What follows are tips that encourage active reading. They consist of summarizing, reacting, questioning, arguing, evaluating, and placing a text within one's own experience. These processes may be the most complex to develop in a classroom setting, the reason being that in English reading classes most attention is often paid to dictionaries, the text, and the teacher.
Interrupting this routine and encouraging students to dialog with what they are reading without coming between them and the text presents a challenge to the EFL teacher. Duke and Pearson (2001) have stated that good readers are active readers. According to Ur (1996), Vaezi (2001), and Fitzgerald (1995), they use the following strategies.
Interrupting this routine and encouraging students to dialog with what they are reading without coming between them and the text presents a challenge to the EFL teacher. Duke and Pearson (2001) have stated that good readers are active readers. According to Ur (1996), Vaezi (2001), and Fitzgerald (1995), they use the following strategies.
- Making predictions: The readers should be taught to be on the watch to predict what is going to happen next in the text to be able to integrate and combine what has come with what is to come.
- Making selections: Readers who are more proficient read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading.
- Integrating prior knowledge: The schemata that have been activated in the pre-reading section should be called upon to facilitate comprehension.
- Skipping insignificant parts: A good reader will concentrate on significant pieces of information while skipping insignificant pieces.
- Re-reading: Readers should be encouraged to become sensitive to the effect of reading on their comprehension.
- Making use of context or guessing: Readers should not be encouraged to define and understand every single unknown word in a text. Instead they should learn to make use of context to guess the meaning of unknown words.
- Breaking words into their component parts: To keep the process of comprehension ongoing, efficient readers break words into their affixes or bases. These parts can help readers guess the meaning of a word.
- Reading in chunks: To ensure reading speed, readers should get used to reading groups of words together. This act will also enhance comprehension by focusing on groups of meaning-conveying symbols simultaneously.
- Pausing: Good readers will pause at certain places while reading a text to absorb and internalize the material being read and sort out information.
- Paraphrasing: While reading texts it may be necessary to paraphrase and interpret texts subvocally in order to verify what was comprehended.
- Monitoring: Good readers monitor their understanding to evaluate whether the text, or the reading of it, is meeting their goals.
References
Duke, N. K., and Pearson, D. P. (n.d.). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. Available at //effective reading.com/ (Oct. 15, 2001).
Fitzgerald, J. (1995). English-as-a-second-language learners' cognitive reading processes: a review of research in the United States. Review of Educational Research 65
Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vaezi, S. (2001). Metacognitive reading strategies across language and techniques. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran.
