Article 1 Principles in Teaching Reading

MAIN PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING READING
Liudmyla Voinalovych (Zhytomyr, Ukraine)

Reading is a receptive language activity, but not a passive skill. There are many
reasons why getting students to read English texts is an important part of the teacher's job.
In the first place, many students want to be able to read texts in English either for their
careers, for study purposes or simply for pleasure. Anything we can do to make it easier
for them to do these things must be a good idea. While teaching reading we should
observe the following principles.
Principle 1: Encourage students to read as often and as much as possible.
The more students read, the better. Everything we do should encourage them to read
extensively as well as – if not more than – intensively.
Principle 2: Students need to be engaged with what they are reading.
Outside normal lesson time, when students are reading extensively, they should be
involved in joyful reading – that is, we should try to help them get as much pleasure from
it as possible. But during lessons, too, we will do our best to ensure that they are engaged
with the topic of a reading text and the activities they are asked to do while dealing with it.
Principle 3: Encourage students to respond to the content of a text (and explore
their feelings about it), not just concentrate on its construction.
It is important for students to study reading texts in class in order to find out such
things as 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 as this. As a result, we must give students a chance to respond to that message in
some way. It is especially important that they should be allowed to show their feelings
about the topic – thus provoking personal engagement with it and the language. With
extensive reading this is even more important.
Principle 4: Prediction is a major factor in reading.
When we read texts in our own language, we frequently have a good idea of the
content before we actually start reading. Book covers give us a clue about what is in the
book; photographs and headlines hint at what articles are about; we can identify reports as
reports from their appearance before we read a single word. The moment we get these
clues our brain starts predicting what we are going to read. Expectations are set up and the
active process of reading is ready to begin. In class, teachers should give students hints so
that they also have a chance to predict what is coming.
Principle 5: Match the task to the topic when using intensive reading texts.
Once a decision has been taken about what reading text the students are going to
read (based on their level, the topic of the text and its linguistic and activation potential),
we need to choose good reading tasks – the right kind of questions, appropriate activities
before during and after reading, and useful study exploitation, etc.
The most useful and interesting text can be undermined by boring and inappropriate
tasks; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and
challenging activities, especially if the level of challenge (i.e. how easy it is for students to
complete a task) is exactly right for the class.
Principle 6: Good teachers exploit reading texts to the full.
Any reading text is full of sentences, words, ideas, descriptions, etc. It doesn't make
sense, in class, just to get students to read it and then drop it and move on to something
else. Good teachers integrate the reading text into interesting lesson sequences, using the
topic for discussion and further tasks, using the language for study and then activation (or,
of course, activation and then study) and using a range of activities to bring the text to life.
References
1. Ніколаєва С. Ю. Методика навчання іноземних мов у середніх навчальних
закладах. Підручник. – К.: Ленвіт, 1999. – 320 с.
2. Jeremy Harmer. How to teach English. Pearson Education Limited, 2007. – 288 p.

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MAIN PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING READING

Liudmyla Voinalovych (Zhytomyr, Ukraine)

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