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How to teach a reading skills lesson (ESL/EFL)

Let’s look at how to prepare and teach a reading skills lesson step-by-step and at the rationale behind those steps. This framework works best for teenage and adult learners, especially at basic and intermediate levels.

Contents:
What a reading skills lesson is not!

Before we have a look at how to teach reading skills, let’s discuss a few important concepts, namely oracy and literacy, and extensive and intensive reading. While these things all work together, it is necessary and very helpful for a teacher to have some pedagogical distinctions in mind.

Oracy vs. literacy skills

Let’s start with what a reading skills lesson is not. Having your students read a text aloud with you correcting their pronunciation as they go along is not working with reading skills at all. Reading aloud is not very natural, we only do that when reading to others or making a presentation. Reading aloud and working with tone, pace, etc. is more aligned with an oracy skills lesson rather than a reading skills (literacy) one.

I am using the most basic definitions of literacy and oracy here. Literacy is the ability to read and write, therefore, in the case of a reading skills lesson, we are basically talking about understanding what is read and interpreting it correctly. Whereas oracy is the ability to speak well, especially when it comes to public speaking. In an oracy lesson you would work with pronunciation, voice projection, posture, rhetorical techniques, listening and responding accordingly, etc. In my experience, what I would call an oracy lesson was when I had to help students prepare for presentations and meetings.

It is not productive to work with oracy skills at the same time you are working with reading skills. If you ask your students to read aloud, they will be worried about pronunciation and intonation rather than about comprehending the text – which is the actual purpose of a reading skills lesson. Besides, what will most likely happen if you ask your students to read aloud is that while one student reads, the others will get bored and will be internally judging their peer’s pronunciation.

Tip 1: In my experience in Brazil, some students, especially older ones, are used to reading aloud in class whenever there is a text to be read. If that happens in your context too, make sure to explain to them why you won’t be doing that and the difference between oracy and reading skills. 

Tip 2: You can use the same text to work with both literacy and oracy skills, start with literacy though. It is pointless to work on presenting or discussing something your students haven’t properly understood. The same text can be used across literacy lessons (reading and writing) and oracy lessons (speaking, presenting, debating). For example, after a reading class, you could work on a text’s genre and use it as a model for a writing skills lesson and then, in an oracy skills lesson, students may present and debate about what they have written.

Extensive vs. intensive reading

Another important distinction to make is between extensive and intensive reading. Extensive reading is the type of reading most people do most often outside the classroom. It refers to reading a variety of texts for pleasure, curiosity or general understanding of topics of interest. Those are usually longer texts (magazine or blog articles, novels, etc.) and they are normally read without much careful attention to detail and language.

That is pretty much the opposite of what we do in the classroom, which is intensive reading: reading shorter texts, usually no more than a page in length, in order to train reading strategies, such as skimming, scanning, using connectives to predict content, guessing meaning of unfamiliar words using clues in the surrounding text, etc. This is close and careful reading, requiring the same text to be read several times. We do this in real life, for instance, when reading something to find the information we need rather than reading for pleasure (e.g. academic students reading an article, patients reading the patient information leaflet, reading a manual, etc.)

Ideally, we should provide students with the opportunity of doing both types of reading as they work best in tandem:

Teachers can train reading strategies in this way [intensive reading] but it is only through more extensive reading that learners can gain substantial practice in operating these strategies more independently on a range of material. (Hedge, p. 202)

Tip 3: I once worked at a school that required learners to read fictional books outside of class (extensive reading) and then make a presentation about what they had read (oracy skills). This type of work might also help students become more interested in reading literature in English and, therefore, potentially increase their interest in anglophone culture, which will in turn facilitate their learning of the language as we tend to learn better when we are more interested in something as that gives us more intrinsic motivation to learn it. If you are working with business students, you could also try to implement more extensive professional reading according to their interests and needs. You can also, of course, let students choose what they will read, which will probably be more enjoyable and interesting for them and therefore help with their language acquisition. This type of activity also helps learners become more autonomous; it’s good training in study skills.

What is a reading skills lesson?

Reading to oneself in silence rather than reading aloud for others is considered a ‘receptive skill’ like listening. Therefore, as with listening, when preparing and teaching a reading lesson, our focus is on developing our learners’ so-called reading sub-skills, that is, reading strategies that lead to comprehension. The main ones you will be working with, especially at lower levels, are skimming (reading quickly to get the general idea) and scanning (reading to find specific information), we can also work with reading for inference, guessing new words through context, etc. 

When we read something in real life, it is usually with a purpose. Unless we are reading literature for pleasure, we read to understand a topic, to learn something, to be informed about current events, etc. We need to emulate that in the classroom by creating interest around the text that students must read. Ask yourself: why would someone read this text in real life? How can I make this topic relevant to my students?

