Principal of Teaching Reading

Principal of Teaching Reading

Harmer (2001) stated that there are some principal in teaching reading:

a.   Reading is not Passive Skill

                                Reading is an incredible active occupation. To do it successfully, we have to understand what the words mean, see the pictures are painting, understand the arguments and work out if we agree with them. If we do not do these things and if students do not these things, the we only just scratch the surface of the text and we quickly forget it.

b.   Students Need to be Engaged with what they are reading

                                As with everything else in lesson, students who are not engaged with the reading text, not actively interested in what they are doing, are less likely to benefit from it. When they are really fired up by the topic or the task, they get much more from what is in front of them.

c.             Students should be Encourage to Respond to the content of reading text, not just to language.

                                Of course it is important to study reading text for the way they use language, the number of paragraph they contain and how many times they are use relative clauses. But the meaning, the message of the text, is just as important and we must give students a change to respond to that message in some away. 

d.            Prediction is Some Major Factor in Reading

                                When we read texts in our own language, we frequently have good idea of the content before we actually read. Book covers give us a hint of what’s in the book, photograph and headline hint at what articles are about and reports look like reports before we read a single word.

                                The moment we get this hint, the book cover, the headline, the word processed page, our brain starts predicting what we are going to read. Expectation are set up and the active process of reading is ready to begin. Teacher should give students a ‘hint’ so that they can predict what coming too. It will make them better and more engaged reader.    

e.             Match the Task to the Topic

                                We could give students Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘to be or not to be’ and ask them to say how many times the infinitive is used. We would give them a restaurant menu and ask them to list the ingredients alphabetically. There might be a reason for both tasks, but on the face of it. They look a bit silly. We will probably be more interested in what Hamlet mean and what the menu foods actually are.

                                Once a decision has been taken about what reading text the students are going to read. We need to choose good reading task, the right kind of question, engaging and puzzle. The most interesting text can be undermined by asking boring and inappropriate question, the most common place passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and challenging task.

b.       Good Teachers Exploit Reading Texts to the Full

                                Any reading text is full of sentence, words , ideas and description. It doesn’t make sense just to get students to read it then drop it to move on to something else. Good teachers integrate the reading text into interesting class sequence, using topic for discussion and further task using the language for study         

Tweet