150 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
And of course, loads of foreign words have been pasted into English and vice
versa, so it never hurts for the students to have a go.
Working on Skills Associated with Reading
Reading is rather a broad area. Does the fact that students are reading auto-
matically mean that they’re improving? Not always. You can adopt various
sub-skills as aims of reading lessons to focus the minds of your students and
yourself more keenly and mark the difference between efficient and ineffi-
cient readers.
Including reading-related skills
Those students who haven’t mastered the following sub-skills from reading in
their mother tongue benefit a great deal by developing in these areas:
✓ Working out the meaning of new words from the context.
✓ Recognising high frequency words.
✓ Working out what the purpose of the text is (to entertain, inform and
so on).
✓ Skimming (see ‘Getting the gist’ earlier in the chapter).
✓ Scanning (see ‘Getting down to the nitty-gritty’ earlier in the chapter).
✓ Summarising and taking notes.
✓ Learning how texts are organised.
✓ Identifying grammar in context.
✓ Reading between the lines.
✓ Identifying key and minor points.
Doing more than reading
Reading aloud is just one way to use a text. Other ways are for students to
answer comprehension questions, extend the dialogue themselves or fill in
deliberately placed gaps, even at beginner level.
