For Teachers: 5 Ways to Help Your Students with Reading
#1: Don’t ask Students to Read Aloud
I know there is some debate in our industry about the pros and cons of reading aloud in class but I fall strongly on the side of being against it. * see links below for some sources my colleagues who disagree have forwarded me.
My main reasons for being against is are:
a. It’s not an authentic use of language
Most of us only ever read aloud to children and those books are graded so they’re much easier for us to process. Besides reading to children, when have you ever read aloud?
b. It makes everyone’s pronunciation worse
Students who sound perfectly natural speaking in class begin to sound robotic when they read aloud. Their pronunciation becomes worse! Even native speakers sound stilted when they’re reading aloud. Why would we ask students to do something that affects their pronunciation negatively?
c. It’s not reading
Most importantly, reading aloud takes a different kind of focus than reading for comprehension. If we’re busy being focused on speaking/pronunciation we aren’t focused on the meaning of the text. Reading aloud requires processing in different parts of the brain than reading for comprehension so it’s conflating two things, diverting attention away from both and giving neither the attention they deserve.
#2: Learner Training: Dealing with Vocabulary
It’s important to encourage students to resist the urge to engage with unknown vocabulary too soon. Get them to practice reading and overlooking things they don’t know by setting time limits in class. Also, explain why you’re having them skip over unknown words to start – because this is what we do in real life! (Although less so today since we can easily look up words in most online reading platforms.) Spend some time in lessons explicitly teaching your students to infer meaning from context. And, make sure students know how to access learners’ dictionaries – discourage the use of translators or bilingual dictionaries which are typically not very good.
#3: Use Authentic Materials
Let’s just call it: most course book texts are boring beyond belief. How many times can you read about some clearly made-up story that is there, often, to illustrate - very unnaturally - multiple examples of a particular target language? These texts don’t typically represent any genre you would encounter in real life and it’s hard to feel excited about them.
Authentic materials, on the other hand, are much easier to engage with. There are many genres to choose from: blog posts, Facebook and WhatsApp messages, listicles, emails, and old standbys like: short stories, novels, menus, etc. The choices are really endless.
Helping students access authentic materials will help them feel more confident about trying to engage with authentic materials on their own in their own free time. Which leads us to…
#4: Encourage Extensive Reading
Reading is good for our brains – it enhances our memory and helps us fight off depression. So, there is plenty there to encourage our students, but even more so in our context: it’s one of the most effective ways to build our vocabulary.
Think about the armchair observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. With classes meeting, say, 10 hours a week, that would be 19 years’ worth of classes! But if students spend just 2 hours a week reading that would decrease that number to 16! These numbers aren’t at all accurate – that 10,000 hour thing has been debunked – but it does illustrate the importance of putting the time in. You have to work at it to get good at it.
To these ends, give your students a bunch of resources to go to and get them to read some for fun outside of class. Graded readers are a good start and the internet is filled with useful materials – for current events, I’ve often recommended PBS News Hour Extra and I love the BBC Teach website for other resources. If you have other good sources, please share in the comments below.
#5: Keep ‘em honest
Get the students to report back on what they’ve read! Be it writing a book report, doing a Vlog, or simply discussing what they’ve been reading with their partners, it’s important to encourage a response to texts the students have read. It’s an authentic thing to do – I’m always swapping recommendations with friends and family. Or even better, get the students to start a book club or encourage them to join ours! Everything is more fun when it’s shared.
If you have other tips for helping students with reading, please share them below.
Sources on reading aloud: