Development of reading skills in a Second Language
See Literacy section of this site for teaching learners who are unfamiliar with the English alphabet.
Reading in a second language is not the same as text study
ESSAY TITLE: Intermediate pupils who have been taught with the aid of courses based on intensive text study may often believe that reading English is a very different activity from reading in their own native language. Why is this so? What obstacles will it raise to their aquiring better reading skills in English and how would you tackle the problem of improving these skills?
Intermediate pupils who have been taught with the aid of courses based on intensive text study may come to believe that reading English is a very different activity from reading in their own language. This is largely because the reading they encounter in the classroom is often not representative of the reading they do in real life. Instead of reading for a purpose, they may have been trained to concentrate on individual words, sentences and grammatical structures. The result can be a set of reading habits which seriously obstruct the development of fluent reading skills in English.
Few people consciously analyse the skills involved in the different kinds of reading they do in their native language. Most adult students of English as a foreign language are already familiar with the Roman alphabet before they begin an English course. General coursebooks can therefore take this familiarity for granted and use written texts as one of their principal vehicles for presenting and practising the language.
In the early stages of learning, the main aim is understandably to introduce and practise a body of vocabulary, grammatical forms and language functions. This gives students an entry into the new language and provides a basic means of communicating concepts such as number, quantity, spatial relationships, time and modality. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are often used principally to reinforce this basic linguistic foundation.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach at an elementary level. The problem arises when it continues for too long. Intensive text study may give students considerable practice in dealing with carefully graded passages, but such passages are often very different from the English they encounter outside the classroom. They are generally written or adapted to contain particular items of grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation which the course writer wants students to learn. Their context is therefore primarily pedagogical.
This is understandable to some extent in the teaching of listening and speaking, since spontaneous oral interaction is difficult to reproduce in a coursebook. However, the failure to represent the kinds of reading we actually do, particularly after several hundred hours of instruction, is much harder to justify. By this stage, the simple text-study model should increasingly give way to the longer-term goal of helping students use the reading skills they have already developed in their first language.
The central problem is that reading is not one uniform activity. Outside the classroom, people read different kinds of material for different purposes and at different speeds. An adult living in an English-speaking environment may need to read record cards, forms, immigration documents, notices, telephone directories, maps, letters, tickets, timetables, price lists, menus, newspaper headlines and advertisements. Each of these requires a somewhat different approach. A timetable may need to be scanned rapidly for one particular piece of information, while a newspaper article may be skimmed to discover whether it is worth reading in detail. A novel may be read for pleasure, whereas a form may need to be examined carefully because a mistake has practical consequences.
Students therefore need opportunities to transfer the reading strategies they already possess in their first language to English. This is not necessarily the teaching of a completely new skill. Rather, it is the development of the ability to use familiar reading skills in a new language. Cultural differences may, however, make this transfer less straightforward. Students may need to become familiar with conventions of layout, terminology and organisation which are specific to the target-language environment.
For example, a student who is perfectly competent at using a street atlas in his or her own country may initially find the conventions of the London A-Z unfamiliar. The ability to read a map and use an index is already present, but applying that ability successfully requires knowledge of the conventions used in the new environment. The distinction between something such as South Gro. N6 - 3D 29 and South Gro. E19 2B 32 is meaningful only if the reader understands how the particular system works. Cultural knowledge can therefore form part of successful reading.
The most useful reading materials are consequently those which resemble the materials students are likely to encounter outside the classroom. These might include advertisements and timetables for scanning, magazines and newspapers for skimming, and a range of books and other material for reading longer texts for pleasure. In a classroom, a coffee table might contain magazines, colour brochures for self-catering holidays, leisure guides, London bus maps, illustrated guides to the British Museum or Brighton's Royal Pavilion, and holiday brochures. Such material provides students with a much wider experience of what reading actually involves.
When I teach English in the surroundings of the UK, I place particular emphasis on reading for information. I use materials from tourist information centres and transport companies, including maps of the Brighton transport area and information about bus and rail services. The important point is that the reading activity should have a genuine purpose. It should be motivated by need and interest, rather than by the teacher's need to find a text containing a particular grammatical structure.
