Teaching Reading Skills

Teaching Reading Skills
Submitted By: Abdul Farooq Khan
Roll No: 05
Submitted To: Mr. Naseer Ahmad
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
MINHAJ UNIVERSITY LAHORE
HAMDARD CHOWK, TOWNSHIP, LAHORE.
PHONE# (42) 3514 56 21 – 24
EMAIL:INFO@MUL.EDU.PK

Contents
1. Introduction ___________________________ 01
2. Reading ___________________________ 01
3. Literacy ___________________________ 02
4. Types of Reading ___________________________ 02
5. Students’ Needs to read well in a language ___________________________ 02
6. Why Extensive Reading? ___________________________ 03
7. Reading Skills ___________________________ 03
8. Teaching Reading Skills ___________________________ 03
9. Conclusion ___________________________ 05
10. References ___________________________ 06

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1. Introduction
Effective reading is essential for success in acquiring a second language. After all, reading is
the basis of instruction in all aspects of language learning: using textbooks for language
courses, writing, revising, developing vocabulary, acquiring grammar, editing, and using
computer-assisted language learning programs. Reading instruction, therefore, is an essential
component of every second-language curriculum. Understanding some important facts about
reading, literacy, and teaching methods is essential for providing effective instruction in
reading.
2. Reading
Reading is a conscious and unconscious thinking process. The reader applies many strategies
to reconstruct the meaning that the author is assumed to have intended. The reader does this
by comparing information in the text to his or her background knowledge and prior
experience. A reader approaches a text with a huge store of prior knowledge and experience,
including preconceptions about the uses of spoken and written language. All of a person’s
prior knowledge, experience, and values are organized in categories, or schemata. Each
category, or schema, is connected to many other schemata in a complex mental network. As
he or she notices particular ideas or facts in a text, the reader matches that information with
background knowledge and is able to construct a version of the text’s meaning. Researchers
in text comprehension have applied an information-processing analogy to understanding how
people think, learn, and remember what they read. When a person reads, two aspects of this
“human information processing system” continuously interact. When the reader focuses
primarily on what he or she already knows, this is called a concept-driven or “top-down”
mode. On the other hand, when the reader relies primarily on textual features and information
to comprehend, this is called a data-driven or “bottom-up” mode (Kintsch and van Dijk 1978;
Rumelhart and Ortony 1977; Winograd 1977; Rumelhart 1980). In other words, the reader is
constantly noticing parts of the text and comparing that sample with what he or she already
knows.

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3. Literacy
Literacy is a set of attitudes and beliefs about the ways of using spoken and written language
that are acquired in the course of a person’s socialization into a specific cultural context.
Language and culture cannot be separated. Language knowledge and thinking patterns are
socially constructed within a cultural setting, and each language/culture fosters its own way
of understanding the world. In other words, each culture fosters the development of different
schemata of the world. That is why readers from two different cultural backgrounds can read
the same text and construct very different models of what the text means. They have different
schemata (different background knowledge), different expectations about how a text should
present information, and different ways of creating meaning.
Consequently, teachers cannot assume that students who are good readers in their native
language can simply apply successfully the same skills to reading in English. Reading in
English requires a set of thinking skills and attitudes that grow out of the spoken and written
use of the English language. Teaching reading in Standard English to second-language
learners and other limited English proficient students means helping them acquire the literate
behaviors, the ways of thinking about text that is practiced by native speakers of English. In
fact, learning to read and comprehend a second language requires learning a secondary
literacy: alternative cultural interpretations, cultural beliefs about language and discourse,
and culture specific formal and content schemata. It is important to realize that learning to
read effectively in a second language literally alters the learner’s cognitive structures and
values.
4. Types of Reading
Reading could extensive or intensive.
a. Extensive
It’s a type of reading in order to gain a general overview of the contents
b. Intensive
It is a careful detailed reading of section of a text.

