Teaching reading and writing in English for academic purposes

10 READING OBJECTIVES AND TECHNIQUES FOR ACHIEVING THEM

These objectives are intended for upper-intermediate or advanced learners who wish to study in higher education in the UK.

1. Identifying the topic and purpose of a written text

Objective: Given a general text of average difficulty in relation to the learners' vocabulary and general proficiency, and sufficient time to read it at a speed appropriate to its purpose and type, students should be able to give a plausible account of why it was written and who it was written for. They should also be able to paraphrase the subject matter in global terms by saying what the text is about in one sentence.

Techniques: Achieve this through global reading-comprehension questions such as: What is the text about? Who is it written for? Where would you expect to see a text like this? Would you find it in X or Y? Another useful activity is to provide four possible titles and ask students to choose the most appropriate one.

2. Developing appropriate reading styles

Objective: Students should develop a variety of reading styles appropriate to their present and short-term future reading purposes and to the accompanying text types. Given texts of average difficulty and different reading purposes—such as reading academic texts or newspapers for information, consulting a text in a library or bookshop, or reading for pleasure—students should select a reading style appropriate to each particular text type and purpose.

Techniques: Set clearly defined tasks and impose realistic time limits. Provide a variety of text types, such as a dictionary page, telephone directory, train timetable, bank statement or Tube map, and ask students to locate specific information as efficiently as possible.

3. Learning new language from context

Objective: Given a text containing a generous proportion of known vocabulary, together with semantic and syntactic links between known and unknown items, students should develop the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from their context. They should be able to learn new language by using the linguistic context to test their deductions before resorting to a dictionary.

Techniques: Use an interesting text and an engaging reading task. Initially, provide visual support where appropriate. At a later stage, black out or underline selected unfamiliar items and ask students to infer their meanings and suggest synonyms. Definition questions can also help learners focus on words whose meanings they only partly understand.

4. Reading with conceptual awareness

Objective: Given general texts containing relatively common concepts and a familiar degree of abstraction, students should develop the ability to interpret the author's concepts in relation to their own experience and knowledge of the world, without distorting the author's message. Their understanding can be checked through think-aloud techniques or through an appropriate comprehension test.

Techniques: Use discussion as a follow-up to reading. Newspaper articles and reports are particularly useful for exploring learners' experience of concepts of a general nature. Such activities can also be used to develop vocabulary fields and semantic networks.

5. Understanding relationships within sentences

Objective: Given a general text of suitable difficulty, students should be able to identify, with a high degree of accuracy, structural or sense units at word, phrase and clause levels, as well as relational words and phrases and expressions of modality. They should also be able to explain how the position of words, phrases and clauses within a sentence affects its meaning through their interrelationships.

Techniques: Use direct reference questions, including wh- questions, together with activities requiring learners to identify noun phrases and verb phrases. See also Meaning & the English Verb.

6. Understanding relationships between sentences

Objective: Given suitable texts, students should be able to identify cohesive ties, including reference, anaphora, cataphora, hyponymy, comparison and nominalisation. They should also be able to identify logical cohesive devices expressing addition, comparison, contrast, concession, enumeration, exemplification, inference, summary, time, result, reformulation, replacement and transition.

In both cases, students should demonstrate their understanding of the semantic relationships between sentences through paraphrase, substitution or appropriate comprehension testing. They should also become aware of cases where an inferential bridge has to be established between sentences because an expected relational marker has been omitted.

Techniques: Use vocabulary-building activities involving synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, including sorting words into categories. Ask students to underline anaphoric and cataphoric markers and identify their referents. For logical cohesive devices, jumbled-paragraph activities can be particularly useful. See Grellet's Developing Reading Skills, as well as exercises based on lists of logical cohesive devices.

7. Understanding paragraph structure and rhetorical organisation

Objective: Given suitable texts and appropriate time constraints, students should be able to identify basic patterns of topic development, including Linear, Constant Topic and Hyponym patterns. Given fairly regularly constructed paragraphs, they should also be able to identify features of paragraph structure such as the topic sentence, developers, context modulators and concluding sentences.

Techniques: Provide paragraphs illustrating different patterns of topic development and ask students to identify the way in which the topic is developed. Compare Linear, Constant Topic and Hypertheme patterns. See Given & New Paragraph Development Models, TESOL 18.3 (1984), and From Paragraph to Essay by Imhoof and Hudson.

8. Learning and selecting information from a text

Objective: When reading a text intended to convey information, and when the learning task has been defined in terms of specific requirements, students should be able to distinguish the main points from subordinate points. Their ability to do this can be measured through a précis or, in order to avoid mixing receptive and productive skills, through an alternative task in which students underline the main points.

Techniques: See Widdowson's Reading and Thinking in English. Readers may fail to distinguish main from subordinate points when they lose sight of their purpose for reading. A useful remedy is therefore to emphasise the task before reading begins. Guided note-taking frames, such as those described in Listening Comprehension & Note-taking by James, Jordan and Matthews, can be adapted for reading passages. Note-taking frames and fill-in activities can be used to organise information obtained from reading.

9. Improving reading speed

Objective: Given suitable texts and clearly defined reading purposes, students should be able to read with understanding at a speed appropriate to the text type and the purpose for reading. Comprehension tests can be used to check that increased speed has not resulted in a significant loss of understanding.

Techniques: See Mosback & Mosback's Practical Faster Reading. Conversion tables relating the length of a text, reading time and reading speed can help learners measure their progress. It is important, however, to recognise that different reading purposes require different speeds.

Pugh's technique of having the teacher read aloud while students follow the text in their books was reported to increase reading speed from approximately 60 to 90 words per minute, with the improvement being maintained. However, this technique needs to be used with care, since it may encourage learners to associate reading speed with the teacher's rather than their own reading rate.

10. Reading with critical awareness

Objective: Given suitable texts and appropriate time constraints, students should be able to understand meanings which are not literally stated as well as those which are explicitly stated. This includes recognising the writer's attitudes, values and possible intentions. They should also be able to bring their own attitudes, values, knowledge and experience to bear on the author's assertions, actively questioning what they read rather than passively accepting it.

Techniques: Discussion questions focusing on tone, attitudes, ideas and different perspectives can help learners recognise that a text should not automatically be treated as an unquestionable statement of truth. Comparing reports of the same news event from newspapers with different editorial perspectives can be particularly effective. Work on advertising can also provide useful material for examining how language influences readers. Bell's work on the syntax and semantics of news editing could be adapted for use in the follow-up phase of a reading lesson.

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