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Techniques and Strategies of Teaching Reading Skills at Secondary Level: An

Applicative Approach

Article in IJELLH (International Journal of English Language Literature and Humanities) · April 2022

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IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1923

Hussein Faraj. A. Albozeidi

Research Scholar,

Dept. of English, Aligarh Muslim University,

Aligarh, UP, India

[email protected]

Techniques and Strategies of Teaching Reading Skills at Secondary Level: An Applicative

Approach

Abstract: Traditional teaching practices and classroom do not promote many opportunities for

the students to participate in the classroom or speak in the classroom rather they are like one-

way traffic. The teacher plays an active role and teaches deductively throughout the course. It

is regarded as the silent skills which can be learned automatically by the students. But the

reality is reading is one of the important receptive skills of the language which enables

students to learn or acquire other important skills of the language. It is like the soul of the

language which fills the entire body with positive energy. So it is equally important to

understand the importance of the reading skills in teaching and learning and develop the

techniques and strategies of pedagogy which will make the learning process easier.

Strategies are often applied by the teachers and used by the learners to obtain the

intended meaning of the text which they read. The paper intends to promote a practical

application of classroom pedagogy to teach reading skills using activity-based teaching. It also

emphasizes how different strategies of teaching reading and techniques can be used or utilized

in teaching through different activities.

Key Words: Reading skills, Strategies, Techniques, Activities based teaching

IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1924

Introduction

Teaching English in ESL/EFL context especially when it comes to teaching reading

skills in the classroom brings a number of challenges for the teachers across the globe. This

happens because practitioners and scholars partially take reading as an important skill which

can be taught in the classroom. It is regarded as the silent skills which can be learned

automatically by the students. But the reality is reading is one of the important receptive skills

of the language which enables students to learn or acquire other important skills of the

language. It is like the soul of the language which fills the entire body with positive energy. So

it is equally important to understand the importance of the reading skills in teaching and

learning and develop the techniques and strategies of pedagogy which will make the learning

process easier.

Traditional teaching practices and classroom do not promote many opportunities for the

students to participate in the classroom or speak in the classroom rather they are like one-way

traffic. The teacher plays an active role and teaches deductively throughout the course.

However, the demand for today’s competitive world is to become active and expressive

students at every forum. Students still do not feel comfortable when they are asked to deliver a

speech or speak in front of the audience. This is because they are not trained enough to read

and speak in the classroom. Additionally, teachers across the world in ESL/EFL classrooms do

not use strategies or techniques to teach reading skills or develop the schema of the students.

Reading skills especially in EFL settings have different goals or we can say that a reader

read a text with different intentions. Understanding a written text means getting the required

meaning of that particular text as efficiently as possible. To retrieve the required meaning from

the text one needs to apply different reading strategies according to their needs and wants. For

example looking a newspaper for some specific information and looking a notice for required

information or particular kind of information. Locating the relevant advertisement in the

IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1925

newspaper contains in the article demonstrate that the purpose of reading in each situation has

been successfully fulfilled. In the first case where the reader is looking for specific information

applies the scanning strategies and in the second case the reader applies the skimming strategies

to infer the gist of the text where more detailed co comprehension of the text is needed.

Strategies are often applied by the teachers and used by the learners to obtain the

intended meaning of the text which they read. Now the question here is what kind of text

learners generally read and what are the necessary skills required for them to infer the meaning.

For example what kind of text students read like newspapers, novels, short stories, other literary

text and passages, essays, poems, articles, reports, summaries, textbooks and so forth. Now the

next level of comprehension is why students read? The answer is generally students read to

obtain the information from the text. The second is to seek pleasure from the text.The main

ways of reading are as follows:

Skimming

The process of skimming comprises of quickly running through the text and get the gist

of it and get a general idea of the text to understand what it is all about.

Scanning

Scanning as a strategy of reading is more specific as compared to the process of

skimming because through this one can quickly going through a text to find a particular piece

of information. It is used to get specific information from the text.

Extensive Reading

The extensive reading is mainly used to read longer texts, usually for one's own

pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving the overallunderstanding of a text.

Intensive Reading

Intensive reading is used to read shorter texts, to extract specific information. This is

more an accuracy activity involving reading for details of the text. These different ways of
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1926

reading are not mutually exclusive. For instance, one often skims through a passage to see what

it is about before deciding whether it is worth scanning a particular paragraph for the

information one is looking for. In real life, our reading purposes constantly vary and therefore,

when devising exercises, we should vary the questions and the activities according to the type

of text studied and the purpose in reading it. The idea of teaching reading skills varies according

to the situation and level of students. Here one size fit for all cannot be applicable in the real

classroom because the nature of the students is heterogeneous.

