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Unit 6 Section 3 1

Reading

Summary

In this part of the unit we will look at skills again, and in particular at reading. You willfind that much of what is said here links to what was said in the sections on listeningand writing and both written and spoken discourse, but we will be examining issuesthat pertain particularly to the skill of reading.

We will be focusing on what reading is, and what an effective reader is. We will belooking at problems that reading can pose for learners, and at strategies we canfocus on in the classroom to help students become more effective readers. We willbe evaluating coursebook reading tasks, and discussing coursebook and authenticreading materials. We will be identifying appropriately articulated overall and stagereading aims. Finally we will be addressing the importance of encouraging readingoutside of class, how that can be achieved and the use of supplementary readers inparticular.

Objectives

By the end of the section you will:

• Be familiar with terminology associated with reading.

• Be familiar with what effective reading involves and the problems that studentsare likely to have with being effective readers in English.

• Have thought about why reading is taught in class, whether, in fact, we can“teach reading” and what “reading strategies” are.

• Be able to articulate appropriate and principled reading aims.

• Have considered coursebook and authentic reading materials.

• Have analysed your own practice and thought about alternatives.

• Have thought about the place of reading in a historical context.

• Have focused on promoting reading outside the classroom and using readers.

• Have been introduced to current debates regarding reading.



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Contents

1. A Definition of Reading

2. What kinds of reading texts are there?

3. Why and how do people read?

4. A Brief Historical Perspective

5. Thinking about Text Exploitation

6. What does effective reading involve for any reader?

7. What affects our students’ English reading ability?

8. Current Issues in Teaching Reading

8.1. A Definition of Effective Reading

8.2. Enabling Students: Skills or Strategies?

8.3. Atomistic or Holistic, Testing or Developing?

9. Articulating Reading Lesson Aims

10. A Reading Focus

11. Finding Materials for Reading

11.1. Authenticity and Authentic Materials

12. Types of Reading Tasks

13. Readers and Extensive Reading

13.1. Supplementary Readers

14. Conclusion

15. Terminology Review

Reading

Appendices



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1. A Definition of Reading

TASK 1: What is reading? (2 - 3mins)

Write your answer to this question in the space below:

It is likely that we can immediately agree on certain things in writing a definition ofreading:

1. It is an activity involving focus on written text.

2. The reader approaches the text with purposeful intent to extract meaningregardless of any more specific reason for doing the reading.

3. The reader may respond to the content.

There are other aspects to a definition of reading as well, which are crucial tounderstanding current thinking about reading:

4. It is a communicative activity with interaction between reader, writer and text;

5. The interaction is not necessarily easy or straightforward;

6. Reading is a process.

The first is quite self-explanatory: in contrast to the historical definition, reading is nolonger considered a passive mental exercise involving eye movement. It is nowaccepted as an active process. The reader may ask him/herself questions about the

text; the reader may formulate questions s/he wants the text to answer; the readermay carry on a dialogue with the author, etc. The author, on the other hand, haswritten the text to communicate something with the reader. This may or may not beeasily communicated, and it may or may not be what the reader understands, hencethe complicated nature of the interaction. Thus, reading is a process of the writerattempting to communicate something with the reader and the reader participating inthe communicative process by trying to understand.

These are the six elements that are currently commonly agreed. For reading on this,please see the Introduction to Reading in a Foreign Language, Alderson andUrquhart (Longman, 1984) and Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (Macmillan, 2005), Nuttall, Chapter 1.



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2. What kinds of reading texts are there?

Task 2: Types of Reading Text (5-7mins)

First, make a list of all the reading you have done in the past couple of days. Thengroup the items on your list – you decide how.

Think about how you organised the list: Did you consider content? Language?Your reason for reading the text?

You should have an extensive list of different types of reading you have done,perhaps including things like emails, messages, letters/post cards, newspaper andmagazine articles, adverts, scholarly text, coursebook and teaching materials andreaders, a novel, poetry, a recipe or an instruction manual.

These different text types are different genres and they have different vocabulary,grammar, discourse and stylistic conventions. The important thing is that you canrecognise differences in genre and can identify characteristics of at least the mostcommon. The characteristics of different genres are not universal, and the linguistic,stylistic clues we use to interpret a text are not necessarily obvious or known tostudents, thus increasing the difficulty they have in understanding a text. Theconclusion must be that helping students identify the characteristics of a good rangeof genres is crucial to enabling their development as effective readers.

Please look back at the discussion and reading on genre in the section on WrittenDiscourse as we will not be discussing it further here. To read about genre andreading, please see Reading, Wallace, Chapter 5.

3. Why and how do people read?

There are obviously a myriad of reasons for reading, and the reason you readsomething may differ from the reason someone else reads the same text.

Task 3: Reading Purpose (7-10mins)

Go back to Task 2 above. Choose three of the texts you listed, and make a list ofthe reasons you had for doing that reading.

As practising teachers you are aware that how you read the different texts waslargely determined by what you expected or needed to get out of them. We do not,for example read a TV Guide in the same way that we read a newspaper article or aBooker Prize-winning novel; in other words, the way we approach and exploitdifferent types of text will be different. We are most likely to scan, to glance quicklythrough, the Wednesday evening TV schedule to find a programme that looks ofinterest; once we find one we may well skim the write-up about it, or read it quickly,to confirm whether or not we want to watch it. In the case of a newspaper article we



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may read it just to get the gist, or overall/general impression of the writer’s opinion oran understanding of what the writer is saying; we may also read it carefully to identifyspecific arguments, facts or information in detail. When reading a novel, we maywell read carefully and in depth for meaning, or to appreciate aspects of the writer’sstyle. This is another way of reading for specific information.

You will also have seen the terms intensive and extensive applied to ways of

approaching a text (see the section on Listening previously in the course materials).Historically, approaching it intensively has been used to mean a careful scrutiny ofthe content of a short text usually for specific information or for a specific languagefocus; an extensive focus has involved reading long(er) texts. The use of the termshas changed somewhat. In the current classroom, intensive reading relates to afocus on a shorter text in a variety of ways (skimming, scanning) for a variety ofreasons (specific information, gist) while extensive reading happens outside of classtime. Students are encouraged to read longer texts on their own for pleasure,relaxation, specific information and/or gist; what is important is that increasinglystudents are encouraged to make their own decisions about what they want to getout of the text.

To recap then, how we read is informed by why we are reading and vice versa. This

has implications for the ELT classroom. It is important that we consider why ourstudents wish to read in English generally. Do they want to read for the same reasonor reasons in English as they do in their own language? What is their motivation forlearning to read in English? Is reading something they expect to do simply as part ofthe process of learning a new language, something they need to survive, or is itsomething they have little opportunity or expectation of doing outside school? Theanswers to these questions can then inform decisions we make about encouragingstudents to read in the ways that they need (and negotiating otherwise). Becausereading is a purposeful activity, it is imperative that we find answers to thesequestions so we can try to ensure informed classroom practice which has relevanceto our students.

Task 4: Action Research (2 hours)

Undertake research to find out whether your students have reasons for wanting tolearn to read in English and what those reasons are. This should include identifyingtext types/genres students are likely to find themselves reading currently or in thefuture and any difficulties they find with the different genres.

Devise a short, simple questionnaire to help you get information; you will need theinformation later in this Unit. This Task is similar to one that you did in Unit 3(Listening); please feel free to refer to it for ideas in writing your questionnaire.

Summarise the results of your research and post your findings in your DiscussionForum on the Delta website.



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4. A Brief Historical Perspective

TASK 5: The History of Reading in ELT (10 mins)

Match a sentence completion (a-e) with its logical beginning (1-5):

1. In a Grammar Translation classroom .................

2. In a strict Audio-Lingual classroom.....................

3. At the start of the Communicative Approach ......

4. Later in the Communicative Approach ...............

5. In today’s classroom ..........................................

a) .... reading is discouraged, and students are expected to learn by hearing andrepeating target language and dialogues.

b) .... reading texts regain importance. Students are encouraged to silently andselectively read texts to get information to complete tasks which often involveworking with other people.

c) .... reading is a skill with which learners are encouraged to be autonomous sothe focus of the classroom is on enabling students to be more effective readers.

d) .... reading is used both to raise language awareness and reinforce languagepassively and actively and to practise/test students’ comprehension of theinformation in the text. It is considered one of the four skills for learners to learnso that their acquisition of the language is balanced.

e) .... students’ language learning is based on texts which they read usually aloud

but also silently. The work is first and foremost language-focused, with littlefocus on comprehension, as students work in both first and new language withthe text.

See Appendix 1 for answers.

5. Thinking about Text Exploitation

The previous task highlights how texts have historically been used to present orprovide practice of either grammar structure or, less commonly, vocabulary. This has

carried on to the present with the addition of some “reading skills practice”; we willreturn to this in more detail in our discussion of tasks, in Subsection 12. We will nowlook briefly, however, at how texts are often exploited in teaching materials atpresent. In order to make principled decisions for students it is important that we areaware of what tasks are really asking students to do.



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Task 6: Texts in Coursebooks (15mins)

1. Look at 2 coursebooks you use in your classes. Choose 4 texts and decidehow they are being exploited: principally for language or principally forincreasing student confidence with reading, for example.

2. If you feel that a text is being used for “skills development,” identify whichskills are being addressed.

3. Is this part of systematic development of the skills or do the activities “test”student use of the skills?

For an example of how to approach this task, please see Appendix 2.

6. What does effective reading involve for any reader?

Texts can be difficult for a variety of reasons, and readers reading in their firstlanguage commonly use a series of strategies to help them identify or interpret themeaning in the text. Writers assume that they share certain experiences andinformation about specific topics and the world with their readers. If these things arenot shared or if they have been experienced and interpreted in very different ways,the text becomes much more difficult for the reader to understand. There is also anassumption that reader and writer share the same script/characters, punctuationconventions, and knowledge of the same grammar, discourse and vocabulary andstylistic conventions.

With assumptions about shared knowledge of a topic or the world and with a reasonfor reading, a reader approaches a text with certain expectations of what s/he willfind there. These expectations enable the reader to make predictions about and to

draw inferences from the text as a whole and about specific parts of it. Thepredictions and inferences, in turn, guide the reading and reduce the reader’sprocessing load as the reader “chunks” information into manageable units. In otherwords, by having a good idea of what to expect (predicting content) and by having anidea of what s/he wants from a text, the reader can organise information into what isfamiliar and what is unfamiliar so that s/he can focus more efficiently on what isunfamiliar.

Effective reading also involves the reader simultaneously moving between top-down processing of the content to bottom-up processing of the language in the text as isnecessary. Top-down processing involves the reader focusing on getting an overviewof the text, on getting the “big picture”, on understanding generally what is being saidrather than looking at the text at a micro level. In bottom-up processing, the reader

stops and looks at individual words or structures to understand what the writer issaying to facilitate understanding at a more global level. It is the interaction of thesetwo forms of processing that is important, and an effective reader reads differenttexts in different ways and moves between these two ways of processing informationas the text, the knowledge s/he has of the topic and the purpose for reading changes.This type of reading, where both top-down and bottom-up processing occurssimultaneously, is termed interactive reading.

For additional reading on this, you might like to see Silberstein , Techniques andResources in Teaching Reading, Chapter 1 (Oxford University Press, 1994); Nuttall



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Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (Macmillan, 2005), pp12 - 17 andCook (oxford University Press, 1989) Discourse, Unit 7.

Task 7: The Importance of Prediction in Reading (10mins)

Look at the following titles and decide for each one how much knowledge, and soconfidence, you would bring to the text and why you might be reading each:

a) Ian Rankin, Black and Blue

b) Mean, Statistics in Research

c) An insurance document

d) Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

e) Mills and Boon, Too Hot to Handle

f) A recipe for salmon en croute

g) New Headway Intermediate, Unit 5

h) Physics for Idiots

Which texts would you process in a predominantly top-down way and which in abottom-up fashion? Why? List 3-4 reasons.

