English teaching methodology

1. APPROACHES TO READING
Nyíregyházi Egyetem, tanári mesterszak (MA/MSc) levelező Nagy Éva 20/12/2018

2. Introduction
• Reading to oneself is a „receptive” skill, like listening
• The most obvious differences between a reading and a listening activities:
• people read at different speeds and in different ways
• individuals can control the speed they work at and what they are looking at when reading
• There are two main types of reading:
• intensive reading
• reading texts closely and carefully to gain as much details as possible
• stop-start kind of reading, involving going back over the same text a number of times
• it is the way we read e.g. manuals and leaflets
• extensive reading
• fluent, faster reading, often of longer texts for pleasure
• reading without such careful attention to the details
• when we do not understand words, just keep going

3. Difficulties when reading a foreign language
• problems reading a text in a language that we do not know very well:
• not knowing enough vocabulary
• needing the dictionary all the time
• it is very slow
• understanding all individual words, but the whole thing eluding completely
• because it is slow, the pleasure/interest in the subject matter is soon lost
How to make students better readers:
• raise their awareness that it is not always essential to understand every word
• practise some different reading techniques in English
• help them to read fast

4. Selecting an appropiate reading task
• The suitable tasks to get students to read quickly are tasks that encourage students to search for specific small
sections of text which they then read more carefully to find a required piece of information
• Activities designed to increase reading speeds are variations on the following two ideas:
• skimming (fast reading to find key topics, main ideas, overall theme, basic structure)
• scanning (fast reading for specific individual pieces of information e.g. names, addresses, facts, prices, numbers,
dates)
• Typical skimming task: general question from the teacher – the students would attempt to find the answer quickly
• Typical scanning task: searching for information in a leaflet or directory
• Skimming and scanning are both „top-down” skills

5. Choosing useful reading activities
• One test for useful reading might be to check how far tasks reflect real-life uses of the same text
• If a text is reasonably similar to real life, it is likely that the task will be effective but we want to
train students in specific reading techniques/strategies so they will help their future reading
• Top-down reading
• many reading lessons move from „big” to „small” – from overview to details

6. Top-down route map for a basic reading lesson
Pre-text
- Introduction and lead-in
• First task (pre-reading)
Text
• Task to focus on skimming
• Task to focus on scanning
• Task to focus on meaning (general points)
• Task to focus on more intensive comprehensive understanding
• Task to focus on individual language items
Post-text
• Follow-on task
• Closing

7. Some specific ideas for reading tasks
• Put these illustrations of the text in the correct order
• Find the words in the text mean the same as the words in this list
• Give a headline to each section of the article
• Act out the dialogue, story, episode etc.
• Put this list of events in the right order
• Discuss interpretations of, reaction to, feelings about the text

8. Extensive reading
• extensive reading has a powerful impact on language learning
• the more someone reads, the more they pick up items of vocabulary and grammar from texts
• this widening language knowledge seems to increase their overall linguistic confidence

9. Encouraging students to read a lot in the target
language
• providing a library of readers, magazines, newspapers, leaflets etc.
• training students how to select suitable reading materials and in ways to read it
• creating a „book club” environment that encourages learners to choose what books to purchase,
talk about favourite books, share them with each other
• allowing sections of classroom time purely for students to read
• Readers in this context mean books of stories published specifically for learners to get extended
exposure to English
• They often have their grammar and vocabulary „graded” to named levels (e.g. Elementary)

10. Thank you for your attention!