Reading to Learn

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss

Reading is an indispensible aspect of language instruction at all stages because it supports learning in various ways:

• By giving students a variety of materials to read, instructors provide multiple opportunities for students to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence and discourse structure to give students more complete picture of the ways in which the elements of the language work together to convey meaning.
• Students’ purpose for reading in their own language is most often to acquire information about a discipline they are learning and studying, and this purpose can be advantageous in the language learning classroom as well. Reading for content information in the language classroom gives students both genuine reading material and an important purpose for reading.
• Reading everyday materials that are designed for native speakers can give students insight into the ways of the world. Students have easy access to newspapers, magazines, and Web sites, they are made aware of culture in all its variety, and cultural stereotypes has already started to break down.

Strategies that can help students read more quickly and effectively include :

• Reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions gives a picture of the structure and content of a reading section.
• Using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge about the author to make judgements about writing style, vocabulary, and content
• Using a quick survey of the text to get the theme of the subject, identifying text structure, and confirming or questioning predictions.
• Using learnt knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as hints to the meanings of words not known, instead of not trying to find out the meanings of them.
• Stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by reading through the information and the content in the text.

Instructors can help students learn when and how to use reading strategies in several ways.

• By modelling the strategies aloud, instructors would help and show students how the strategies work and how much they can know about a text before they begin to read it thoroughly.
  • By allowing time in class for group and individual discussion and analysis as preparation for class and out of class reading. Allocating class time to various reading activities signifies their importance and value.
  • By using fill in the blank exercises to review vocabulary enhancement. This helps students learn to understand meaning from context.
• By helping and motivating students to discuss about the strategies they think would help them approach a reading assignment, and then talking after reading about what strategies they actually used. This helps students develop flexibility and convenience in their choice of strategies.

At the purely technical level, it is possible to achieve reading speeds of up to 100 words per minute by:

1. Reducing the number of fixations per line and stopping after every three to six words rather than after every word.
2. Getting away or eliminating backward movement and wandering.
3. Last but not the least reducing the duration of each fixation.

When language learners use reading strategies, they find that they can control the reading experience, and they gain confidence in their ability to read the language.