There are three stages of the Communicative method in teaching reading:

1. Pre-reading stage (what teacher and learners do before reading). Teacher: set purposes what to read for, think if the background or linguistic knowledge is necessary, what approach (bottom-up or top-dow) to use, set tasks for the leaners, help learners to prepare for the task (vocabulary, pictures), motivate the learners to read (interesting topic). Learners: predict, answer the questions, drawing, brainstorm, discuss etc.

2. While reading stage – (what teacher and learners do during reading). Learners check predictions and guesses, make reading activities (on worksheets) on linguistic and comprehensive competence – orderning, t/f sentences, identify the pictures to the text, draw a picture, choose a title, define main ideas, define the bold parts of speech, define the tense of verbs, etc. Teacher: monitor, ask questions, help.

3. Post-reading stage – (what teacher and learners do after reading). Learners: react to the text: give personal opinions, answer the questions, complete the sentences, retell, problem solving, write an essay. Teacher: evaluate reading: linguistic and comprehensive competences.

Types of exercises in teaching reading The aims of reading exercises:

• Introduce and develop reading skills which are useful outside the classroom

• Introduce or practice language

Types of exercises in teaching reading

1. Graphemic-phonemic exercises - help learners to master graphemic-phonemic correspondence in the English language. Teaching begins with presenting a letter to learners, or a combination of letters. The use of flash cards and the board is necessary. The visual aids are used also to teach learners to read words.

2. Structural-informative exercises - help learners how to read sentences, paragraphs and texts correctly. Special attention is given to intonation and stress because they are very important in the actual division of sentences. At an early stage of teaching reading the teacher should read a sentence or a passage to the class by himself. When the learners understand the passage he can set individual and the class to repeat the sentences after him. This kind of elementary reading practice should be carried on for a limited number of lessons only. When a class has advanced far enough to be ready for more independent reading, reading in chorus might be decreased, but not eliminated. Structural-information exercises help also to find the subject and predicate in the sentences, to fulfill lexical and grammar analysis, Grammar and lexical analysis helps learners to define structural words, the meaning of a word according to its position in the sentence, to find the meanings of unfamiliar words, and those which seem to be familiar but do not correspond to the structure of the sentence (I saw him book a ticket).

Some examples of tasks:

• Read the following sentences and guess the meaning of the words you don’t know.

• These sentences are too complicated. Break them into shorter sentences.

• What is the significance of the tense difference?

Structural-information exercises are done both in reading aloud and in silent reading.

3. Semantic-communicative exercises – help learners to get information from the text. The learner is to be taught to compare, to contrast, to guess and to foresee events.

Questions before may be very helpful for reading comprehension. Semantic-communicative exercises are all connected with silent reading. These may be:

• Read and say why…

• Read and find answers to the following questions

• Read the text. Find the words which describe.

• Read the text and say what made somebody do something.

• Read the text and prove that.

Comprehension may also be checked using the following tasks:

• Read and draw or colour.

• Find the following information

• Correct the following statements

• Find the most important sentences in the text.

• Read and put the pictures in order.

Some of the assignments may be done in writing.