Heinemann
Silberstein, S. 1994 Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading Oxford University Press
Wallace, C. 1992 Reading, Oxford University Press
Additional Reading
Alderson, J. C. & Urquhart, A. H. (eds) 1984 Reading in a Foreign Language Longman
Banford, J & Day, R. R. 2004 Extensive Reading Activities for teaching Language Cambridge
University Press
Cook, G. 1989 Discourse Oxford University Press
Grellet, F. 1981 Developing Reading Skills Cambridge University Press
Grundy, P. 1993 Newspapers Oxford University Press
Mosback, G. & Mosback, V. 1976 (reprinted 2003) Practical Faster Reading Cambridge
University Press
Richards, J. C. 1990 ‘A profile of an effective reading teacher’ in The Language Teaching

Matrix Cambridge University Press
Thornbury, S. 2005 Beyond the Sentence MacMillan
Urquhart, S. & Weir, C. 1998 Reading in a Second Language: Process, Product and Practice
Longman
Williams, E. 1994 Reading in the Language Classroom Oxford University Press

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Reading

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© International House London and the British Council

 Be familiar with terminology associated with reading.

 Be able to articulate appropriate and principled reading aims.

 Have considered coursebook and authentic reading materials.

 Have analysed your own practice and thought about alternatives.

 Have thought about the place of reading in a historical context.

 Have been introduced to current debates regarding reading.

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2. What Kinds of Reading Texts are there?

3. Why and How Do People Read?

4. A Brief Historical Perspective

5. Thinking about Text Exploitation

6. What Does Effective Reading Involve for any Reader?

7. What Affects our Students’ English Reading Ability?

8. Current Issues in Teaching Reading

8.1. A Definition of Effective Reading

8.2. Enabling Students: Skills or Strategies?

8.3. Atomistic or Holistic, Testing or Developing?

9. Articulating Reading Lesson Aims

10. A Reading Focus

11. Finding Materials for Reading

11.1. Authenticity and Authentic Materials

12. Types of Reading Tasks

13. Readers and Extensive Reading

13.1. Supplementary Readers

15. Terminology Review

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1. It is an activity involving focus on written text.

3. The reader may respond to the content.

4. It is a communicative activity with interaction between reader, writer and text.

5. The interaction is not necessarily easy or straightforward.

2. What Kinds of Reading Texts are there?

3. Why and How Do People Read?

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4. A Brief Historical Perspective

In a strict Audio-Lingual classroom, reading is discouraged, and students are expected to

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5. Thinking about Text Exploitation

5 © Copyright The Distance Delta

6 © Copyright The Distance Delta

Greenall, S. 1995 Reward Intermediate Heinemann (pp38-39)

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6. What Does Effective Reading Involve?

Finally, the importance of prediction in reading cannot be overestimated. Looking at the

 Mean, Statistics in Research

 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

 Mills and Boon, Too Hot to Handle

 A recipe for salmon en croute

 New Headway Intermediate, Unit 5

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7. What Affects our Students’ English Reading Ability?

 Topics are unfamiliar and/or inappropriate.

 Students do not have sufficient background information.

 Students’ level of language is not high enough.

 Students may not be familiar with the script.

 Students may not be familiar with conventions of layout, punctuation, paragraphing.

 Students may find reading in the classroom off-putting.

 Students may read word by word only.

 Students may mouth words as they read or, as above, subvocalize.