There are certain skills that should be implemented in the classroom when teaching

reading skills. Judi Moreillon writes in the book titledCollaborative Strategies for Teaching

Reading Comprehension: Maximizing Your Impact:

Brains seek out patterns and thinking involves making connections. Understanding the

importance of background knowledge to comprehension is critical becausewe connect

new information with prior knowledge before weintegrate and organize the new

information. Background knowledge is always behind reader backing up the

comprehension. It is the sum of the prior experiences that bringto each new encounter

with text.Eachreader brings his own feelings, personality,and experiences to the text

and that each reader is different eachtime he revisits a particular text. Background

knowledge is whatthe reader brings to the reading event. Each reader’s interpretation

and each reading of the text are potentially unique. (19)

Firstly, it is very important for the students to recognize the script of the language in

order to deduce the meaning of the text that they read and also have to make a prediction about

the unfamiliar lexical items. Apart from this, they have to understand the conceptual meaning

of the text and communicative function of the sentences and utterances. Secondly, one of the

important aspects of reading is to link between the sentences to reach the exact meaning. For

this, making the inter-sentential and intra-sentential relations is very important to understand
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1927

relations within the sentences. Cohesive devices are helpful in understanding the relations

between the text and part of the text. Interpretation of discourse markers of text is an essential

component because these markers support the reader to reach to the meaning.

Francoise Grellet writes in the book titledDeveloping Reading Skills “Reading is an

active skill which needs attention and effort in ESL/EFL setting. As mentioned earlier, it

constantly involves guessing, predicting, checking and asking oneself questions” (8).These are

some of the steps that should be taken in order to infer the meaning of the text which is being

read by the participants. This should, therefore, be taken into consideration when devising

reading comprehension exercises. It is possible, for instance, to develop the students' powers

of inference through systematic practice, or introduce questions which encourage students to

anticipate the content of a text from its title and illustrations or the end of a story from the

preceding paragraphs.

Similarly, one should introduce exercises in which there is no single straightforward

answer. This type of exercise has too often required students to exercise only their powers of

judgement and appreciation, but extending the range of these exercises to cover other reading

skills will lead to greater comprehension of the text.

The second aspect of reading as an active skill is its communicative function. Exercises

must be meaningful andcorrespond as often as possible to what one is expected to dowith the

text.Activities of reading comprehension exercises should be flexible and varied. Reading

comprehension activities should be suited to the texts and to one's reasons forreading them.

The aim of the activities must be clearly defined and a cleardistinction made between

teaching and testing. Testing will obviously involve more accuracy type exercises

whereasthrough teaching one should try to develop the skills of reading. Students should know

that what they are doing in the classroom and why they are doing it.
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1928

The students must be taught how to approach and consider thetext in order to become

independent and efficient readers. It isalso important to remember that meaning is not inherent

in thetext, that each reader brings his own meaning to what he readsbased on what he expects

from the text and his previousknowledge. This shows how difficult it is to test competence

inreading comprehension and how great the temptation is toimpose one's own interpretation on

the learners.There isa number of techniques which are important to be taught while teaching

reading skills. Few of them are discussed below.

Inference

Inferring means making use of syntactic, logical, and cultural cluesto discover the

meaning of unknown words from the text. If these are specific words,then word-formation and

derivation will also play an importantpart.When dealing with a new text, it is better not to

explain thedifficult words to the learners beforehand. They would only getused to being given

'pre-processed' texts and would never make theeffort to cope with a difficult passage on their

own. On thecontrary, students should be encouraged to make a guess at themeaning of the

words they do not know rather than look them upin a dictionary. If they need to look at the

dictionary to get a precisemeaning - which is an important and necessary activity too

theyshould only do so after having tried to work out a solution on theirown. This is why, from

the very beginning, it is vital to developthe skill of inference.

The relationship within the Sentence

It is important to understand the relation between the sentences to get the meaning of

the text.Inability to infer the meaning of unknown elements often causes discouragement and

apprehension in students when they are facedwith a new text. A similar problem arises when

students are unableto get an immediate grasp of sentence structures. This will be a definite

handicap in the case of texts with relatives, embeddedclauses and complex structures. This can
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1929

be minimized by the interactive pedagogy in the classroom by implementing the activity based

teaching which promotes confidence and creativity among the students.

Linking of Sentences and Ideas

Another area in which it is essential to prepare the students is inrecognizing the various

devices used to create textual cohesion andmore particularly the use of reference and link -

words.Reference covers all the devices that permit lexical relationshipwithin a text. The

elements of reference which are important to teach are anaphora, cataphora, comparison,and

nominalization. Texts are made up of ideas not only the independent sentences and can be

easily decoded with the help of these references. These are the connectors and perform the

communicative function in the text.