You will undoubtedly have said that reading a Mills and Boon romance involves littlebottom-up processing; a poem from Birthday Letters may well necessitate acombination of both top-down and bottom-up. The recipe will demand careful bottom-up reading if it is the first time that you have made the dish; if you are making it for

the umpteenth time, you will probably read the recipe just to remind yourself of thekey steps you need to remember to carry it out. Thus, the more knowledge you sharewith the writer and have of the type of text you are reading, the more familiarity youwill have with the language and content you expect to find, the more realistic yourexpectations are of what you do find in the text and so the better your predictions areregarding that type of text; you are able to move between top-down and bottom-upprocessing effectively and efficiently in order to achieve your reading purpose.

7. What affects our students’ English reading ability?

Let us assume that our students are reasonably proficient readers in their ownlanguage (although this is not an assumption that you will always be able to make)and so employ the strategies for interpreting and decoding text described above.



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Task 8: Factors Affecting your Students’ Reading Proficiency (10mins)

Observe your students informally. What is their reading ability? What problemsdo they have when reading? For example, you might find that students

subvocalize (i.e. they read the text aloud under their breath), or that they lackexperience with the western world and so do not have background informationthat coursebook writers take for granted.

Your list may have included some or all of the following factors:

• Topics are unfamiliar and/or inappropriate.

• Students do not have sufficient background information.

• Students’ level of language is not high enough.

• Students may not be able to apply reading strategies from their own language.

• Students may not be familiar with the script.

• Students may not be familiar with conventions of layout, punctuation,paragraphing.

• Students may find reading in the classroom off-putting.

• Students may read word by word only.

• Students may mouth words as they read or, as above, subvocalize.

• Students may translate as they read.

• Students may focus or get stuck on what they don’t know.

• Students may panic when confronted with text and task(s).

Let us look in more detail at some of these factors.

Topic: As stated above, having even limited knowledge of a topic gives readersexpectations which they want to be fulfilled by the text, and it allows them to makepredictions about the content of the text. Together these two things enable readers tochunk information, and to identify what needs closer scrutiny and what needs lessattention.

Background: Background information is another factor in the expecting, predicting,recognising and inferring chain of skills. When we read we use a network of generalbackground information to help us comprehend. For example what the text looks like(hand written, bold type, small print, lots of space, pictures) gives us information;likewise, the scene the text calls up in our minds (a bar in Paris at about 5 pm; a bus journey in the Andes; on a boat in a typhoon in the China Sea; getting ready to walkthrough Petra) allows us to make predictions about what we will read.

Schemata: It is believed that we organise the experiences we have had into mentalstructures called schemata (or schema in the singular); when we read, ourschemata are activated and we use our experiences to enable us to interpret the text



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because of the sequence and partly because we expect the past perfect to beused to provide explanations.

For further reading on the importance of discourse in reading, see Reading, Wallace,Chapter 2 and Nuttall (2nd edition) Chapter 2.

Task 9: Follow-up to Factors Affecting your Students’ ReadingProficiency (20mins)

Go back to Task 8 and compare your list to what has been described so far.

To what extent do each of the above affect your students? Choose three of thefactors you mentioned. List two things for each that you do or could do to helpstudents overcome these problems.

See Appendix 3 for examples.

Being in Class: The classroom often has a strange effect on students. Thestrategies they use in reading in their own language sometimes appear to besuspended, and the expectations they would normally have about a text type theyare familiar with do not seem to exist. This is partly explained by the fact that readingin class is viewed as instructional – an activity that the teacher focuses on and thatstudents will be tested on. This results in different expectations from those we havewhen we read for ourselves, and the summoning of different schemata than what wenormally use outside class when no one is monitoring our reading or the correctnessof our answers. It may also be that students regard reading in a new language asnecessitating new strategies.

The classroom has other effects on readers: there are distractions and tensions, forexample fears associated with being asked questions one may not have the rightanswer to or reading to time limits which are overly challenging.

Different Writing Conventions: Script and writing conventions including layout,paragraphing and punctuation can increase student difficulty in understanding a text.Clearly for students whose first language (or even other languages) does not useRoman script, reading will be impossible until they have some familiarity with it. Forthese students, hand-written texts can be especially problematic although evenprinted text has sufficient variation in the form of some letters (includingcapitalisation) that students can become confused between, for example, “g” and “g”,or “a” and “A”. Similarly, consider the difference in information conveyed between“My sister, who works for Médecins San Frontiers, has a flat in Paris” and “My sisterwho works for Médecins San Frontiers has a flat in Paris.” In this case, the commasconvey important information to the reader about how many sisters the speaker has – one in the first sentence and more than one in the second.

All of the above factors can result in our students having problems with reading inEnglish; once you have identified those affecting your students, it is obviouslyimportant to find ways to help students overcome them.



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8. Current Issues in Teaching Reading

8.1. A Definition of Effective Reading

Task 10: Reasons for Teaching Reading (15 mins)

a) Why do we do reading activities in an ELT classroom? Make a list of reasons.Be critical and consider the question from both your (the teacher’s) and thestudents’ point of view.

b) What is “effective” reading?

c) Do you think we can teach it? Why and how?

See below for some suggested answers.

You may have listed the some of the following in answering question (a) above:

• Because in class it adds to a balance of language systems and skills.

• Because learning a language means acquiring reading (as well as other skillsand structure, lexis, etc.).

• Because students expect to learn to read when they learn a new language.

• Because students need to learn to read in the language they’re learning (for their jobs, to pass an examination, etc.).

• Because reading is a very effective means of learning language, and aboutlanguage.

• Because texts contextualise specific target language and this helps studentunderstanding.

Let us consider the last two points in the list in particular, however, as this is an areaof some debate in the ELT profession. There is no doubt that reading widely exposesthe reader to a range of language; it is generally held that this is an effective way ofacquiring and/or reinforcement of language. Readers see, and perhaps process,patterns of lexis and structure which reinforce what they already know, or textsintroduce them to new patterns. This view has been summarised by Nuttall:

“Language improvement is a natural by-product of reading, and a highlydesirable one”.

Nuttall, (2nd edition), p30

While improved knowledge of language may occur as a result of any reading focus,it should not be the main aim of a “reading” focus. There may be a language focusintegrated (often as a follow-up activity) so that language in context is highlighted;however, students read to understand. It is unhelpful to have a first reading of a taskfocussing on language alone. It is imperative to help students become effectivereaders – in other words to enable them to make decisions about and to interact withthe text, to understand the purpose of the text and to extract meaning from it.



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Obviously, in order to do this, they will need to understand language and how itconveys meaning. The focus on language is, as we have discussed above, only onefactor of the factors that affects students’ ability to read effectively.

Being an effective reader means being proficient with a process in real life (i.e.,outside the classroom). It is a process of silently reading real and meaningful textwith purpose, without teacher assistance but interacting with the text by using textual

and non-textual clues to understand it, questioning, predicting, reacting, inferring,stopping and looking at things in depth when necessary, and understanding what it isnecessary to understand:

“In contemporary approaches to reading, meaning is not seen as beingfully present in a text waiting to be decoded. Rather meaning is createdthrough the interaction of reader and text; developing metacognitiveawareness is an appropriate goal of a reading curriculum.”

(Silberstein, Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, pp7 – 9)

Current thinking is that, as teachers, we cannot “teach” effective reading. Rather, it isthe teachers’ responsibility to enable students to be more effective readers bymaking strategies overt to students. Ultimately, it is the students’ responsibility to putinto practice the strategies they are made aware of or introduced to in readinglessons.

For further reading on this, you should read “A profile of an effective readingteacher,” Richards, J. The Language Teaching Matrix, (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990).

8.2. Enabling Students: Skills or Strategies?

A second area of discussion and debate in the literature has to do with the terms“skills” and “strategies”; these words describe ways students approach texts andprocesses they might apply to text to extract meaning. For some writers, includingGrellet and Munby, the words are interchangeable. You might like to look through the

list of reading skills Grellet provides in the first chapter of her book.

Urquhart and Weir, on the other hand, seek to distinguish between them. Theydescribe skills as “text-oriented” and strategies as “reader-oriented.” For them, skillsare unconscious ways of dealing with text; they are abilities which operate withoutthe readers’ consciously thinking about them. Strategies, on the other hand, are theconscious ways that readers problem-solve while they read. When comprehensionof the text breaks down, for example, when the lexis becomes too complex for rapidcomprehension, students employ strategies such as inferring meaning from context,or breaking words down into their constituent parts, in order to pick their way through.Strategies also define the decisions students make about what to take from the text.

Wallace, on the other hand, presents evidence for a holistic view, i.e. one in whichskills and strategies cannot be separated:

“Reading is a unitary (sic) process both because it cannot beadequately broken down into separate skills and because we draw onsimilar processing strategies in the reading of all languages, evenwhere the writing systems are very different.”

Reading, Wallace op cit chapter 3, 3.3



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The strategies adopted are determined by the context within which the reading takesplace, the type of text being read and the reader’s purpose and the strategies areused selectively.

In the end, Wallace suggests that rather than developing different strategies forreaders in their second (or third) language, as teachers we should:

“ensure that text, context, and reading task give maximum support to thesecond language learner’s current linguistic and schematic knowledge”

Wallace, op cit pp.42-43

Nuttall falls between both these points of view. She acknowledges the amount ofresearch that has gone into identifying reading skills and the relationships betweenthem but says:

“The issues remain controversial. In any case, it is generally agreed that,if individual skills exist, they work together and are inextricably linked.Most people accept that we can at least identify certain strategies whichreaders can make conscious use of when reading difficult texts. Probablythe best way to acquire these is simply to read and read. However, there

is evidence that strategy training helps”.

Nuttall, op cit, Introduction to Part Two

Task 11: Identifying Skills/Strategies Students Might Use/Need (40mins)

1. Brainstorm a list of reading skills and/or strategies based on the coursebooksyou have access to, your classroom experience and articles you may haveread. You might include, for example, guessing the meaning of unknown lexisfrom the context, predicting content from a title, and scanning efficiently forspecific information.

2. Refer to Grellet, Developing Reading Skills (2nd ed) pp4-5 and Nuttall,Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (New ed.) chapters 4, 5, 6and 7 to compare and extend your ideas.

3. Evaluate your own teaching. Which skills and/or strategies do you already focusstudents on in reading? Choose two that you have not focused students on andplan to incorporate them into your next reading lesson.

8.3. Atomistic or Holistic? Testing or Developing?

Coursebooks from the 1980s onwards include activities to increase students’confidence in reading. These are often referred to as ‘reading skills development’activities: students may be asked to predict content of texts; they may be asked toguess the meanings of unfamiliar lexis in context; they may be asked to identify thetext type and to comment on stylistic features. Much more commonly, however,students are asked to extract different levels of information from a text within a giventime limit; and this is often done in preparation for exploiting the text for targetlanguage.



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Because we set questions with right and wrong answers, and because we measurethe effectiveness of students’ reading by the proportion of answers they get right andwrong, most reading activities test (or at best, practise) students’ reading rather thandevelop their confidence and effectiveness as readers. Reading activities tend toapproach text atomistically, from a bottom-up point of view if you will, rather thanholistically. They tend to emphasize the product – answering questions aboutaspects of the text, rather than the process of approaching the text as a whole.

To take this further, let us return to Task 6.

Task 12: Follow-up to Task 6 (10mins)

In Task 6, you were asked to identify whether the tasks you chose focused onreading ‘skills’ or language, and whether the tasks were developmental or were infact testing students’ ability to comprehend text.

Having read the above section, are there any that you wish to reconsider?Consider issues such as purpose/aims, support for students, texts and tasks.

Do you feel that the reading focus in coursebooks is by-and-large atomistic orholistic? Discuss your conclusions with others in your Discussion Forum on theDELTA website.

There is no doubt that on the one hand, testing is a necessary tool for measuringmastery and progress and for identifying areas demanding remedial or teachingfocus; also without doubt is the fact that many of the task types used fordevelopmental purposes can also be used for testing. The teacher’s ability to firstidentify what the aim/focus of the task really is, to evaluate whether that isappropriate to her students and then her lesson/stage aims is crucial.

While the above issues are currently being debated, there are certain conclusions wecan draw about what constitutes an effective reader. Students need to be exposed toa range of texts; they need to read and understand the whole text, the writer’sopinion, and/or the writer’s vision, as well as focusing on how that meaning iscommunicated. Students may need teachers to highlight strategies they can use tohelp them when they run into difficulty interpreting the meaning, but readingeffectively is “an integrated process” (Nuttall, p41) in which skills and strategies areapplied only when and if necessary to facilitate understanding. They may also needteachers to reassure them that L2 reading skills are the same as those in L1(provided, of course, that the student is literate in L1). Taken all together,understanding a written text involves having a purpose to read, activating schemataand strategies; it also necessitates awareness of language. Reading, it would

appear, is much more of a holistic activity than previously thought.

9. Articulating Reading Lesson Aims

Let us start with a general overall aim. In a “reading lesson“ we seek:

To enable students to become independent, effective readers who are able to readreal and meaningful texts with purpose and to be aware of what it is necessary forthem to take from similar texts outside the classroom.



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In order to enable students to do this, we may choose to develop meaning-orientedawareness and/or highlight strategies. In order to do this we not only draw students’attention to them but also to provide supportive practice. Thus aims in a readingskills lesson might be:

• To develop students’ awareness of the importance of having a reason to readand developing strategies for this.

• To develop students’ awareness of how to use peripheral information (e.g. layout,visuals, title, typeface, text type / genre, location etc) to get information about atext.

• To enable students to decide which new vocabulary they need to understand andwhich they can skip over (in order to better understand the specific text studentsare reading, with an eye to being able to read similar texts more effectively infuture).

• To enable students to read more quickly.

• To enable students to infer meaning (of the text)

• To develop student awareness of pronoun reference and how it affects meaning.This then enables students to read similar texts more effectively in future.

• To develop student awareness of cohesive devices of contrast including:although, despite, in spite of , though, mind you and nevertheless. This thenenables students to read similar texts more effectively in future.

• To develop students’ awareness of lexical cohesion and the role it plays inorganising texts and managing arguments. This then enables students to readsimilar texts more effectively in future.

• To develop students’ awareness of chunks of collocations in text. This thenenables students to read similar texts more effectively in future.

• To develop student recognition of fore-grounded information by looking at clauseorder in sentences. This then enables students to read similar texts moreeffectively in future.



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Task 13: Evaluating Reading Aims (10mins)

Look at the following reading aims and decide why each is inappropriate:

1. To develop the reading skill.

2. To practise the skill of scanning a light-hearted magazine article for specificinformation.

3. To practise reading for understanding.

4. To practise skim reading a long text.

5. To enable students to understand and use the present perfect continuous in thecontext of a letter home.

Check the reasons that each is a poor aim in Appendix 4.

Now, either look at or think through aims that you have written for lessons that haveinvolved a reading focus. Be critical. Re-articulate any that are vague or do not

really reflect what you did.

10. A Reading Focus

A reading lesson can be a whole lesson or simply part of a lesson. The following waspart of a longer lesson for a strong mid-intermediate class of mixed nationalities.Most of the students were planning to study for and take the Cambridge FirstCertificate examination in the following months. The teacher was working hard toimprove students’ reading strategies and to encourage the students to take moreresponsibility for their own learning.

TASK 14: Stage and Overall Aims (30mins)

As you read through the procedure, evaluate whether the focus wasdevelopmental or not and why.

Write appropriate stage aims and then overall aims for this part of the lesson. See Appendix 5 for suggested answers.



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Nuttall, C. 1996 Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language Macmillan Heinemann(page 238)



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Stage Aim Focus/Time Procedure

s-s / 5-7mins Students look at title in groups of 3.Discuss:

• What do you expect to read?

• What do you already know aboutthis topic?

Ss alone

2-3mins

Students are asked to look at thefollowing ways of reading a text afterglancing briefly at the text itself (OHT).Tell them they will be asked to answerquestions about the text after they readit and they should be able to say whythey have chosen to read the text theway they have:

a) Read text through

b) Carefully answer questions

c) Skim through text

d) Look at questions

e) Read text more carefully

f) Answer questions

g) Read through questions

h) Scan text for answers

i) Read through questions

j) Read text carefully to find answers

• Students decide how they will readthe text.

• Students read and answer questionsin 4mins.

t-s-t

s-s

10mins

• Teacher asks students to evaluateeffectiveness of their choice of

reading approach.

• Students discuss answers toquestions.

• Students’ feedback to teacher.

It should be clear that the approach taken here is focused more on the developmentof strategies than on giving students practice of and evaluating their reading



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comprehension. The teacher’s aim is to activate and encourage students’ makingpredictions, their bringing their knowledge of the world and their experience to thetext, and their making choices of how they will approach a text and then reflecting onthe effectiveness of these choices. Please see Nuttall, chapters.3, 9, 11 and 12 for athorough discussion of the aims of a focus on reading, on planning a reading focus ina lesson and on ways of exploiting texts.

Task 15: Reflecting on Your Own Practice (30mins)

Discuss one of your lesson plans with a reading focus in it with someone in yourDiscussion Forum. Tell the person whether you take a developmental approach ornot and what evidence there is of this in the plan. If you don’t take a developmentalapproach, discuss with the person what developmental focus you will be includingin your next lesson.

You may well find that the coursebook you use with your classes is not of great helpto you in developing skills and strategies; in the end, the developmental focus in mostbooks is quite limited. Hopefully Nuttall and Silberstein will give you ideas foractivities to use with coursebook, or other, materials.

11. Finding Materials for Reading

Task 16: Sources of Reading Material (10mins)

Make a list of the sources of English-language reading texts available to you andyour students.

Undoubtedly, your list contained coursebooks and supplementary books. It may ormay not have also included: local and international English-language magazines andnewspapers, novels and/or other books of various types, reference material such asmenus, timetables, maps, letters, cartoons, adverts, company brochures, readersand material downloaded from the Internet, amongst others. You should also haveincluded materials you have written for class use.

The rationale for choosing texts may include consideration of your students’ age, sex,interests/needs, their level, variety in the classroom and/or the quality of print of the

text. Teachers may not be given a choice; they may well be told what material theyhave to use.

11.1. Authenticity and Authentic Materials

Texts used in course books and on courses increasingly are authentic, or they aremade to look authentic, and there is increased emphasis on teachers’ bringingauthentic material into class so that students have more “real life” exposure to nativespeaker communication. Before going any further, let us pause briefly to examine thenotion of authenticity.



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Authenticity, like skills and strategies, is a matter of discussion amongst academics.

Widdowson, Breen, Meinhof and Davies argue variously that once material isin a classroom it is no longer authentic; authenticity arises from readerinteraction with the text rather than being inherent in the text itself; andauthenticity comes from a reader’s understanding of the text. (See Reading,Wallace, Ch. 9, 9.5; Reading in a Foreign Language, Davies in Alderson and

Urquhart, Ch. 9). This is quite theoretical, however; authentic texts are usuallyregarded more pragmatically by practitioners; they are unadapted orunsimplified texts originally designed to be read by native-speakers.

Specially written materials can be produced, and so-called authentic material can besimplified/graded for learners. So long as the materials “still resemble the original interms of either syntax, discourse structure, vocabulary or content” (Silberstein, p102),they maintain their integrity in providing an authentic language experience.

Silberstein goes on to provide a thoughtful approach to this question:

“It is possible to get carried away with concerns that edited texts deprivestudents of authentic reading experiences. Students need to read. Theyneed to read as much as possible, often as quickly as possible, to buildup a store of textual knowledge and reading experience. Readingpassages should be authentic in the sense that they resemble the “real-world” texts students will encounter and that they require the sameapproaches to reading. Editing or “simplification” will sometimes berequired for the sake of accessibility. Careful adaptation that preservesthe essence of text along with the redundancy of natural languageprovides access to authentic reading that students might not otherwisehave..... At all proficiency levels, we want students to be engaged withtexts that are “authentically” similar to those which represent theirreading goals.”

Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading, Ch 7, p102

There are advantages to using both types of texts with students. Compare theadvantages of authentic and specially designed text in the table below:

Authentic texts: Specially-written texts:

• Familiarise students with the waylanguage really works, especiallyconnected meaning in writtendiscourse.

• Can be constructed to highlightspecific features and/or to eliminateoverly difficult or irrelevantlanguage.

• Build confidence if the task ismanageable and students are

successful.

• Build students’ confidence becausethey are left feeling they have

understood (almost) everything.

• Motivate students because they areworking with real material.

• May motivate students to read atthe next level.

• Help reduce the artificiality of theclassroom.

• Reduce stress while preparingstudents to deal with the real world.



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Task 17: Disadvantages of Authentic and Specially Written Texts(10mins)

List 4 potential disadvantages of both authentic and specially written texts in thespace below. Use the table above and write disadvantages for the advantages

provided; check them in Appendix 6.

Authentic texts Specially-written texts

The other possible source of materials is teachers producing their own texts; this isnot something we will be looking at. However, if this is something you would like todo, need to do or already do you might like to read Techniques and Resources inTeaching Reading, Silberstein, for practical guidance.

12. Types of Reading Tasks

We will return now to the discussion started in Subsection 5. We are all familiar witha standard set of reading tasks: true/false, matching, comprehension questions,sentence completion or ordering events, for example. We may set students otherless common tasks such as filling in a graph or relating parts of text to pictures; wemay link a reading to a discussion or listening. For the most part texts in coursebooksare used as a basis for language focus with an efficient check of students’understanding of the text, or texts are used to give students practice in reading andunderstanding with comprehensive tasks which largely ‘test’ students’ ability toperform well. Look back at Subsection 10, Task 13. What do you notice about thetasks given to students? How would you describe them: as testing or developmental? As was discussed above, there is a mixture in this plan. In fact, the only ‘traditional’task is the comprehension questions which students eventually answer.

Many of the strands of this Section come together here: the importance of teacherclarity regarding what it means to be an effective reader and how we can enable ourstudents towards it, clarity regarding lesson/stage aims and the aims of tasks, andthe importance of a developmental focus to work on effective reading rather thansimply text-based language and/or comprehension work. You should by now haveread most or all of Nuttall; different types of tasks are discussed throughout her book;Silberstein’s book also contains a good range of activity ideas as do Grellet’s andWallace’s books. Try some of them out with your students.



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Task 18: Different Reading Task Types (1 hour)

With members of your Discussion Forum, each of you do the following:

• Find one task that you particularly like from a coursebook or from one of the

essential or recommended methodology books.

• Identify what it does (developmental? developmental of what? testing?).

• Decide why you feel it is a worthwhile task.

• Explain if / how you would need to adapt it for your particular group ofstudents.

In order for you to do this you will need to direct the others to the task so thateveryone can look at it.

13. Readers and Extensive Reading

So far, the focus of this section has been on reading in the classroom with the aim ofdeveloping students’ confidence and effectiveness in understanding both themeaning in the text and how it is produced. The broader aim of the reading we dowith students in class is, however, to enable them to function independently andeffectively outside of class. Reading longer texts without the guidance of a teacher,most often now done outside class, is called extensive reading, and it is often aneglected aspect of a systematic and thoughtful reading development programme. (Ifyou would like to revise the difference between intensive and extensive reading, seeSubsection 3).

Why is it so important to provide students with an opportunity to do extensivereading? Consider the following reasons and add any that you feel are important:

• It encourages students to read in a ‘non-school’ context.

• It gives students exposure to lexis, structure, discourse etc. in different andmeaningful contexts.

• It is important that students read longer texts, not only short ones.

• It provides an opportunity for more of a top-down focus (to balance the moretypical in-class bottom-up focus).

• It offers students meaningful choices: reading what they are genuinely interested

in, getting out of the text what they want, for example.

• It can help encourage learner independence.

• It increases the amount of time students are exposed to English.

• It can be motivating for students to complete a reading outside of class – it canprovide a sense of progress and achievement.

• Extensive reading can be integrated into class work.



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Task 19: Outside Reading Materials Audit (30mins)

1. Conduct an audit of the materials available (in the school where you work) toyour students for them to borrow and read at home:

• What materials are available?

• Is there material for all levels?

• Is there a system for borrowing?

• Do students seem to use the materials? Why/not?

2. Look back at Task 15. You investigated and noted the English-languagereading resources available to you and students; which ones are available tostudents outside school? Consider, for example, (local) English-languagenewspapers, magazines, etc.

You might like to read Nuttall, Chapter 8 at this point. There is an in-depth discussionabout promoting an extensive reading programme and practical information aboutsetting up a library in the first two-thirds of the chapter.

13.1. Supplementary Readers

Although an extensive reading library could, and should, have a range of booksavailable for students to choose from, including “native-speaker” novels, plays, poetryand subject texts which students might be interested in, we will confine ourdiscussion here to readers as they are now commonly available in schools and areoften the backbone of school lending libraries.

There are many reasons for deciding to invest in them and for providing them for use:they look like real books; there is a range of books available for each level; there is agood variety of titles/genres; they are of manageable length; they are comparativelyinexpensive; and they are quite easy to get hold of. There are, however, drawbacksto consider: there may be cultural limitations and/or appropriacy issues to takeaccount of; the language can be overly artificial especially at lower levels; studentsmay not perceive them as authentic and so find them uninteresting; they do not lastlong and so need to be constantly replaced thus increasing their expense.

There are different ways that you might choose to use readers. It may be that youwant students to read different books independently and then participate in some sortof project (for example, a presentation or written summary, etc.); it may also be thatyou use a reader as a set book with everyone reading the same book.



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Task 20: Using A Set Book - Reading (20 mins)

Read Nuttall, Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (Macmillan,2005), Chapter 8, Using a Class Reader.

What are the key elements that she highlights about using a class reader?

Check your answer in Appendix 7

If, however, you encourage students to read the book of their choice rather than aclass reader, you can incorporate the reading into class time in different ways:through a report back task (for example a 2-3 minute presentation to the class aboutthe book and whether they recommend it or not and why); a poster project; designinga cover for the book and justifying the elements included; a radio/videoed review ofthe book. You could also encourage student writing on what they have read. The key,as Nuttall says, is to ensure the reading experience is enjoyable and so any follow-upshould not be perceived by students as hard work or “testing”. You might encourage

them to write a review of what they have read to be put into the books – or even on aschool website – for other students to read to help them decide whether they want toread the book, for example. Alternatively, you may choose not to base any classwork on the reading being done extensively; you might simply keep track of thenumber and/or titles of books students read over a set period of time and then toincorporate this information into tutorials or reports you are asked to produce on thestudents.

If you are interested in promoting extensive reading with your learners, look atBanford, J. & Day, R. R. 2004 Extensive Reading Activities for TeachingLanguage (Cambridge University Press)

14. Conclusion

The purpose of this part of the module has been to prompt you to reconsider the wayyou approach reading in your classrooms: to encourage principled reflection andevaluation of your current practices, to highlight current thinking about reading andwhat it involves for foreign language learners, and to encourage principled change toyour current practice.

15. Terminology Review

The definitions below all refer to “parallel” concepts from this section. For 1 – 3, canyou differentiate between the terms given? There is an example provided.

Example. SKIMMING versus SCANNING

SKIMMING involves reading a complete text quickly in order to gain an overviewof the meaning of the whole piece, such as reading the back cover of a book tosee whether it appeals to us. SCANNING requires reading a text in order toextract salient details but not necessarily an overview of the whole text – what wedo when looking for an item on a list, for example.

1. DEVELOPING SKILLS versus TESTING SKILLS



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2. ATOMISTIC versus HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO READING

3. SCHEMATIC KNOWLEDGE versus SYSTEMIC KNOWLEDGE

Check your ideas in Appendix 8.



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Reading

Essential Reading

Nuttall, C. 1996 Teaching Reading Skills in a foreign language (new ed.),

Macmillan Heinemann

Silberstein, S. 1994 Techniques and Resources in Teaching Reading OxfordUniversity Press

Wallace, C. 1992 Reading, Oxford University Press

Recommended Reading

Alderson, J. C. & Urquhart, A. H. (eds) 1984 Reading in a Foreign Language Longman

Banford, J & Day, R. R. 2004 Extensive Reading Activities for teachingLanguage Cambridge University Press

Cook, G, 1989 Discourse Oxford University Press

Grellet, F. 1981 Developing Reading Skills Cambridge University Press

Grundy, P. 1993 Newspapers Oxford University Press

Mosback, G. & Mosback, V. 1976 (reprinted 2003) Practical Faster ReadingCambridge University Press

Richards, J. C. 1990 “A profile of an effective reading teacher,” in The LanguageTeaching Matrix Cambridge University Press

Urquhart, S. & Weir, C. 1998 Reading in a Second Language: Process, Productand Practice Longman

Williams, E. 1994 Reading in the Language Classroom Oxford University Press



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Appendices

Appendix 1: The History of Reading in ELT

1e)

In a Grammar Translation classroom, students’ language learning is based on textswhich they read usually aloud but also silently. The work is first and foremostlanguage-focused, but also with a focus on meaning as students work in both firstand new language with the text. Learning is assessed in terms of accuracy.

2a)

In a strict Audio-Lingual classroom, reading is discouraged, and students areexpected to learn by hearing and repeating target language and dialogues to a goodstandard of accuracy.

3b)

At the start of the Communicative Approach, reading texts regain importance.Students are encouraged to silently and selectively read texts to get information tocomplete tasks which often involve working with other people.

4d)

Later in the Communicative Approach, reading is used both to raise languageawareness and reinforce language passively and actively, and to practise/teststudents’ comprehension of the information in the text. It is considered one of the fourskills for learners to learn so that their acquisition of the language is balanced.

5c)

In today’s classroom, reading is a skill with which learners are encouraged to be

autonomous so the focus of the classroom is on enabling students to be moreeffective readers.

Appendix 2: Texts in Coursebooks

The following is a short written example (only 2 texts instead of 4) of how you couldapproach this task. You do not have to write your answer to Task 6 but you might liketo take notes as you will need to refer back to your ideas in Task 11.



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Greenall, S. 1995 Reward Intermediate Heinemann (pp 38-39)

This reading focus appears to be aimed at developing students’ reading ability. Thestudents do a series of language activities (vocabulary in particular) which would get



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them thinking about the content and focus of the text generally (i.e., the activitiesfunction to activate their schemata related to the topic) and more specifically theirideas about specific aspects of the topic. Two of the reading tasks focus the studentson forming an opinion about who the text is written for, the writer’s opinion about thetopic and the tone of the writing. The final reading task falls between skillsdevelopment and language work: it gives the students practice of understandingunknown vocabulary in context – again a reading development aim, but alsodevelops students’ linguistic repertoire.

In general in this book, the texts are followed by a variety of activities, most oftencomprehension. There is a regular, but not frequent, focus on working out themeaning of vocabulary in context, but that appears to be the only regulardevelopmental work. The texts are always in units with an overt language focus, andthey are often referred to in the language focus, so that texts ultimately are almostalways exploited for language and have been chosen on this basis.



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Soars, L. & J. 1996 New Headway Intermediate Oxford University Press (p56 & 57)

This text is used as a context for a language presentation/revision. While there are afew questions to check students’ comprehension, the text is only exploited forlanguage.

In general, texts are used two ways in this book: language is regularly contextualisedin reading texts and as above there is a comprehension check associated with thisuse of the text; there are texts used for reading as well – longer texts with acomprehension focus. There may or may not be a development focus in these texts.If there is, it often has to do with developing students’ ability to guess at the meaning



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of new words in context; students may also be asked to form opinions/drawconclusions about what was said or to make predictions. One reading focus inparticular gives students a choice about what they read and asks them to formquestions they want the text to answer.

Appendix 3: Follow-up to Factors Affecting your Students’ ReadingProficiency

This is a short example of the way you might work with Task 9:

1. Factor affecting my students:

• Reading word by word

2. Possible solutions:

• Give students activities in which they first read chunked language (not text) setout vertically and then second annotate text into chunks.

•

Ensure single-word vocabulary limited; vocabulary given in chunks and stored inchunks in notebooks.

Appendix 4: Evaluating Reading Aims

The reasons that the aims are inappropriate are:

1. This aim is far too general. It gives insufficient information about what the lessonfocus will actually be.

2. The aim is probably inappropriate for the type of text being used.

3. Again, this aim is very general. What depth of understanding? Is the focus on

students’ having a global understanding or understanding detail in the text? Whatkind of text will students be dealing with?

4. This aim gives us an idea of what students will be asked to do (i.e., we have agood idea regarding procedure), but we have no idea why. It is also possible that,again, the text is inappropriate for the stated activity as we have no idea of thetext being used.

5. This is a language aim, not a reading aim, and so it is inappropriate as the aim tothe reading focussed part of the lesson.



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Appendix 5: Stage and Overall Aims

Stage Aim Focus/Time Procedure

To encourage students to

articulate theirexpectations of thecontent (lexis included)and activate schema.

s-s/5-7mins Sts look at title in groups of 3.

Discuss: What do you expect toread?

What do you already know about thistopic

To enable students toidentify different ways ofapproaching a text and toencourage them to makea decision for themselvesabout the mostappropriate way of

dealing with it.

To give students anopportunity to put theirdecision into practice.

Students alone

2-3mins

Students asked to look at thefollowing ways of reading a text afterglancing briefly at text itself (OHT).Tell students they will be asked toanswer questions re the text afterthey read it and they should be ableto say why they chose to read the

text as they did.

Ways of approaching text:

a. Read text through carefully. Answer the questions.

b. Skim through text. Look atquestions. Read text morecarefully. Answer questions.

c. Read through questions.Scan text for answers.

d. Read through questions.Read text carefully foranswers.

Students decide how they willapproach the text.

Students read and answer thequestions in 4mins.

To give students anopportunity toevaluate/discuss theirchoice.

To encourage discussionof the content of the text.

t-s-t and s-s10mins

Teacher asks students to evaluatetheir choice of reading approach(and why).

Students discuss answers toquestions.

Students’ feedback to Teacher.

The aim for this focus in the lesson could be articulated as:

• To raise student awareness of different ways of reading a text and give thempractice in making such a choice.



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Appendix 8: Terminology Review

1. DEVELOPING SKILLS in class requires the teacher to show the studentshow to listen better. It may involve asking them to process a text in a

particular way and then reflect on what they did and how effective it was.TESTING SKILLS involves getting the students to provide answers based on(say) comprehension questions from the text in order to assess theirproficiency in reading.

2. ATOMISTIC versus HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO READING. The formerapproach views that reading can be broken down into discrete sub-skillswhich can – and should - be developed separately, whereas a holistic view ofreading, posited by (e.g.) Catherine Wallace posits that the skill cannot befragmented.

3. SCHEMATIC KNOWLEDGE is a reader’s knowledge of the wider world andof different situations, contexts and genres, and how these are likely toinfluence the development (and language employed) in a text. It is vital for

top-down processing. SYSTEMIC KNOWLEDGE, on the other hand, is alearner’s knowledge of lexis and grammar which helps them interpret a textand is imperative in bottom-up interpretation.