Presentation for the Reading module of the TKT course.

1. READING
 Teachers can help students read a text by
reading it aloud while they follow in their
books.
 There are no major differences between how
we read in our mother tongue and how we
read in a foreign language.
 To understand a reading text, you have to
read and understand every word in it.

2. Reading:
• Making sense of a written text.
• Understand the text:
- Word level
- Sentence level
- Whole text level
- Previous world knowledge

3. • The boy was surprised because the girl was
• much faster at running than he was.

4. Key concepts:
• Discourse
- Text that is connected by grammar,
vocabulary and/or our knowledge of the
world. Reading involves understanding these
connections.
• Coherence
• The sense connection between two
sentences.

5. Key concepts:
• Cohesion
- Grammatical links between the sentences.
• The boy was surprised because the girl was
much faster at running than he was. But after
he found out that her mother had won a
medal for running at the Olympics, he
understood.

6. Reading skills / subskills
• What do you do when you want to find a
number in a telephone directory?
• Scanning: Glancing over most of a text until
you find the information you are interested in.

7. Reading skills / subskills
• What do you do when you are at the
bookshop and you want to buy a book?
• What do you do when you are looking for
references to write an essay?
• Skimming / reading for gist / reading for
global understanding: glancing through a
text to get a general understanding of it.

8. Reading skills / subskills
• What do you do when you read a love letter
from your boyfriend?
• Reading for detail / intensive reading:
Getting the meaning out of every word and
out of the links or relationships between
words and between sentences.

9. Reading skills / subskills
• Inferring : working out what the writer’s
opinion or feelings are on a specific topic.
• Deducing meaning from context: Reading
the words around an unknown word or
thinking about the situation the unknown
word is used to work out its meaning without
using a reference resource (e.g. dictionary).

10. Reading skills / subskills
• Predicting: Using clues before we begin
reading to guess what a text may be about.
(e.g. newspaper)
• It helps us decide if we want to read the text
and understand it better by linking it to our
previous knowledge of the world.

11. Text structure
• Problem – solution essay
• Letter of complaint

12. Extensive vs Intensive reading
• Extensive reading: reading for pleasure.
Involves reading long pieces of text (e.g. a
novel).
• Intensive reading: reading texts to examine
the language they contain (e.g. finding verbs
in the past form). Does not involve reading
for comprehension, but for language study.

13. Text types
• Layouts: ways in which text is placed on a
page.
• E.g. letters, postcards, stories, etc.

14. Implications for the language teaching
classroom
• Check the subskills students are good at,
work on the subskills they are not using yet.
• Lead-in activities: looking at pictures, titles,
brainstorming, prediction, pre-teaching of
vocabulary.
• Graded readers for extensive reading.
• Take into consideration grade and first
language of students.

15. Implications for the language teaching
classroom
• Choosing the right texts (motivating and at
the right level of difficulty).
• Variety of texts (articles, stories, postcards,
emails, etc.)
• Reading aloud to check pronunciation or
understanding after other work on
comprehension.

16. Pattern of a reading lesson:
1. Introductory activities
2. Main activities: series of comprehension
activities from general activities to more
detailed comprehension.
3. Post-task activities: asking learners to
think about how the topic of the text relates
to their own lives or to give their opinion.