READING STRATEGIES

I am a secondary teacher and I teach students from about 11 to 18 years old. I usually work on the four basic skills in every class. In order to practice reading, I usually choose the texts from the textbook, although I often work on other texts I find interesting and appealing to them. 

First of all, we comment on the photos that accompany the text as well as the title and we try to predict the content of the text. We do this orally so as to practice speaking skills too. Prediction is really important before reading a text and also use our previous knowledge on the subject to think about the topic.

Then, we skim and scan the text, trying to ignore the vocabulary they are not familiar with and summarize orally the content of each paragraph, to check they are understanding the basic ideas of the text. For me, it is important for them to realise that they do not need to understand every single word in the text. Students often get frustrated when they don’t know the meaning of all the words. This way, I try to encourage them and show them that you can perfectly read a text without a dictionary.

After that, I ask my students to read the text again individually trying to remember as much information as possible. We write down the new words and summarise the text orally again and reflect on the ideas in the text and relate what they have read to their own experiences and knowledge.

Along this process, we have worked on reading and speaking. Afterwards, I let them some time to do some exercises related to the text in their notebook (answering questions, finding words or phrases in the text and so on).

To sum up, I could say that predicting, skimming, scanning and in-depth reading are the strategies I mainly use in my classes.