Teaching Reading

People seem to think that reading means just starting at the beginning when you just start to go word by word, when you stop to look up every unknown word until you come to the end. Օf course to enrich your linguistic knowledge you may act so but if you intend to use reading for content information you should move past the idea of looking up all the new words as it means that you use bottom – up strategy as linguists have noted, instead you should use top- down strategy. The thing is that it will be more effective to help students transfer the method they use when reading in their native language to reading anything in foreign language. Reading is an important means of learning a foreign language as while doing it you also make language input. By reading variety of materials pupils obtain not only vocabulary but also get to learn the ways in which certain language elements- let’s say grammar, sentence structure… are used to work together in order to convey the meaning. In my teaching practice I usually use a few strategies to gain success in teaching reading process. They are; previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, check comprehension … We read texts on the Internet, e- books which are both interesting and informative. Also we have access to Websites and that naturally helps us expose culture in all its display. First I figure out the purpose of reading. If we have prior knowledge about the subject matter of the topic, which we can guess from reviewing the title, the section or chapter heading to get the sense of content of the selected book. We use the prior knowledge of the subject as clues to guess the meaning of a new word. Secondly, we read those parts of the text that are relevant to our language knowledge and leave out or ignore the rest. This selectivity helps us to focus on the important items. Sometimes I tell them to read without my interference, leaving them alone as reading is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Let them use their knowledge, skill and proper strategies to understand the plot. As they are expected to face variety of situations while reading they should learn by and by how to deal with them in order to read more effectively and quickly. In this way we have read articles on Stonehenge, true friendship, Man overboard, The Seagull, The Norwegian Wood, The Phantom of the Theatre and so on.