The importance of interest and previous knowledge became particularly clear to me in one of my least successful lessons. The text was entitled Centrifugal Governors and came from The Structure of Technical English. The students were all employed in a steelworks and therefore had considerable knowledge of heat treatment and welding. Nevertheless, instead of using that knowledge to interpret the text as a whole, they concentrated almost entirely on asking me to explain unfamiliar vocabulary so that they could understand each individual sentence.
A much more successful lesson involved a text comparing life in a Stockholm suburb with life in the Swedish countryside. There were relatively few unknown items which the students could not infer from the context. Their immediate interest in the subject encouraged them to read beyond sentence level. The organisation of their subsequent discussion around ideas of contrast and comparison also showed that they had grasped the global organisation of the text. This contrast suggests that unfamiliarity with, or lack of interest in, a topic can encourage students to fall back on inefficient sentence-level reading habits.
The teacher's role in presenting reading texts is therefore crucial. A distinction needs to be made between procedures designed to develop efficient reading comprehension and procedures appropriate to intensive text study. Most reading texts should be read silently. Silent reading gives students an opportunity to practise skimming, scanning and selective attention. Fluent readers do not give every word equal attention. They frequently skip words and phrases which are not essential to their purpose, and sometimes anticipate the content of a sentence or paragraph without reading every word.
This is one reason why excessive use of choral repetition can be counterproductive. If students are trained to read aloud after a teacher or recording, attention is inevitably drawn to every word. Yet this is not how efficient reading normally takes place. Furthermore, people's purposes for reading rarely require every word or paragraph to receive equal attention. Choral repetition can therefore reinforce precisely the habits which we need to replace.
Instead, reading activities should encourage three broad stages: anticipation, skimming and more detailed reading.
First, students should be encouraged to anticipate the content of a text. They can use every available clue: the title, accompanying pictures, layout, typeface and headings. They can make predictions about the subject matter, the author's purpose, the intended audience and the situation in which the text originally appeared.
The concept of situation can be particularly useful here. Students can consider the physical setting, the roles and status of the people involved, their feelings and attitudes, and the knowledge and experience which the writer assumes to be shared. These questions are normally associated with spoken communication, but they can be applied equally well to written texts. What relationship does the writer establish with the reader? What attitude does the writer have towards the subject? What does the writer assume the reader already knows?
Secondly, students should skim the text in order to test and extend their initial hypotheses. At this stage, they are not trying to understand every sentence. They are looking for the overall meaning and organisation of the text.
Only then should they read more carefully, extending their purpose for reading as new information emerges. They should attempt to answer the questions they have already asked themselves and any new questions generated by the text.
These procedures reflect the fact that reading is fundamentally an activity of constructing meaning rather than simply decoding individual sentences. Written communication, like spoken communication, normally extends beyond the sentence. Sentences occur within linguistic and situational contexts, and different parts of a text contribute unequally to its overall meaning.
The efficient reader therefore relates ideas to one another, relates them to the purpose and organisation of the text, and relates them to personal experience and knowledge of the subject. A range of reference and cohesion skills contributes to this process. Readers recognise relationships involving anaphora, cataphora, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, comparison and nominalisation. They also use discourse markers and other lexical and grammatical cohesion devices to identify relationships between ideas and to follow the direction of an argument.
These skills are central to prediction, anticipation and confirmation. They also enable readers to recognise different levels of generality within a text. If students remain at sentence level, many of these processes are lost. Understanding individual sentences is only a small part of understanding a text as a whole.
It is therefore important to discourage students from immediately reaching for a dictionary whenever they encounter an unfamiliar word. Authentic reading material may initially appear frighteningly difficult to learners who have become accustomed to structurally graded texts. However, the difficulty is often increased by their old reading procedures rather than by the text itself. If students attempt to understand every word, an authentic text can appear almost impossible. If they read selectively, make predictions and use context, much of it may prove surprisingly accessible.
