2. Reading strategies. Types of reading

Teaching reading presupposes developing learners’ reading strategies: what we do and in what sequence, how quickly, what is the aim etc. In fact, there are about 50 of them, and it’s no wonder, since we read different texts in different ways. It depends mainly on our aim and the kind of text. So it is very important to set certain tasks before reading, for the learners have some definite purpose to read and to choose the appropriate reading strategy. Usually a reader combines several strategies, e.g. predicting, noticing and understanding cohesive devices, guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words from content etc. According to the strategy that dominates, there are 4 main types of reading:

• Skimming (looking through the text quickly to get the main idea, to understand what the text is about and whether it is worth reading). The speed is about 1.5 pages per minute. Learners are taught this in senior forms.

• Scanning (looking through the text to find a particular piece of information, especially often used when reading pragmatic texts). It is also a quick type of reading. It is often used for assessment.

• Intensive reading (reading texts in order to understand 100 % of information, so it is accuracy orientated). But you are to make sure that this is reading, not translation and just language analysis, the object is still to infer information. It is rather slow – about 50-60 words a minute but it shouldn’t be slower – it should remain reading! The length of texts for intensive reading is shorter than in texts for scanning or skimming but their content and language material is often more complicated. The texts include texts of different types and genres: fiction, publicist, popular science, pragmatic; they can be authentic, abridged or adapted.

• Extensive reading (reading longer texts, often for pleasure). It is fluency oriented, it involves global understanding. It is not a quick type of reading (home reading or reading some additional material).

3. Stages of teaching reading and types of activities used at them

The type and the communicative aim of reading predetermine the number and kinds of activities. But irrespective of that, teaching reading includes 3 stages: pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading.

At the pre-reading stage the teacher tunes learners in, may inform them of some facts from the life of the author or from history, biology, ecology, etc depending on the kind of text and its topic and the type of reading learners are going to be engaged in. The teacher may elicit from learners what they know about the author or topic, what other books by that author they have read etc. All that work should motivate learners to read the forthcoming text, trigger their interest.

Pre-reading stage is also used to facilitate further reading, to eliminate some difficulties: phonetic (personal names, geographic names may be written down on the board and practiced), grammar (some exercises be done, analysis or translation of some difficult structures can take place), vocabulary (some words that belong to learners’ potential vocabulary can be suggested for guessing their meaning etc). Students may be asked to predict the content of the text or the topic by the headline to the text. With intensive reading the number of pre-text activities is the greatest, with scanning – the smallest.

At the while-reading stage learners get the task or tasks to perform (so the aim of reading is set), read the text silently during a limited period of time and do the task(s). Depending on the type of reading the tasks may include finding answers to the questions, true-false statements, filling in the table, matching titles to paragraphs, ordering paragraphs etc.

At the post-reading stage learners perform some activities checking their comprehension and use the information inferred from the text in other skill developing activities (speaking, writing). Comprehension is checked with the help of question and answering work, multiple choice, completion of sentences, matching (e.g. characters to opinions), etc. Learners can make up a plan of the text, retell it orally or in a written form, write an argumentative lesson, take part in the discussion of the problems touched upon etc. Certainly, the character of activities depends on the type of reading and the level of comprehension it presupposes. You cannot check understanding of details in case of skimming, for instance.