Teaching Reading

Many people think  that reading means that you start reading and stop  every now and then when  to look  every unknown word up in the dictionary.  Օf course you may dact so if youwant to enrich your active vocabulary  but if you intend to use reading for the information you should move past the idea of looking up all the new words.  According to some linguists' opinion it means that you use bottom – up strategy , instead you should use top- down strategy. The thing is that it will be more effective to help students use the method they use when reading a book in their native language not only in readind a book in the native language but also in foreign language language. Reading is an important means of learning a foreign language as while doing it you get to know many new ways of language usage. By reading variety of materials pupils obtain not only vocabulary but also get to learn the ways in which certain language elements- let’s say grammar, sentence structure… are used to work together. In my teaching practice I usually use a few strategies to gain success in teaching reading process. They are; previewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, check comprehension … We read texts on the Internet, e- books which are both interesting and informative. Also we have access to Websites and that naturally helps us expose culture in all its display. First I figure out the purpose of reading. If we have prior knowledge about the subject matter of the book, which we can guess from reviewing the title, or from the chapter heading to get the sense of content of the  book. In this way we use the prior information  as clues to guess the meaning of a new word. Also it useful  to pay attention to the setting of every book, where you can faintly guess what lies ahead. Secondly, we read those parts of the text that are relevant to our language knowledge and leave out or  those which are more difficult to understand.  This selectivity helps us to focus on the important items. Sometimes I tell them to read without my interference, leaving them alone as reading is an interactive process so I let them use their readind skill,  and use proper strategies to understand the plot. As they are expected to face variety of situations while reading they should learn by and by how to deal with them in order to read more effectively and quickly. In this way we have read articles on Stonehenge, true friendship, Man overboard, The Seagull, The Norwegian Wood, The Phantom of the Theatre and so on.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     Shushan Azatyan