The above-discussed ideas are theoretical underpinnings of the reading skills whereas

how to develop these skills through techniques of skimming, scanning, intensive reading,

extensive reading is the challenge for a teacher whether it is an EFL or ESL classroom. For

this, the best option is to have activities which targets to develop the skills of reading at the

same time it is equally important to take into consideration that activities should be interactive

and focus to use the group work, pair work and think pair share so that the whole class can

participate and get benefited. Some of the sample activities are discussed below which can be

easily used to teach reading skills at the undergraduate level or secondary level.

Activity One

Objective of the Activity:To improve the vocabulary of the students using the textbook that is

prescribed in the course.

Time: 50 minutes Level: Secondary level or Undergraduates

IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1930

Teaching Aids:It is suggested to use the textbook that is prescribed in the course because it is

better to use the authentic materials in teaching so that the students can have a real-life

exposure.

Procedures:The teacher has to choose the lesson from the textbook which can be used as

material to teach reading. It is better to choose according to the size of the group. The activity

demands careful scaffolding before it should start. Brainstorming is necessary because students

should know what they are going to do in this activity and why they are doing it. The moment

they knew it they will be more interested in and actively participate in the activity.

Divide the class into small groups and ask them to read the lesson quickly. Give them

10 minutes and then ask them to stop it. The next step is to call the group in the front and ask

them to speak what they have understood from the text, what kind of text it is? And what are

the difficult words that you do not understand? The role of the teacher is to be a moderator and

elaborate wherever needed. Keep the activity going as it is and in the last when there isa number

of difficult vocabulary discussed by the class, the teacher should ask the class to write the word

meaning of the words that have been discussed. Doing this activity also promote speaking and

writing partially and trains students to become a proficient reader through quick reading. It also

develops the group cohesion.

Activity Two

Objective of the Activity:To improve the reading skills of the students as well as enhance the

capacity of sentence construction.

Time: 50 minutes Level: Secondary level or Undergraduates

Teaching Aids:Photocopies of the passage in a separate sheet and it is suggested not to go with

long paragraphs.

Procedures:Divide the class into pairs and distribute the sheets among them. The next step is

to ask the students to read the sheets loudly. For example pair 1 reads the passage for pair two
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1931

and the second pair will note down the difficult word in a separate sheet. Every pair has to

repeat the activity ones and submit the sheets to the class teacher. The teacher work is to discuss

the difficult words and give an individual word and ask the pairs one by one to make the

sentences. The one who fails to make the meaningful sentence, they will not get the bonus

points and the word will be forwarded to another pair. Continue the same activity and in the

end, the pair who has got the maximum bonus marks will be the winner.

Activity Three

Objective of the Activity:To improve the reading skills by enactment.

Time: 50 minutes Level: Secondary level or Undergraduates

Teaching Aids:The teacher needs the cards which contain the isolated sentences. Cards will be

arranged according to the size of the classroom.

Procedures:The teacher has to distribute the cards among the students and ask them to read the

sentences in the cards. The step is to ask the students to come forward in a pair and read the

sentences loudly in front of the class. The teacher should ensure that the card's details should

not be disclosed to the other students. The next step is to enact the sentences in front of the

class. This will be a fun activity and it promotes creativity and enhances the overall competence

of the students.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned ideas and activities about reading skill can be extremely effective

if it is implemented in a careful environment. For example, the activities demand active

participation of the students so the teacher has to take care of the fact that sometimes students

get frustrated and demotivated when asked to perform in front of the class. It can be solved

through different techniques like group work, pair work and so on. The activities are

spontaneous and creative and target to develop the accuracy and fluency of the students. The

uniqueness of the activity based teaching is that they focus to improve integrated skills like two
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1932

skills at one time. Concluding the above discussion, these activities are creative and effective

but only if they are used with proper preparation before going to the actual classroom.
IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1933

References

Grabe, W. Stoller, F.L. Teaching and Researching Reading. Harlow, Essex: Pearson

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Grabe, W., &Stoller, F.Teaching and Researching Reading (2nd ed.). Harlow, UK:

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Grabe, William, and Fredricka L. Stoller.Teaching and Researching Reading. London:

Routledge, 2013. Print.

Grellet, Françoise. Developing Reading Skills: A Practical Guide to Reading

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Koda, K. Insights into Second Language Reading. NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Lems, Kristin, Leah D. Miller, and Tenena M. Soro.Teaching Reading to English Language

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Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. "You Gotta Be the Book": Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading

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 IJELLH Volume 7, Issue 1, Month 2019 1934

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension: [role Plays, Text

Structure Tableaux, Talking Statues, and Other Enactment Techniques That

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