efficient reading strategies

One of the major problems which can guide the teacher in helping students discover efficient reading strategies is the foreign language reader's instinct to process the written text word by word. This linear processing of texts has been called tunnel vision by Smith. It is probably adopted because of the reader's anxiety when confronted by a text in another language. Possible solutions to this problem are to help the reader dominate the text by giving him/her a wider perspective on the reading material and by encouraging self-confidence to replace fear.

• Write the title of the text to be read on the board.
• Ask the students to brainstorm words which may appear in the text.
• Ask one student to predict an outline of the text using the words on the board.
• The students read the text in a given time to see how far their prediction fits the text.
• Ask one student how far the prediction was correct/incorrect.
• Ask him/her to say what the text was about.

Promote reflexion through general questions on how students read the text:

• Did the prediction help/hinder your understanding of the reading?
• Did you refer to any photos on the page to help you understand the text?
• Did you refer back to the title during your reading?
• Did you guess any words?
• Did you feel the need to consult a dictionary?
• For which words?
• Can you guess their meaning now?
• Are they essential to understanding the text?

Following the hypothesis that if you have a framework for understanding text structure the meaning can be more easily dominated, we suggest the following exercise:

Prepare four short passages: a narration, a description, a discussion and an informative text. (see (5) for examples). Discuss the schema of each one: its structure, verb tenses, connectors and lexis.

It should become apparent that many texts can be fitted into one of these schema after a quick scan. Hereafter, each time the class reads a text, categorise it through a brief discussion into one of the above schema. Ask questions after the reading about whether this pre-categorisation helped students or not to read the text with more ease. These question can be added to those already mentioned in part a. above.

To encourage readers to speed up their reading process the following exercise was found useful if repeated two or three times during the year.

• Get the students to start copying out a text placing a stroke(/) after each chunk copied.
• After an interval all students stop copying and divide the number of words by the number of strokes. This calculation will give the average number of words read at each glance or `fixation'. (see 7)
• The speeding up process can be made evident if excerpts fromof long fixation passages are read out by the teacher from the students' work.
• One variation is to do the same exercise making sure everyone has read to the same place in the text. Students then answer multiple-choice questions on the text, from memory, to check comprehension. Speed and Comprehension can thus be compared: similar comprehension le vels at higher speed levels can be pointed out as beneficial to those who read more words per fixation since they show equal understanding of the text in less time. This may encourage`slower' readers to expand their fixations.