In this article, you’re required to follow 7 important tips if you want to develop your students’ reading skills.
Although reading is generally after listening and speaking in the hierarchy of communication abilities to be developed, most teachers make reading one of the first priorities to develop. This is not only because reading enables learners to access information from many written texts but also because reading proficiency contributes to one‘s self-realization and the development of personal-social adjustment.
And since reading is a very complicated process involving a variety of factors that interact with one another, it should be developed in graded and sequential phases.
The factors involved in reading include sub-reading skills (such as word recognition, skimming, scanning, sentence comprehension, getting the topic, etc.) and background knowledge.
To develop your students’ reading skills in English, you might need to consider the following tips:
1. Consider your students’ interests when choosing reading texts.
In this case, students will want to read for the same reasons they read in their own language: to be entertained or to find out something they do not already know.
2. Provide your students with a variety of texts which meet their language proficiency and interest.
It is a very good idea to provide ten or more minutes of silent uninterrupted reading time in every English class. Recent studies show that limiting opportunities to engage in real reading experiences is one of the surest ways to retard students’ reading progress and limit their intellect.
3. Make reading an interesting challenge to your students.
By telling students that they’re not required to understand every word in the text, whether they are skimming the text for general meaning or scanning it to pick out specific information.
4. Spend time preparing for the reading task.
By using illustrations, students’ own knowledge about the subject matter, and key vocabulary to help the students to predict the general content of the text.
Discuss the subject and ask questions to elicit language and stimulate the students’ interest in the text before they begin reading. Also, make sure that the students understand the essential vocabulary they need to complete the task before they begin to read.
5. Move around the class while students are reading the text.
Provide support if students need it, and encourage students to work out the meaning of vocabulary as they come across it using the context and the supporting illustrations.
6. Discourage your students to read aloud if the reading activity is directed toward comprehension.
Reading aloud inhibits most students and forces them to concentrate on what they are saying as opposed to what they are reading and the meaning is very often lost.
Reading aloud should be employed only as an activity to improve pronunciation, recognize the relationship between written symbols and sounds, learn a play, or recite a poem.
7. Help your students fall in love with books.
Reading is an enjoyable act. There are wonderful stories and interesting characters one can meet in books. Through reading, one can experience magic, adventure, success, failure, moral dilemmas, triumph, comedy, or tragedy.
In good books, one can also learn about interesting things or travel to many fascinating places.
Looking for a comprehensive guide to learn about how to teach the four English language skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing?
Here’s what you’re searching for:
Teaching The Four English Language Skills – A Comprehensive Guide
It’s time to discover insightful information about the nature of each of the four language skills.
And when it comes to teaching the four language skills in the classroom, you must implement practical procedures and activities that work well. So I’m super excited you want to learn more about them!
In this comprehensive guide, we prioritize what you must do exactly in the classroom to develop each skill in your students.
I’m currently an ELT Supervisor with a long experience in teaching various students in various contexts.
I wasn’t born a teacher. It’s only after learning and discovering what works well and what doesn’t I learned how to make a difference in my students’ level of English.
Obviously, I don’t want you to start taking an expensive TEFL course at first to be able to teach English more effectively. But we will set you up on a path that if you want to, one day you’ll be able to.
Also, if you’re in a hurry, we want you to know we’ve compiled all our practical material into a friendly guide so you can read it at your leisure (I’m picturing you reading the guide poolside, sipping a lemonade).
It’s a handy guide called (appropriately): Teaching The Four English Language Skills – A Comprehensive Guide