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5. Students’ Needs to read well in a language
In order to read well in English, then, students need to do the following:
1. Develop a schema of the reading process that includes the idea that reading is more
than translating—reading is thinking.
2. Talk about their reading, and explain how they make sense of a text.
3. Read extensively for pleasure in English, and discuss their reading with someone who
can model the literate behaviors expected in an English-language context.
4. Break the habit of reading every word by reading faster.
5. Learn to vary their reading rate to suit their purpose in reading.
6. Employ top-down processes effectively by learning to make connections between
what they already know and what they are reading.
7. Learn reading and thinking skills that fluent readers of English employ unconsciously
to strengthen both top-down and bottom-up processing abilities.
8. Enhance bottom-up processing by acquiring the most useful vocabulary and by
learning strategies for guessing meaning in context.
9. Master the basic 2,000 words that constitute approximately 80 percent of texts in
English.
10. Acquire specific reading comprehension skills they can apply strategically.
6. Why Extensive Reading?
Extensive reading is recommended because it
1. Develops positive attitude
2. Motivate to read more
3. Increases reading fluency
4. Improvement in writing
7. Reading Skills
Reading skills are the cognitive processes that a reader uses in making sense of a text. For
fluent readers, most of the reading skills are employed unconsciously and automatically.
When confronted with a challenging text, fluent readers apply these skills consciously
and strategically in order to comprehend.

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8. Teaching Reading Skills
1. Automatic decoding: Being able to recognize a word at a glance.
2. Previewing and predicting: Giving the text a quick once-over to be able to guess
what is to come.
3. Specifying purpose: Knowing why a text is being read.
4. Identifying genre: Knowing the nature of the text in order to predict the form and
content.
5. Questioning: Asking questions in an inner dialog with the author.
6. Scanning: Looking through a text very rapidly for specific information.
7. Recognizing topics: Finding out what the text is about.
8. Classification of ideas into main topics and details: Categorizing words and ideas
on the basis of their relationships; distinguishing general and specific.
9. Locating topic sentences: Identifying the general statement in a paragraph.
10. Stating the main idea (or thesis) of a sentence, paragraph or passage: Knowing
what the author’s point is about the topic.
11. Recognizing patterns of relationships: Identifying the relationships between ideas;
the overall structure of the text.
12. Identifying and using words that signal the patterns of relationships between
ideas. Being able to see connections between ideas by the use of words such as
first, then, later.
13. Inferring the main idea, using patterns and other clues.
14. Recognizing and using pronouns, referents, and other lexical equivalents as clues
to cohesion.
15. Guessing the meaning of unknown words from the context. Using such clues as
knowledge of word parts, syntax, and relationship patterns.
16. Skimming. Quickly getting the gist or overview of a passage or book.
17. Paraphrasing. Re-stating texts in the reader’s own words in order to monitor one’s
own comprehension.
18. Summarizing. Shortening material by retaining and re-stating main ideas and
leaving out details.

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19. Drawing conclusions. Putting together information from parts of the text and
inducing new or additional ideas.
20. Drawing inferences and using evidence. Using evidence in the text to know things
that are unstated.
21. Visualizing. Picturing, or actually drawing a picture or diagram, of what is
described in the text.
22. Reading critically. Judging the accuracy of a passage with respect to what the
reader already knows; distinguishing fact from opinion.
23. Reading faster. Reading fast enough to allow the brain to process the input as
ideas rather than single words.
24. Adjusting reading rate according to materials and purpose. Being able to choose
the speed and strategies needed for the level of comprehension desired by the
reader.
9. Conclusion
Extensive Reading, Comprehension Reading, Reading Fluency, Vocabulary Building
are the integral parts of the reading. It is necessary to give attention to all four in order
to be a good reader.

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10. References
1. Anderson, Neil J. (2005). Fluency in L2 Reading and Speaking. TESOL 2005
colloquium.
2. Birch, Barbara M. (2002). English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
3. Cook-Gumperz, J. (ed.) (1986). The Social Construction of Literacy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
4. Day, R. & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive Reading in the Second Language
Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. Beatrice S. Mikulecky (2009). Teaching Reading in a Second Language

Teaching Reading Skills

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