To begin, I think it is necessary to examine the role of the teacher in a reading class. As Eskey (1983:3) points out, basically students learn to read by reading. Thus, ``the point of the reading class must be reading – not reinforcement of oral skills, not grammatical or discourse analysis, and not the acquisition of new vocabluary.`` Essentially, the reading teacher needs to provide students with the opportunity to read. As Nuttall maintains (1982:22), the reading teacher has two main tasks: first, to provide suitable texts, and second, to develop activities that will focus the students` attention on the text.
Suitable text is interesting to the students and at the appropriate level of difficulty. The teachers try to determine whether or not students have the needed cultural and world background knowledge to correctly interpret the text. First of all, in selecting a text, the teacher needs to determine what cultural background information is contained in the text and to what extent the cultural assumptions in the text differ from those of the students. And secondly, the teacher needs to determine to what extent the cultural information is representative of the society being described.
In addition to selecting texts, reading teachers need to provide students with activities that will help them focus on the text and on the cultural assumptions in it (McKay :11).
Following the admonitions of Earl Stevick (1975:72), we utilize a paradigm of L2 classroom activity which minimizes teacher intervention, forcing the students to use and develop their new language skills. Within this paradigm Clarke and Silberstein (1987:236) point three roles for the teacher: the teacher as teacher, the teacher as participant, and the teacher as facilitator.
The teacher as teacher is necessary only when the class is attempting to resolve a language problem, for it is only in this situation that the teacher is automatically presumed to possess more knowledge than the students. This role can be minimized if the students` attack strategies and reading skills have been effectively developed. If the task is realistic, and if the students have learned to adjust their reading strategies according to the task, there should be little need for teacher intervention.
The teacher is a participant in activities in which the knowledge and opinions of all persons in the class are of equal weight. Such activities would include discussions arising from reading activities, forming judgements about ideas encountered in readings, and activities which emphasize learning about a subject through the medium of the L2.
The teacher is a facilitator when creating an environment in which learning take place, where linguistic expertise is required only in the event of communication breakdown. Often assignments can be discussed and corrected without teacher participation. Individualized assignments or small group sessions also require little direct teacher intervention.
This paradigm of the L2 classroom has two important advantages. First, it puts teachers in their place, emphasizing the individuality of students and reducing the compulsion we sometimes feel to control classroom activity. This relieves us of feelings of guilt and frustration occasioned by unsuccessful attempts at coercing the students to keep together. Secondly, it puts the responsibility for learning squarely on the shoulders of the students, which is where it belongs.
Eskey (1983:4) claims that the reading teacher has a crusial role to play in helping students to read. A good teacher can make a critical difference in performing a number of significant functions.
It is, first of all, the teacher who must create the world of reading in a particular class. It is the teacher who must stimulate interest in reading, who must help students to see that reading can be of real value of them. This means relating reading to the interest of the students, to what they are thinking and talking about and therefore know enough about to relate the content of their reading to. Good reading assigments should grow naturally out of the interests and concerns of a class or, whenever possible, the interests and concerns of individual students.
Good reading assignment should also, of course, fall within the students` range of proficiency. Choosing just the right materials thus becomes all-important, and it is, ideally, the teacher who must choose, or edit, or modify, or even, in some circumstances, create appropriate materials for students with varied needs and purposes to read in challenging but not overwhelming amounts and in a sequence of increasing difficulty which will lead to improvement, but not to frustration. Bringing students and appropriate materials together is a very large part of the reading teacher`s job.
What can the language teacher do to alleviate the frustration that some students experience trying to gain meaning from a reading? Chastian (1988:229-230) suggest that the first step is to determine the number of students who feel incapable of reading for meaning and/or of completing the postreading activities successfully. If many students are frustrated, the teacher should examine the materials that he is expecting the students to read. Perhaps the linguistic complexity is beyond their level of preparation or the reading deals with unfamiliar subject matter. Another possibility is that the students may have little or no interest in the materials they are asked to read. In other words, the teacher needs to choose more suitable readings or seek to prepare the students more adequately.
What is more, the teacher should consider the adequacy of the prereading activities. Often the failure of a large portion of the class to understand the reading can be traced to the teacher`s failures in preparing them. He should also consider the skills he has expected the students to exhibit during those acivities. His unjustified expectations will convince the students that they are not doing well and discourage them from expending maximum effort in the future.
