The Teaching Of Reading

In our school, a lot of problems still exist in the English teaching especially in the teaching of reading. There are many reasons why getting students to read English texts is an important part of the teacher’s job. In the first place, many of them want to be able to read texts in English either for their careers, for study purposes or simply for pleasure. Anything we can do to make reading easier for them must be a good idea.Students must also read widely because only a fraction of knowledge about the world can come from other experiences in their short lives.When the teachers give reading class to students, they should notice a balance----a balance to be struck between real English on the one hand and the students’ capabilities and interests on the other. There is some authentic written material which beginner students can understand to some degree: menus, timetables, signs and basic instructions,teachers can offer their students texts, which, while being like English, are nevertheless written or adapted especially for their level. Anyway, the materials to be read should be interesting and meaningful. Teachers should become better acquainted with books written specially for teenagers and dealing with their problems. What are the principles behind the teaching of reading?
i) Permit Students To Read：Teachers keep them in skills books learning rules about letters, syllables or definitions of words rather than letting them into the book itself, permitting them to be immersed in the language which comes from the authors as the readers try to reconstruct the written message.
ii) Encourage students to respond to the content of a reading text, not just to the language：Teachers should help students understand that the main reason to read is for them. They have to have their own purpose to read and reading must make sense, they have to find ways of doing something about it. They should be encouraged either to reread or to continue reading to gain meaning.
iii) Encourage students to guess or predict：Readers’ guesses or predictions are based on the cumulative information and syntactic structure they have been learning as they have been reading. Therefore, their guesses are more often than not appropriate to the materials.