Teaching EFL Reading

Teaching Reading in the EFL Classroom

We have created a podcast to complement this page.  You can download it from our podcast page.

Basic Concepts:

Teaching reading in EFL is a bit different than the way native speakers are taught to read.  While vocabulary is an important part of reading, teaching the reading skills of surveying, skimming, scanning, inference, predicting, and guessing are just as important.

Research tends to indicate that a student’s reading comprehension can be improved by focusing on teaching students skills in the following areas:

Vocabulary

Many languages do not have the word building concepts that English does. In teaching vocabulary, the idea of “root” words, and prefixes and suffixes helps students build a larger vocabulary quickly.  Affixes (prefixes and suffixes) help us create a variety of words from one base word.  many EFL students won’t recognize that contain is the root word of container and containment; or that desire is the root word of undesirable and desirability. When teaching new vocabulary it is important to point out these connections and we can quickly help students expand their vocabulary with the base words they already know.  Teaching affixes is only one of several strategies for teaching vocabulary.  See the links below for more.

Surveying, Scanning, Skimming

In an academic setting we rarely read an entire text word for word.  More typical is that we look at the contents of a book, the chapters, headings, subheadings, sidebars, pictures, illustrations, words in italics and bold type – and dive in to find the information we need. These are the concepts of surveying, scanning and skimming: moving from the big ideas of a reading down to the specific details.  These are skills that EFL students don’t usually have and must be taught.  The linked readings below will give you more specifics on these skills.

Guessing and Predicting from Context

Students also need to be taught to guess the meanings of words based on the context of the reading and to draw from the reading an ability to predict what might happen in the next paragraph.  Links below will lead to more information on these skills.

Expanded Concepts:

Teaching Reading – read the entire section and subsections

Teaching Reading Skills – download this PDF file

Skimming and Scanning

Scanning Exercise - The University of Victoria website where these scanning exercises are located sometimes has problems with their Javascript quizzes and you might find that your correct answers are scored incorrectly!    Don’t worry about it.  The point of visiting the website and looking at the exercises is to be sure that you understand what scanning is.  You can do that by looking at the reading exercise and then at the questions to see that they are wanting you to pick up important individual details.  That is what scanning is about.

Skimming, Scanning, and SQ3R

An excellent short article about teaching reading and specific reading skills is HERE at About.com

When you finish these readings, proceed to the section on Teaching Writing.