Teaching English Toolbox

Reading

Do you know what all these terms mean and which ones belong together? Check your answers below!

  • scan, scan
  • graphic organizer
  • top-down, bottom-up
  • gist, detail, infer, deduce, decode, comprehension
  • intensive, extensive
  • whole language, phonics

Find a text you think would work well with your learners and think about how you would apply the words and terms in the word cloud to your selected text!

You will find additional resources on stories and graded readers in the "Classroom Basics and Basic Issues" section of this toolbox and below are a few examples and resources.

The following texts are relatively dated but they cover the basics. If you want to keep up on the newest research on Reading, follow anything by Daniel Willingham - http://www.danielwillingham.com/ or Jennifer Serravallo - and apply these ideas to the ideas below.

  • Grabe, W. (2014). Key Issues in L2 Reading Development in Proceedings of the 4th CELC Symposium for English Language Teachers-Selected Papers (pp. 8-18)
  • Brun-Mercer, N. and Moore, C. (2022). [could not resolve link target: il_0_dfile_3886007] . ELT Forum. 1:2-12
  • Search for "reading" on the ELT Forum website for many innovative practices.
  • Day, R. (2020). Teaching Reading, Revised Edition. ELT Development Series. TESOL Press.

Example 1: Putting Text in Order

In this third grade example, the learners were working on a role play. The general steps involved in this lesson were:

  1. Listing flavors of ice cream and saying what "My favorite flavor is" and "I can eat XXX scoops of it at a time";
  2. Putting the strips in order;
  3. Checking the order with a partner;
  4. Repeating the text out loud, repeating after the teacher;
  5. Practicing with a partner;
  6. Going outside and practicing without the text;
  7. Playing "Heads Up" for vocabulary terms in the text (I would like; Can I help; How are you?);
  8. Eating an ice cream together! 
3rd grade ordering ice cream dialogue. © PHZH (L. Buechel)

Think about the following questions:

  • This is not a reading lesson per se, but there is reading involved. What type of reading is involved? For what reasons do learners have to read?
  • What are the reasons for each step above (e.g. having the learners put the text in order "forces" them to read it for comprehension)? What subskills might you mention for each step?
  • If you wanted the learners to have a little "reading quiz" with this text a week later, what might you do? For what instructional purposes?

Example 2: Reading for Specific Information

In this reading activity, the learners had to read the texts and to write words into categories from the text. 

This is an example generated with CoPilot. The original text included Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night, Shrove Tuesday, Harvest Festival, St. Patrick's Day and came from Tomkinson, A, and Lee, E. (2014). Think Global. Eli Publishing. p. 28. Keep in mind that most coursebooks have similar pages.
© PHZH (L. Buechel)

From the words they noted, the learners had to describe some of the different holidays they had just read about (including Australia Day and Diwali). From this, they had to go and describe their own favorite holiday in a similar way. 

Think about it!

  • The learners could have focused more on structures or grammar - how could you do some guided discovery with this or such a text?
  • You see some underlining, boxing and squiggling in the first paragraph. What do you think was happening here? If you had wanted learners to highlight or underline anything, what might that have been and why?
  • The learners in this class read, underlined, and were quizzed later about the content of this text. At the same time, they had to write their own texts which were handed in and corrected. How else could you use this text? What could you do in a 3rd grade with this text? In a 6th grade?
  • If you were to write a reading comprehension quiz based on this text, what questions would you have for inference? detail? gist? How would you make sure you are only testing reading comprehension and not other things such as world or prior knowledge? Should you avoid testing prior knowledge?

  • How can you use the terms in the word cloud above to design meaningful reading activities?
  • Describe how reading should develop according to the CEFR aims for the levels you will be teaching.
  • Why should you set your aims at a higher level than what the learners are actually at?
  • What is different about learning to read in English than in your mother tongue or the local language? How might it be taught differently based on what you know about reading development?
  • What are meaningful reading strategies? What strategies need complex instructions? Some research shows that strategies such as highlighting are ineffective unless you have further steps. What further steps might you have?
  • What reading processes (e.g. top-down / bottom up / skimming / scanning) are used in which situations? How can they be trained?
  • How can you encourage reading in English?
  • Can you describe some fun reading games and activities that don't take forever, but help foster reading skills?
  • Can you describe how you might use reciprocal reading in English lessons?
  • Why do you have learners read in English? What can they do with these skills or this knowledge?
  • How can you test reading skills? What constructs can you test when you test reading? Should you test reading? What are the alternatives?
  • How can you use graded texts meaningfully in reading instruction? Should you use graded texts? What are the alternatives?
  • Searching for parallel words has been shown to be ineffective. Why?