Loew (1984:301-303) offers practical advice for teaching reading skills. He urges language teachers to encourage students to guess, to tolerate ambiguity, to link ideas, to paraphrase, and to summarize so that they stop dwelling on isolated words often not vital to comprehension. They can also help students by discussing the title, theme, and cultural background before reading. During the course they should cultivate positive attitudes toward reading and the students` ability to read. Prior to the first reading assigment they should teach students how to skim, find the main idea, develop and modify their hypotheses, and correct and learn from errors. They should give them practice using the dictionary, taking notes, underlining, skimming, and rereading. And before making any reading assignment, they should be sure that the reading task is clear to the students.
Tierney and Pearson (1985:14-17 ) make the following recommendations to language teachers :
Be sure to find out students` prior knowledge of a topic or text genre before beginning to read.
Encourage rereading.
Give students more opportunities to evaluate their own ideas, to consider others` views, and to recognise how their own past experiences and reasons for reading influence what they understand.
Spend more time helping students develop strategies for reading to understand and to accomplish various tasks and assignments.
Help students develop story maps ( a time line or flow chart of key events ) for stories before they read.
Encourage students to consider why and to whom an author is writing.
Develop links between what students read and what they write.
Revive the small discussion group as away to accomplish all these goals.
Grellet (1981:14-24) discusses useful reading practice techniques. One is to have students work their way through comprehension problems by inferring the meaning through word formation and context. They should also learn to pick out the important words that form the core of each sentence, and they need to be aware of the use of referent and connecting words to establish relationships in and among sentences and paragraphs. Another is to practice timed readings to improve reading speed. A third is to learn to use scanning and skimming techniques to preview reading material, predict what the selection is about, and develop expectations about the content of the text.
Krashen and Terrell (1983:131-142) outline the following communicative reading strategy :
Read for meaning.
Don`t look up every word.
Predict meaning.
Use context.
According to Grabe (1986:44-45) the role of the teacher is to facilitate reading, raise consciousness, build confidence, ansure continuity and systematicity, show involvement, and demand performance.
Urr (1996:149) sums it up and gives useful recommendations for the teachers to improve reading skills.
Make sure your students get a lot of successful reading experience: through encouraging them to choose their own simplified readers, for example, and giving them time to read them.
Make sure that most vocabulary in reading is familiar to your students, and words that are unknown can be easily guessed or safely ignored.
Give interesting tasks before asking learners to read, so that they have a clear purpose and motivating challenge. Our use texts that are interesting enough to provide their own motivation.
Make sure that the tasks encourage selective, intelligent reading for the main meaning, and do not just test understanding of trivial details.
Allow, and even encourage, students to manage without understanding every word: by use of scanning tasks, for example, that require them to focus on limited items of information.
Provide as wide a variety of texts and tasks as you can, to give learners practice in different kinds of reading.
As we can see, the teacher has a crucial role to play in helping students to read. We, as reading teachers, should help them not only increase their comprehension, but also gain a better understanding of cultural assumptions.
Chastian, K. (1988) Developing Second - Language Skills. Theory and Practice. Hacourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers.
Clarke, M.A, Silberstein, S. (1977) `Toward a realization of psycholinguistic principles in ESL reading class`. Language Learning, 21.1.,135-154, 238-239.
Eskey, E.D. (1983) `Learning to read versus Reading to Learn: Resolving the Instructional Paradox` in Selected Articles from English Teaching Forum 1979-1983.
Grabe, W. (1986) `The Transition from Theory to Practice in Teaching Reading` in Dubin, F., Eskey, D., (eds) Teaching Second Language Reading for Academic Purposes, Addison Weskey Publishing Company.
Grellet, F. (1981) Developing Reading Skills, A practical guide to reading comprehension exercises. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Krashen, S.D., Terrell, T.D. (1983) The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom, The Alemany Press, Hayward, California.
Loew, H.Z. (1984) `Developing Strategic Reading Skills.` .` Foreign Language Annals, 17., 301-303.
McKay, S.(1987) `Cultural Knowledge and the Teaching of Reading.` in Selected Articles from English Teaching Forum 1984-1988.
Nuttall, C. (1982) Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Heinemann, Oxford.
Sterick, E.W. (1975) `One simple visual aid: A psychodynamic view.` Language Learning, 25., 63-72.
Tierney, R.J., Pearson, P.D. (1985) `New Priorities for Teaching Reading.` Learning, 13., 14-17.
Ur, P. (1996) A course in Language Teaching. Practice and Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.