Taken from http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.com/2015_09_01_archive.html
Teaching Reading My Personal Interpretation By Angie Fabiola Obando-Brenes Pre-Service Teacher, School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Monday, April 24, 2016 Post 252
Reading is an essential part of the language; therefore, it must be taught in the English classroom. Reading is a way to understand the language and create a response to it. Reading requests time to be developed, and harnessed. As reading is part of a language, it is learned in the curriculum of English lessons; as a result, reading could become secondary or be not well taught. Thus, teachers should give reading an important place and time in their lessons and know how to teach it. Reading is a habit that needs to be developed; moreover, it has a very positive impact on the reader such as knowledge acquisition, better spelling, more vocabulary and critical thinking. Reading is one of the best ways of learning about the culture that the English language brings to the learner. Teachers must take into account the different kind of readings and reading levels, skills, principles to encourage students to read extensively.
There are different reasons for reading in English, for instance, to studying or working purposes, or for pleasure. Regardless the reason, reading is an amazing tool for English language acquisition. As Jeremy Harmer (2007) poses, reading has a positive effect on vocabulary, grammar, spelling and knowledge acquisition; moreover, a good reading text could be used to work on speaking (give opinions, ask question and share answers, a discussion, a round table, create a new ending to a story, express emotions…) or writing ( to write an assay, a plot analysis, a reader response… ). Reading could be extensive or intensive. Extensive reading means reading for pleasure normally outside the classroom, so students choose the book they want to read. Intensive reading is the one that takes place usually in the classroom, and it is guided by the teacher. There are different materials for reading for example, novels, newspapers, magazines, web pages, plays, poems and others. The teacher should choose the reading according to the level of the students, and it should be authentic written material. Students should learn reading skills such as scanning and skimming. According to the book how to teach
English (Harmer, 2007) Chapter seven, the reading principles are the following: •
Encourage students to read as often and as much as possible
•
Students need to be engage with what they are reading
•
Encourage students to respond to the content of a text (and explore their feelings about it) not just concentrate on its contraction.
•
Prediction is the major factor in reading
•
Match the task with the topic when using intensive reading text
•
Good teachers exploit reading text to the full
Some reading tasks are Jigsaw reading (to read a problem, look for information to solve it and share the information), reading puzzles (to organize a text or Poetry), play extracts (work on acting it out), using newspapers (match articles with the headlines), and reading to stimulate speaking or writing. The main goal is encouraging students to read in English extensively (Harmer, 2007); hence,
teacher must teach rending in the best way possible to create a good reading experience. Teachers should take advantage of reading to teach the language. There are some institutions in Costa Rica that have a single course for reading, but most of them are private. The public institutions have to include the four skills in the same lesson; therefore, some teachers forget to use rending and teach only grammar and writing. I was in a public high school, and I spent like three years and half studying verb tenses and some vocabulary (always the same). And the last year I started doing reading for “examen de bachillerato�. I think what happened when I was in high school does not make sense because reading comprehension
requests
time
to
be
developed,
and
managed.
Reading
comprehension contains processes that should go from the easiest to the most difficult. I think that public institutions should have more English lessons (to achieve a good level of English), and they should include a single reading course to prepare students for the final reading exam throughout the five years of high school. Teachers must try to include reading in their lessons because it is an amazing tool that helps even to practice speaking, listening and writing. Reading is one of the greatest parts of teaching English. Teachers could do amazing lessons including readings; moreover, there are nice webpages and books to teach reading, for example the National Geographic webpage or books, the NASA webpage, the BBC, the British Council and others.
For
example
the
National Geographic webpage (It is for free) has interesting readings with their corresponding audios, so students are able to read the text and look up new vocabulary, listen to the pronunciation, discuss the topic of reading and write a reaction paragraph based on the reading. The fact is that teachers should invest time in finding reading materials and creating the lesson plans to take advantage of the readings. Students could learn vocabulary in context and they can analyze
grammar structures applied in the readings. Reading taught in the best way will have good results in student's learning. It is important to keep in mind that the main goal is encouraging students to read extensively. Reading books is one of the best ways to acquire knowledge besides acquiring the second language. Students needs to spend time reading and teaches must spent time guiding the students in good reading processes. Reading not well taught could make the students reject reading. The key is to choose the right level, topic and task to the reading according the students. I think that the most satisfactory feeling for a teacher is to see their students reading in English for pleasure and to achieve that teachers should work hard. “To defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read, to stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds� -Taken from the movie Detachment Reference Harmer, J. (2007). "Teaching Reading". how to Teach English. Person Longman.