Thoughts on teaching reading

I think students do not develop reading skills simply through extensive reading. Extensive reading can increase lexile levels progressively. It also advocates the interest in reading. Reading does not have to be taught explicitly because we learn from what we read.

However, reading lesson is important to students as they may overlook the reading skills and may not pay attention to the reading passages when doing reading comprehension questions. Teachers should guide them to do reading in a faster and more accurate way, such as the heading of the passages, skimming and scanning are important in reading.

Reading lessons can be more interesting to students if the topic is related to their lives. Also with the help of pre-reading tasks, students can gain vocabulary knowledge and increase general information of the passage so that students could understand the text better.

Teachers can enhance students' motivation in reading by providing interesting readers, such as sci-fi ficition, asking students to adapt the reader and perform a drama, or designing interactive activities to them. Teachers can also promote extensive reading by sharing interesting books during the morning assembly, introducing books in English lessons and using some incentives to encourage reading, like awards or prize.