Chapter 10: Taken as Read: Teaching Reading Lessons 149
Before you set off
You can make new words a pre-reading task (see ‘Getting ready to read: Pre-
reading’ earlier in the chapter). This works well if students aren’t used to
reading in English and need a little reassurance that they can do it. This tech-
nique makes sense especially when a new word occurs so frequently in the
reading that the meaning is necessary to make any sense of the thing.Along the way
Get your students to underline new words as they read but without neces-
sarily stopping to check the meaning. They need to read with relative fluency
and get an overview of the text. Apart from providing definitions yourself, see
if students can help each other. Pooling knowledge is great for keeping every-
one involved and interested.Don’t encourage explanations in the students’ mother tongue (unless you’re
totally fluent). They may be barking up the wrong tree.
If possible, make dictionaries available after the initial reading so that stu-
dents can manage their own learning. Most schools have class sets of learn-
ers’ dictionaries (English to English ones, which have the key word and
definition in English so that students don’t use their mother tongue during
the lesson) but you can get the students to bring their own.
If students use a dictionary to translate, it’s still important that you check
their understanding. Ask open questions using what, why, how, when so that
they can express their opinions and prove that they understand.
Try another route
Context is the biggest indicator of meaning. You can start the investigation by
asking students which part of speech the unknown word is – for example, is it
a noun, a verb or an adjective?Then again, perhaps the new word looks familiar somehow. Maybe it’s part of
a family of words (love, lovable, unloving, lover, for example). Or is it similar
to a word in the students’ own language?English words are mainly derived from Latin and German so a large number of
students whose native tongues derive from those languages are prepared to
take a stab at the meaning.