For this reason, comprehension tasks should be appropriate to the nature and purpose of the text. Initial questions should concentrate on its general function rather than on detailed comprehension. One useful technique is to present six or seven pieces of information and ask students which they would expect to find in a text with the given title. Students can then read the text to confirm or reject their hypotheses. This gives them a genuine reason for reading and encourages anticipation without unnecessarily telling them that they are being taught a reading strategy.
It is also important that reading should not be treated as an isolated skill. In real life, reading is frequently connected with listening, speaking and writing. A text may be read in preparation for a conversation, a discussion, a role play, a simulation or a written response. Reading can therefore form part of a broader programme of study skills in the target language.
Role plays and simulations are particularly useful in this respect. Role cards provide information about character, situation and language, but leave room for interpretation. Students must decide what information is important, how the character might react and how the information in the text relates to the task they have to perform. Discussion of what is salient both inside and outside the text can be as valuable as the role play itself.
Visual material can also help students recognise the organisation of discourse. Labelled diagrams can accompany technical descriptions or explanations; cartoons can help students approach texts containing arguments; and picture sequences or comic strips can support narrative texts. Students can subsequently use the same visual material to reconstruct descriptions, explanations, arguments or stories orally or in writing.
Activities such as putting pictures into the correct sequence, matching pictures with sections of a text, reconstructing jumbled paragraphs, taking notes, producing summaries, or transferring information into a grid or diagram all reinforce the idea that reading is an active process. They require students to identify the organisation of a text and to recognise the lexical and grammatical links which hold it together.
Such activities can also provide a bridge between reading and writing. When we read in our native language, we do not merely absorb a fixed quantity of information. We extract information and subsequently reorganise it according to our own purposes. We may discuss it, summarise it, explain it to someone else or incorporate it into something we write. Students learning English should be encouraged to do the same.
Even materials originally designed for language study can be used in this way. A cloze or fill-in exercise may have been created to practise particular grammatical forms, but once completed, the text can be treated as a whole. My on-the-spot reporters, for example, describe actions and scenery and thereby practise the present continuous, but the larger purpose is to encourage students to visit places such as Rottingdean. Similarly, my preposition stencils provide detailed guidance for shopping in the Lanes or visiting the Royal Pavilion and Gardens. Once students have assembled the information, they can use it for an oral or written reconstruction, perhaps by telephoning a friend and telling them about the visit.
The important point is that language-study input should not obscure the global purpose of the text. A text designed to teach grammar can still become meaningful reading material if students are subsequently encouraged to use it as a whole.
Purely atomistic teaching, on the other hand, inevitably encourages inefficient reading. Pre-teaching every item of vocabulary which students could reasonably infer from context, or allowing students to become dependent on dictionaries, prevents them from developing confidence in guessing meaning and interpreting context. Intermediate students need to understand that the purpose of reading is not necessarily to understand every word.
With appropriate preparation and follow-up activities, authentic texts can therefore be used successfully with intermediate learners. The crucial change is not simply to make texts easier, but to change the way students approach them. They need to know why they are reading, to draw upon their existing knowledge and interests, to recognise different kinds of text, and to vary the speed and degree of attention they give to different parts of what they read.
This is what native readers do instinctively. They know why they are reading; they bring their knowledge and interests to the task; and they read different types of material at different rates, giving different amounts of attention to different parts of the text. They survey the whole text, identify clues to its type, function and style, infer meaning from context and confidently ignore information which is not relevant to their immediate purpose.
The essential task for the English teacher is therefore not to teach reading as though students had never learned to read before. It is to help them transfer the reading skills they already possess into the target language. This involves familiarising them with the conventions of English-language texts and, where necessary, with the cultural knowledge required to interpret them. More importantly, it involves giving them regular opportunities to read for genuine purposes.
Reading in a second language should consequently be treated as a meaningful activity in its own right, rather than merely as another vehicle for the study of grammar and vocabulary. Intensive text study has its place in language teaching, but it should not be confused with reading itself. Students need to experience reading as an active process of prediction, interpretation, selection and reconstruction. Once they are given the opportunity to read in this way, the skills they have already developed in their first language can become a powerful resource for becoming efficient readers in English.