and some ideas for teaching
reading skills
Reviewed
✦ Why teach reading?
Reading is one of the four skills students need to be effective users of English.
It is extremely beneficial to the language learning process and reading widely
is probably the most effective way of building vocabulary knowledge.
For extensive reading practice students could:
read graded readers (your school or a local library might have a set of
these)
read books or magazines that you recommend based on students’
individual interests
join a library or use an e-reader
For extensive listening practice students could:
listen to audio versions of graded readers, podcasts, audio books, radio
programmes
watch and listen to any authentic material that appeals to them - TV
shows, songs, documentaries, films etc.
Unit 5: The process of reading and some ideas for teaching reading skills 1
, ✦ T ypes of reading
Reading a range of longer texts for pleasure is called extensive reading.
Whereas careful reading of a text for a specific purpose such as answering
comprehension questions is called intensive reading.
✦ How do we read?
Top-down processing occurs when we use our existing general knowledge to
help us make sense of a written text. Bottom-up processing however, happens
when we try to understand language by looking at individual meanings or
grammatical characteristics of the most basic units of the text, and moves
from these to trying to understand the whole text.
✦ Discourse markers
Discourse markers are words or phrases that are used to connect speech and
writing, express a person’s attitude, and organise and manage what a person
says or writes. Examples of spoken discourse markers include ‘like’, ‘anyway’,
‘right’, ‘okay’ and ‘so’. Written discourse markers include words like ‘firstly’,
‘furthermore’, ‘on the other hand’ and ‘in conclusion’.
✦ Stages of reading development
There are five stages of reading development that students can go through
before becoming fluent.
Unit 5: The process of reading and some ideas for teaching reading skills 2