Developing reading skills

Factors involved in effective reading

Prepared by:
Najah Abdullah Albelazi
 Outline
• What is reading?
• What are the kinds of reading skill?
• The role of the teacher in extensive and intensive
reading.
• Reading lesson sequences.
• The vocabulary question.
• Letting the students in.
• Effective and ineffective reading strategies.
 What is reading?
• Reading is an important part of learning English. This
guide to how to improve your reading skills will help
you improve reading by using skills you use in your
own language.
• Reading skills refer to the specific abilities that
enable a person to read with independence and
interact with the message. Students at the university
do a lot of reading unlike in secondary school. Some
tips to help in having good reading skills are active
reading and styles of reading.
 The types of reading skill
 Extensive reading.
 Intensive reading.
 Receptive reading.
 Skimming.
 Scanning.
 Extensive reading
• In extensive reading, the teacher encourages
students to choose for themselves what they
read and to do so pleasure and general
language improvement.
• It is important for the development of students'
word recognition and for their improvement as
readers overall.
 Extensive reading materials
• One of the fundamental conditions of a successful
extensive program is that the students should be
reading material which they can understand.

• Written materials for extensive reading are often

referred to as graded readers or simplif-ied
readers. They can take the form of original fiction
and non-fiction books as well as simplifications
of established works of literature.
 Extensive reading materials

• Such books succeed because the writers or

adaptors work within specific lists of allowed
words and grammar.
 The role of the teacher in extensive
reading
• Crucial:
• Teachers need to promote reading and by their
espousal of reading as a valid occupation, persuade
students of its benefits.
• Part organizer/part tutor:
• Teachers can explain how students make choice of
what to read. teachers can suggest that they look for
books in a genre that they enjoy, and that they make
appropriate level choices.
 Extensive reading tasks
Because students should be allowed to choose their own
reading texts, following their likes and interests, and because
teachers want to promote students to keep reading, teachers
should encourage them to report back on their reading in
anumber of ways:
• Students can tell their classmates about books they found them
enjoyable and noticeably awful.
• Students can also write short book reviews for the class
noticeboard.
• At the end of a month, students can vote on the most popular
book.
 Intensive reading
• It is often teacher-chosen and directed.
• It is designed to enable students to develop specific
receptive skills such as:
 Reading for gist(or general understanding-often
called skimming).
 Reading for specific information(often called
scanning).
 Reading for detailed comprehension or reading for
inference(what's behind the word) and attitude.
 The role of the teacher in intensive
reading
• Organizer:
• Teachers 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 it.
 The role of the teacher in intensive
reading
• Observer:
• While students are reading, teachers can
observe their progress, this will give teachers
valuable information about how well students
are doing individually and collectively.
 The role of the teacher in intensive
reading
• Feedback organizer:
• When students have completed the task, teachers can
lead a feedback session by asking where in the text
they found relevant information. Teachers may start
by having them compare their answers in pairs then
ask for answers from the class in general or from
pairs in particular.
• It is important to be supportive when organizing
feedback after reading.
The role of the teacher in intensive
reading
• Prompter:
• When students read a text, teachers can prompt
them to notice language features within it.
• Controller:
• Teachers direct students to certain features,
classifying ambiguities and making them
aware of issues of text structure which they
had not come across previously.
 The other kinds or styles of reading
• Receptive reading:
• The emphasis is on the informational content.
This is sometimes referred to extensive
reading, although the term “extensive” can be
misleading as it implies the use of long texts,
complete texts or series of texts.
 The other kinds of reading
• Scanning:
• It is a visual skill more than interpretive one.
“Readers” look quickly through a text to find
words (shapes) which match a mental template
of what they are seeking.
 The other kinds of reading
• Skimming:
• It involves looking through a text quickly to
derive the gist of something. It involves a
degree of inference and interpretation.
Intensive reading: the vocabulary question

• Teachers encourage students to read for

general understanding without understanding
every word on first or second read-through.

• Then, depending on what is going to be done,

students should be given a chance to ask
questions about individual words or to look
them up.
 How can the teachers limit the amount of time
spent on vocabulary checking?
• Time limit: teachers can give a time limit of,
e.g. five minutes for vocabulary enquiry.
• Word/phrase limit: teachers can only answer
questions about five or eight words or phrases.
• Meaning consensus: teachers can get students
to work together to search for and find word
meanings.
 Intensive reading: letting the
students in
Students are responding to what someone else has
asked them to find out, but they are far to be engaged
in a text. The ways of letting students in:
• Letting them give voice to their feelings about what
they have read.
• Allowing them to create their own comprehension
task.
 Reading lesson sequences
Teachers use intensive reading sequences in
class for a number of reasons:
• Having students practice specific skills such as
skimming or scanning.
• Getting students to read texts for
communicative purposes.
• Identify specific uses of language.
 Effective and ineffictive reading
strategies
• Effective reading
• Ineffictive reading
strategies:
strategies:
• Looking for a topic sentence in
• Mouthing the words.
paragraphs.
• Trying to use the context to work • Mentally translating everything.
out the meaning of unfamiliar • Using a dictionary to find the
words. meaning of all new words.
• Trying to identify implicit logical
relationship between sentence and
sentence,..etc.
• Trying to distinguish between
major and subordinate assertions.
 References
• Parrott, M. (1993). Tasks for Language Teachers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Harmer, J. (2007). The Practice of English Language
Teaching. Pearson: Longman.