Tip 4: Most ELT textbooks nowadays use texts to introduce language rather than to work with reading skills. We normally need to adapt the activities provided in those materials in order to cater for a receptive skills class, or, if you can and have the time, bring in authentic material or create your own materials.

Besides that, we don’t simply read things randomly in real life. We read within a context (reading the news or a recipe, studying, etc.) So, when you prepare a reading lesson, its objective should be something like this: learners will be better able to skim and scan an article in the context of x (x = news about health, travel information, etc). But how do we do that?

Like with listening, we use a framework that is based on the idea of scaffolding, that is, we provide students with support before tasks and each task increases in difficulty. Typically, a reading lesson is divided into three main parts: pre-reading, while reading, and post-reading.

Pre-reading activities

Pre-reading activities usually comprise the lead-in, with the aim of establishing the context of the reading passage and activating learners’ prior knowledge of that context, which will help them process new information better. Another aim of the lead-in stage is to generate interest in the text to be read, making the class more meaningful. If necessary, you can also include a vocabulary pre-teaching stage. These procedures are the same as in a listening lesson, which you can check here.

While reading activities
Skimming (Reading for gist)

Ideally, your first activity is a skimming one. That is, you will help your students practise the skill of reading quickly to get the gist of a text. Having a general idea first will not only help with subsequent, more detailed tasks (scaffolding), but it is also what we naturally do in real life. We generally automatically skim texts first to check whether they will be interesting to read or if they will likely contain the information we expect to find. 

Tip 5:  In a reading lesson, start with previewing the text, which can be incorporated into the lead-in stage. When we approach a text in real life, we naturally look for clues such as titles, subtitles, headings, subheadings, and pictures to have a first idea about the text. Then, we naturally ask ourselves what the text is really about and whether we should read it or not. These strategies are called surveying and questioning. We can incorporate this in our pre-reading stage and also use it as a while reading activity, linking the two stages. For instance, you can use the article’s title and any pictures that accompany the text to establish the context of the lesson and to elicit and pre-teach vocabulary. You can ask learners to identify if a text concerns national or international matters, if it’s business or academic, where you might find the text (newspapers, magazine, blog, social media, a company’s website, etc.), what the genre of the text is, you can make students consider and discuss the possible purposes of the text, etc.

Here are a few ideas for skimming activities: You can show your learners an article’s title and/or pictures and ask them to make predictions about the content, then ask them to read the text quickly to get the general idea and confirm or correct their predictions. You can remove subheadings and ask your students to place them in the correct paragraphs, ask learners to connect images to paragraphs or to come up with a title or choose the best title for the text or ask them to match paragraphs with summaries.

Scanning (Reading for specific information)

Our second task will usually focus on scanning and should take longer than the first task. Students will have to scan the text to find specific information, such as names, dates, locations, times in a timetable, information about a product (size, price, etc) on a shop’s website, ad, menu, etc.

It is important to remember that we are not dealing with grammar here but with reading skills and comprehension. Therefore, our questions should be comprehension questions rather than grammar questions. 

Here are a few more ideas for scanning activities: ask a series of information questions (what, when, where, etc.), a gap-fill exercise using a summary of the text, multiple choice tasks, true or false, etc.

Tip 6: When you set a true vs. false task, add also the option of ‘not mentioned’ and ask your students to correct the false items. A variation of that activity would be yes/no/it doesn’t say. Doing that will guarantee your students aren’t just guessing. Whenever you correct reading tasks and there is a disagreement, always ask your students to point to where in the text they found the answers.

Reading task 3

If you have time for a third task or if your group is more advanced there are other interesting activities you can use, such as inference tasks and guessing words through context.

Post-reading activities

This stage includes a follow-up activity and the final feedback. The follow-up is intended to make students reflect on what they have read or use it somehow. For example, you can have your students share their opinions about the content of the text and discuss whether the author managed to convince them or you can use a text that was used for reading skills as a model for a short writing activity.

The final feedback is usually a whole-group activity and can be used to work on mistakes you noticed your students making (without naming the students who made them), but also to bring up examples of good language use that you noticed and don’t forget to genuinely congratulate your learners on their efforts.

Tip 7: Should you leave reading for homework? Not at the more basic levels because your students will need more in-person guidance. If you are working with a completely different genre for the first time, it is also better to do that in class. However, leaving reading for homework is OK as long as you set some tasks (and remember you could work with extensive reading as homework as well).

Finally, it is important to make sure that we add variety to our reading classes. We should try to work with as many different genres as possible, with a variety of materials and tasks, using different reading strategies and working with various ways of approaching texts.

References:

Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning Teaching: the Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. 3rd ed. Oxford: Macmillan Education.