Unit 11 Teaching Reading
Teaching objectives
 know how and what people read
 grasp strategies involved in reading
comprehension
 know the role of vocabulary in reading
 grasp principles and models for teaching
reading
 grasp procedures and types of activities in
reading
Teaching contents
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How do we read?
What do we read?
Strategies involved in reading
comprehension
Principles and models for teaching
reading
Pre-reading activities
While-reading activities
Post-reading activities
1. How do we read?
1.1 Reading aloud and silent reading
Reading aloud and silent reading are two
types of reading practice commonly found
in classrooms. reading aloud cannot
replace silent reading as it involves only
the skills of pronunciation and intonation,
while one's real reading ability requires
the reading skills of skimming, scanning,
predicting, etc.
1.2 What do effective readers do?
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They have a clear purpose in reading;
They read silently;
They read phrase by phrase, rather than word by word;
They concentrate on the important bits, skim the rest,
and skip the insignificant parts;
They use different speeds and strategies for different
reading tasks;
They perceive the information in the target language
rather than mentally translate;
They guess the meaning of new words from the context,
or ignore them;
They have and use background information to help
understand the text.
2. What do we read?
2.1 Authentic reading materials
The reading material must be the kind of material
that students will need and want to be able to
read when traveling, studying abroad, or using
the language in other contexts .
2.2Simulated texts
The materials are written esp. for language
students with some language control. Simulated
texts are aimed for beginner students who are
probably not able to handle genuine authentic
texts.
3. Skills involved in reading
comprehension
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Understanding the explicitly stated information
Understanding conceptual meaning
Understanding the communicative value (functions) of
sentences
Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items
Understanding relations within sentences
Understanding relations between sentences
Understanding references
Recognizing indicators in discourse
Recognizing the organization of the text
Making inferences
Skimming: reading for the gist or main idea.
Scanning: reading to look for specific information.
4. Principles for teaching reading
◆ The selected texts and attached tasks should be
accessible to the students.
◆Task should be clearly given in advance.
◆Tasks should be designed to encourage selective
and intelligent reading for the main meaning.
◆Task should help develop students’ skill rather
than test their reading comprehension.
◆Teachers should help the students not merely to
cope with one particular text in front of them but
with their reading strategies and reading ability in
general.
◆Teachers should help the students to read on
their own.
4.2 Models for teaching reading
◆ Bottom-up
model : a way of teaching reading
which follows a linear process from the
recognition of letters, to words, to phrases, to
sentences, to paragraphs, and then to the
meaning of the whole text.
◆ Top-down model: the teacher should teach the
background knowledge first so that students
equipped with such knowledge will be able to
guess meaning from the printed page.
◆ Interactive model not only involves the printed
page but also the reader’s knowledge of the
language in general, of the world, and of the text
types.
5.Three stages of teaching reading
5.1 Pre-reading activities
 Predicting
 Setting the scene
 Skimming
 Scanning
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5.2 While-reading activities
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Information transfer
activities
 Reading comprehension
questions
 Understanding references
 Making inferences
5.3 Post-reading Activities
 Discussion
 Role play
 Gap-filling
 Retelling
 False summary
 Writing
back
Thank you