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However, for the majority of cases, in an ESL context, we aren’t teaching students
how to read, we’re helping the students develop skills to
achieve comprehension of a
text. These are very different things.
Extensive reading has also been shown to have a positive impact on fluency
development.
Reading gives students more time to themselves
Pair them up.
Have students work in pairs.
Give them one between two.
As the process of achieving initial comprehension is entirely personal (i.e. my
brain processes information differently to yours) then there is
a clear rationale here to
give students a bit of time alone to work through any reading text before having them
jump into interactive, communicative tasks. Sometimes, it’s just nice to mix things up a
little.
Reading is an easily integrated skill
“Reading tasks provide multiple opportunities for
increasing student-student
interaction. The most most common ways of communicatively exploiting reading texts
are to use them as models, where the text that students read
is an example of a text
students are expected to produce later in the lesson (i.e. student read a letter or a
dialogue, and then go on to practice creating one themselves),
or as a stimulus, where
students read a text and then use ideas in the text as the basis
for generating their own
ideas, responses and discussions”
5
.
So as you can see, these lend themselves to integrating reading with speaking or reading
with writing to maximize the mileage you can get out of a single piece of material, and
help students to make more sense of the language they’re using in production.
5
Wikipedia. 2010.
Reading Comprehension
. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/, accessed April 15,
2011
