16 Teaching reading
Reading is both a matter of quality and of quantity. Students need to learn the
skills of target language reading, and they also need exposure to a rich variety of
written texts. Such exposure will contribute to general language improvement as
well as fostering reading competence itself. The following suggestions should
help you to effectively select and exploit texts, and encourage good reading
habits in your learners.
1 Supplement the readings in your textbook. Extra readings are usually
easy to get hold of, and are an opportunity for you to both respond to your
learners’ particular interests and to bring new ideas into the class. You can
also ask learners to bring in texts for use in class. In these ways, you can
give your learners exposure to a wider variety of texts than they might
otherwise get.
2 Use a good proportion of ‘authentic’ texts. Successful reading of texts
from the world outside the classroom is very motivating, and exposure to
such sources can provide language development opportunities on conscious
and unconscious levels. Adjust the task associated with the reading to make
the text accessible. See 22, Exploiting authentic written texts.
3 Build up a context. You may work with texts where understanding is
particularly dependent on a knowledge of the context in and for which they
were produced. (Newspaper articles are an obvious example.) Help learners
to access the background that the text does not supply. If you choose to work
with short extracts of texts, you will also need to give your learners the
background information that the ‘full’ text supplies.
4 Give learners a reason for reading. A task appropriate to the text can
encourage suitable reading strategies and may give practice in some longer-
term reading goals. Tasks which learners recognize as relevant to their
reasons for studying English are, of course, particularly motivating.
5 Use questions carefully. The technique of having learners answer a series
of comprehension questions on a reading is well known. If you use it, try to
go beyond surface comprehension to involve learners in the ideas behind the
text: for example, you could ask about the author’s main message, position
or attitude.
6 Use reading as an input to other tasks. Reading as a means to specific
ends is very common in the world outside the classroom, and many learners
may need to exploit English language texts in this way. For example, the
task of writing a summary of two or three textbook passages would mirror
one of the ways that EAP learners need to read.
7 Talk about good reading habits. Especially in the earlier stages, you will
need to design activities that explicitly target useful reading behaviour like
using titles and illustrations, skimming over unknown words or working out32 LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM