TEFL LEVEL 5
Level 5 Teaching English as a Foreign Language Course (TEFL)
Home My courses Level 5 Teaching English as a Foreign Language Course (TEFL)
Unit 5: Teaching receptive skills: listening and reading
The process of reading and some ideas for teaching reading skills
The process of reading and some ideas for teaching reading skills
Why teach reading?
Reading is one of the four skills students need to be effective users of English. It is extremely beneficial to the language
learning process and reading widely is probably the most effective way of building vocabulary knowledge. If you are
successful in encouraging your students to read in English independently, as well as in your reading lessons, you will
help ensure that they make good progress in developing their English.
Watch the video below to hear one of our trainers, Rosalind, talk about why she feels teaching reading is essential.
Watch Transcript
Why teach reading?
Credit: Rosalind Logan, TTA Hi, I'm Rosalind, one of the trainers at The Tefl
Length: 06:30 Academy and today, we’re going to answer
the question, Why do we teach reading in our
EFL classes?
Well, reading is so incredibly helpful for your
students’ language learning process and their
6:30 ability to build their vocabulary knowledge.
People who read also tend to know a lot more
vocabulary. So, it’s definitely something you
want to teach. Only if private students make it
really clear to you that they want to focus on
conversation classes do we not necessarily
include reading as part of EFL lessons.
So, try to encourage your students to read at
home as well, not just in the reading lessons
you plan for them, and this will really help
them to progress much faster in their English
language skills.
Did you know that by the time someone has
become fairly skilled in another language
around the upper-intermediate to advanced
stage, they know far more vocabulary and
,grammar than they have been taught? Just
think about this for a moment, an average
student coming to study at an English
language-speaking university will know as
many as 10,000 word families!
This means that a whole lot of the language a
learner knows is by being exposed to the
language rather than being formally taught
vocabulary in a classroom. You can bet that
reading helps them build this knowledge.
Now, let’s think about the sort of students you’ll
be teaching reading to, online or in your
classroom.
You’re most likely to teach children or adults
who can read in their own language and who
already know our alphabet, the Roman
alphabet. They’ll probably know ours even if
they have a different writing system in their
own language. In this scenario, you’re helping
your learners to transfer their own reading
skills into English.
But, a word of caution, in some quite rare
teaching situations, you may find yourself
teaching adults who can’t read in their own
language or people who don’t already know
our alphabet. In this scenario, introduce
students to the idea of visual symbols
representing sounds and meaning.
Okay, so have a think about all the different
things that you’ve read in the last couple of
days.
Here’s just a few of the things the average
person subconsciously reads on a day to day
basis:
bus/train timetables
emails
online weather forecasts
text messages
menus
bank statements
Google maps
application forms
books or e-books
horoscopes
information leaflet in your medication
,Phew, that’s a lot of reading you’ve done
there! See how many things there actually are
that we read on a daily basis! That’s why it’s
so important to help your students to develop
their reading skills.
So, how do we actually read? Let’s take a
closer look at what’s going on inside our
heads.
Have a look at this:
Waht deos tihs msseage cnovey?
Why cn yuo raed it wehn soem leettrs ar
mssiing and oehtrs aer in teh worng positoin?
Could you read it? Aren’t our brains amazing?
When we read, we use the shape of the word
and the first and final letters as keys to help us
to recognise words. Fluent readers recognise
the shape of whole words.
But there’s also something else going on,
something that we call top-down processing.
When we read text, we use the meaning of the
whole message to help us understand what
the individual words are supposed to be. So,
we lean on more than our knowledge about
letters and words. We also use our general
and cultural knowledge to help us interpret the
text. If you are reading something from your
own culture, or a culture you know well, you
may note how it is easier to recognise factors
like the style of print, the style of language,
where this type of writing comes from and the
events or ideas the text contains.
Now, top-down processing is very important,
but it’s not the only method everyone uses to
read. The other method is bottom-up
processing or decoding. Bottom-up
processing happens when we start by looking
at the physical marks on the page, which are
the individual letters. Then we combine these
marks to form words, and we then combine
the word patterns to form sentences. Next, we
combine sentences to form paragraphs, and
we combine those paragraphs to form whole
texts.
This process of building the meaning upwards
from the smallest units- the individual letters—
is called bottom-up processing.
So there you have it! What happens when we
read, is that we actually use a combination of
these two processes. We use bottom-up
processing—decoding or making sense of the
, symbols on the page- and top-down
processing— using our general knowledge—to
help us make sense of what we are reading.
And this is what is happening every time we
read anything and why we encourage our
learners to read and broaden their horizons
through reading to become more familiar with
both processes.
Reading widely is considered as the most effective way of building vocabulary knowledge. In both L1 and L2, people who
read a lot tend to have a better vocabulary than those who don't. This is a two-way process because reading is easier
for people who have a wider range of vocabulary, so they tend to read more, thus further expanding their vocabulary
and improving their reading skills.
Although in your lessons you’ll focus on intensive listening and reading, it’s still important to encourage your students to
read and listen extensively. You can do this by helping them to choose appropriate texts.
For extensive reading practice students could:
read graded readers (your school or a local library might have a set of these)
read books or magazines that you recommend based on students’ individual interests
join a library or use an e-reader.
For extensive listening practice students could:
listen to audio versions of graded readers, podcasts, audio books, radio programmes
watch and listen to any authentic material that appeals to them - TV shows, songs, documentaries, films, and so on.
Discuss
What are some homework tasks you could set to
encourage students to actually do the extensive
practice you recommend? Share some suggestions
below.
