1. General Approaches to Reading

Reading is a complex multi-skill process. It is often supposed that ability to read critically is an advanced skill - yet every time we ask a child if he/she likes a book or a nursery rhyme, we are encouraging him/her to develop critical reading skills

In most textbooks reading materials have two main functions:

1. to achieve the four aims such as:

1. to develop basic comprehension skills so that the learners can read and understand a text;

2. to be able to use reading to increase students' general knowledge;

3. to be able to decide about their reading purpose:

4. to develop the ability to read critically.

2. To act as "shop windows" for language - it means that a textbook displays long items such as vocabulary, structure, idiom, etc. Some of these items may have been taught orally already; other may be met for the first time in the reading passage.

According to Ukrainian methodologist O.Vyshnevskiy reading is a difficult and time-consuming process. He distinguishes between three main stages of reading:

1. Formation of the technique of reading. It is characteristic of the beginners and the students with an intermediate level of English or any other language. The students learn the letters, distinguish between the consonants and the vowels and then, step by step, they start reading.

Teaching reading stage. This stage consists of further development of the first stage and the elements of a mature reading on the basis of oral language material.

2. Mature reading. It combines the previous stages. The students read a text in order to get a necessary information. [O.Vyshnevskiy, p. 157]

Another Ukrainian methodologist E.Onyschenko differentiates between two substages of the technique of reading:

a) reading aloud;

b)silent reading. [N.K.Skliarenko, E.I.Onyschenko, S.L.Zaharova, p.116]

Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. For example, we apply different reading strategies when looking at a notice board to see if there is an advertisement for a particular type of flat and when carefully reading an article of a special interest in a scientific journal. Yet locating the relevant advertisement in the article demonstrates that the reading purpose in each case has been successfully fulfilled. In the first case, a competent reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he is looking for. In the second case, it is not enough to understand the gist of the text; more detailed comprehension is necessary.

There are two main reasons for reading:

• reading for pleasure.

• reading for information (in order to find out something or in order to do something with the information you get). [F.Grellet, p.4]

The main ways of reading are as follows:

- Skimming: quickly running one's eyes over a text to get the gist of it.- Scanning: quickly going through a text to find a particular piece of information.

Extensive reading: reading longer texts, usually for one's own pleasure. This is a fluency activity, mainly involving global understanding.

- Intensive reading: reading shorter texts, to extract specific information. This is more an accuracy activity involving reading for detail.

In real life, our reading purposes constantly vary and therefore, when devising exercises, we should vary the questions and the activities according to the type of text studied and the purpose in reading it. When working on a page of classified ads, for instance, it would be highly artificial to propose exercises requiring the detailed comprehension of every single advertisement. This would only discourage the students and prevent them from developing reading strategies adapted to the true purpose of their reading.

Reading involves a variety of skills. The main ones suggested by John Munby are listed below:

• Recognizing the script of a language;

• Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items;

• Understanding explicitly stated information;

• Understanding information when not explicitly stated;

• Understanding conceptual meaning;

• Understanding the communicative value (function) of sentences and utterances;

• Understanding relations within the sentence,

• Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices;

• Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices;

• Interpreting text by going outside it;

• Recognizing indicators in discourse;

• Identifying the main idea from supporting details;

• Extracting salient points to summarize (the text, an idea etc.);

• Selective extraction of relevant points from a text;

• Basic reference skills;

• Skimming;

• Scanning to locate specifically required information;

• Transcoding information to diagrammatic display. [F.Grellet, p.5]

Figure 1 illustrates one fairly widely held view of reading. The text is full of meaning like a jug full of water and it can be poured straight into the reader's mind which soaks it up like a sponge. In this view, the reader's role is a passive one; all the work has been done by the writer and the reader has only to open his mind and let the meaning pour in.

Fig. 1 One view of reading

Why do we reject this? One obvious reason is that it seldom happens like this. Not all the meaning in the text actually gets into the reader's mind; the figure should show at least some of the water trickling - if not streaming - down the reader's face. The fact that the meaning is in the text is unfortunately no guarantee that the reader will get it out, for we know from personal experience that a text that seems easy to one person may seem difficult to another. [C.Nuttal, p.87]

We shall concentrate on the features of a text that are known to give rise to difficulties for the reader.

Here are the main problems in understanding texts: Concepts

It has often been argued that concept formation is not the job of the language teacher, although many (especially those teaching language for specific purposes) have found themselves willy-nilly teaching concepts as well. We shall assume that the student has a reasonable understanding of the concepts involved within the clause; concepts expressed at higher levels are part of the message that the text expresses and will therefore be taken care of in other ways.