TAC

How to Teach Reading

Taken from How to Teach English
by Jeremy Harmer
Miss Alejandra Cañete Bustamante
• Why teach reading?
• What kind of reading should students do?
• What reading skills should students acquire?
• What are the principles behind the teaching of
reading?
 Why Teach Reading?

• There are many reasons why getting students to read texts is

an important part of the teacher’s job.
• Many students want to be able to read texts in English either
for their careers, for study purposes on simply pleasure.
• Anything we can do to make reading easier for them must be a
good idea.
 Why Teach Reading?
• Any exposure to English is a good thing for language students. At the
very least, some language sticks in their minds as part of the process of
language acquisition, and, if the reading text is especially interesting
and engaging, acquisition in likely to be even more successful.
• Reading texts also provide good models for English writing. When we
teach writing, we will need to show

students models of what we are encouraging them to

do.
 Why Teach Reading?
• Reading texts also provide opportunities to study language:

• Lastly, good reading texts can introduce interesting topics,

stimulate discussion, excite imaginative responses and be the
springboard for well-rounded, fascinating lessons.
 What Kind of Reading Should Students
Do?
• The greatest controversy about this topic has centred on
whether the texts should be ‘authentic’ or not.
• That is because people have worried about more traditional
language-teaching materials which tended to look artificial
and to use over-simplified language which any native speaker
would find comical and untypical.
 What Kind of Reading Should Students
Do?
• If you give students a copy of

• Which are authentic for native speakers, students will

probably not be able to undestand them at all.
• There will be far too many words they have never seen before,
the grammar will be (for them) convoluted (complicated) and
the style will finish them off.
 What Kind of Reading Should Students
Do?
• There should be a balance between the students’ capabilities
and their interests.
• There is some authentic written material which beginner
students can understand, to some degree:
– Menus
– Timetables
– Signs
– Basic instructions
 What Kind of Reading Should
Students Do?
• In case we may want to offer our students texts, while being
like English, are nevertheless written or adapted especially for
their level.
• The important thing is that such texts are as much like real
English as possible.
 What Kind of Reading Should
Students Do?
• The topics and types of reading text are worth considering too.
– Should our students always read factual encyclopedia-type texts?

– Should we expose students to novels or short stories?

– Shoult students only read timetables and menus or

– Can we offer them business letters and newspaper articles?

• It will depend on who the students are.

 What Kind of Reading Should
Students Do?
– Business people  business texts

– Science students  science texts

– Mixed group  ?

• A varied diet is appropriate:

 What Reading Skills should Students
Acquire?
• Many things!

• Scan the text for particular bits of information. It means they

don’t need to read every word and line.
• Skim a text, as if they were casting their eyes over its surface,
to get the general idea of what it is about.
 What Reading Skills should Students
Acquire?
• If they try to gather all the details at scanning or skimming, they will
get bogged down and may not be able to get the general idea because
they are concentrating on specifics.
• Whether readers scan or skim depends on what kind of text they are
reading and what they want to get out of it.
– They may want to scan a computer manual to find one piece of information
they need to use their machine.
– They may skim a newspaper article to get a general idea of

what’s been happening.

 What Reading Skills should Students
Acquire?
• But when reading for pleasure we would expect them to read
slower and closer.
• One of the teacher’s main functions when training students to
read is not only to persuade them of the advantages of
skimming and scanning, but also to make them see that the
way they read is vitally important.
What are the Principles behind the
Teaching Reading?
 Principle 1:
Reading is not a passive skill
• It is an incredibly active occupation. To do it successfully, we
have to understand what the words mean, see the pictures the
words are painting, understand the arguments, and work out if
we agree with them.
• If we do not do these things, neither de students – then we
only just scratch the surface of the text and we quickly forget
it.
 Principle 2:
Students need to be engaged with what they are reading

• As with everything else in lessons, 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 or the task, they get much
more from what is in front of them .
 Principle 3:
Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of
a reading text, not just to the language

• It is important to study reading texts for the way they use language,
the number of paragraphs they contain and how many times they
use relative clauses.
• But the meaning, the message of the text, is just as important and
students should respond to that message in some way.
• It is important that they express their feelings about the

topic – thus provoking personal engagement with it

and the language.

 Principle 4:
Prediction is a major factor in reading
• Book covers gives us a hint of what’s in the book, photographs and
headlines hint at what articles are about and reports look like.
• The moment we get the hints our brain starts predicting what we
are going to read. Expectations are set up and the active process of
reading is ready to begin.
• Teachers should give students ‘hints’ so that they can

predict what’s coming too. It will make them better and

more engaged readers.

 Principle 5:
Match the Task to the Topic
• We could give students Hamlet famous soliloquy ‘to be or not
to be’ ask how many times the infinitive is used, or restaurant
menu and ask them to list the ingredients alphabetically.
• There might be reasons for both tasks, but, on the face of it,
they look a bit silly.
• We will probably be more interested in what Hamlet means
and what the menu foods are.
 Principle 5:
Match the Task to the Topic
• Teachers need to choose good reading tasks – the right kind of
questions, engaging and useful puzzles, etc.
• The most interesting text can be undetermined by asking
boring and inappropriate questions; the most commonplace
passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and
challenging tasks.
 Principle 6:
Good Teachers Exploits Reading texts to the Full

• Any reading text is full of sentences, words, ideas,

descriptions, etc. It doesn’t make sense just to get students to
read it and then drop it to move on to something else.
• Good teachers integrate the reading text into interesting class
sequences, using the topic for discussion and further tasks,
using the language for Study and later Activation.
What do Reading Sequences look
like?