Activities for teaching to read

Teaching to read starts with teaching “phonics”, i.e. associations of sounds and letters. Beginners' reading activities can be organised with the tasks such as “Draw links between the foreign and native language letters that sound the same”. “Draw links between the pictures and the letters that begin the words”. “Cross out letters, which you can't hear when you name an object”. “Read the words, which are names of the animals. Do not read other words”. “In the short story read only the words, which you can understand. What is the story about? ”. “Read out only the sentences, which describe the picture”. ”Read out only the sentences, which belong to one story” (After P.Ur. 1996. A Course in Language Teaching. CUP. P. 156-157).

Exploratory task 2.1

Consider the following reading activity for young learners, “Stick the labels on the picture of the living room. Some labels will be left unnecessary”. List the difficulties that the activity can present to the young learners.

Teaching reading to advanced students can be organised with a single text (skimming and scanning reading), parallel texts (reading two or more texts on the same subject thus creating information gap between the readers), divided text (splitting the text into parts and handing them out for the learners to read and them put information together, thus organising a jig-saw reading). Advanced reading activities can take the form of cued reading (finding information in the text as relevant to the cue given), guided reading (seeking information in the text in answer to the questions given), jig-saw reading (pooling information together of the two or more texts distributed between the learners), shared reading (reading the same text in a group but with each learner having a different task with subsequent sharing information), critical reading (activating thought processes over the text).

Exploratory task 2.2

The following reading activity is based on psychological testing. Do the task and evaluate the activity according to the format given below. Task: Do the following stress test and estimate your stress level. Encode your answers as 1 “always”, 2 “almost always”, 3 “occasionally”, 4 “almost never”, 5 “never”. Total scoring over 24 indicates that your stress level is reaching a dangerous mark.

(O’Connell, S. 1999. Focus on Advanced English. Longman. P. 52)

Reading activities are based on a number of techniques for teaching to read.Techniques for teaching to read include extracting(extracting information from the text in answer to questions or other elicitation tasks), cloze procedure(filling gaps in the text), sequencing text parts(restoring the logical order of the crippled text), matching (matching headlines and passages in the text), restoration of the text (restoring the text from bits and scraps), finding irrelevancies(finding and ticking off sentences, which are logically irrelevant in the text), fitting in sentences or passages(fitting in the sentences or passages in the points of the text, where they are logically appropriate), digest(summarizing the most essential information points from a number of texts), comment(reader's response on the text).