Teaching Reading Comprehension

Question

It seems to me that reading comprehension skills are very difficult for many English learners. What aspects would you like to emphasise in teaching reading comprehension? Or should it be taught at all? Is it enough if students just read on their own?

It think that one of the most important things is to read as widely as possible, ie. EXTENSIVE READING essential. Also the amount of time you spend on reading may help. In addition, if students are allowed to choose the books they read, they will find reading more interesting and thus be more engaged. It might be a good idea to discuss the books one has read with a teacher or a friend, biut I don't find that necessary.

Secondly, VOCABULARY BUILDING is necessary. Teachers could help their students by teaching them strategies for building a powerful vocabulary. Using frequency lists may come in handy so that students can concentrate on the most useful words. Students should be also taught to choose the words they find useful and which they want to learn. Students should know how to infer meaning from context. The study of word parts can help students develop more awareness of the morphological relationships among words so that they can relate the new words to known words or known prefixes and suffixes. It is also useful for the students to recognise collocations in texts.

Thirdly, COMPREHENSION SKILLS are vital when students tackle texts. What are these? For example previewing, making inferences, understanding paragraphs, making sense of the patterns of organisation, skimming, summary skills and critical reading skills.

Finally, READING FASTER may help many students to comprehend more. In my opinion rate improvement must be a key part of any reading program. It helps students to take in meaningful phrases, whole groups of words, at a time.

Old Man Gordon · Accepted Answer

Thanks for these points.  I have never considered trying to push my students to read faster.  This is counter-intuitive; when I want to understand something better, I usually read more slowly.  Can you elaborate a little about how you implement faster reading with your students, and the actual results?

Successor · Answer

To be honest, faster reading is not something I have a lot experience of. It is something that I hope to find time for. In my view though, it may be a problem for many language learners. In academic settings students are assigned large amounts of books to read. If their reading rate is slow, they will be left with little time to reflect on and assimilate what they have read. When you are reading slowly you often read word by word. It is difficult to keep in mind my many single pieces of information, thus you may be prone to forget the beginning of the sentence by the time you get to the end. You should try to take in whole groups of words at a time. Since these groups afre meaningful, they provide more information for the reader to be able to understand the general meaning of a reading passage. In other words, readers incorporate the new information with the old information.

The starting point, it seems to me, would be to check the students' reading habits. Next, reading in chunks, meaningful phrases can be practised for example by dividing the text into these chunks. Students can practise reading texts in pairs and think about if it easier to understand when the text is read in meaninful phrases. Students should learn to skip over unknown words too. Moreover, they also need a lot of practice with timed readings.

The aim shouldn't be to read everything fast, though. More appropriate would be to have a wide range of learning speeds at your disposal, so that you can slow down or speed up when necessary.However, more often than not, some students tend to read everything slowly.

Teaching Reading Comprehension

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