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“[g]ood readers become autonomous, able to read outside the classroom and to stay in touch with English through periodicals and books when they leave school. Through the rich culture environment, readers can acąuire a large vocabulary and an implicit command of the limitless language forms, plcasurably and almost effortlessly” (1991:255).

12.3.4.1. The purpose of teaching reading skills

As suggested by Gough (the lecture on Reading Skills: 08.01.1994), it is of paramount importance to realise the difference between teaching reading skills and teaching ‘texts\ Teaching reading skills aims at preparing students to be able to read other texts than the one which is being read in class whereas teaching texts aim at understanding only the text being read in class. By teaching skills, teachers teach abilities that can be applied to other texts and not knowledge of one particular text. What follows naturally, when teachers come to testing reading skills, it is checked whether students can read similar texts efficiently, not whether they have memorised the content of the text that had been read in class.

a)    Teaching a text teachers make surę that students have understood the text. Leamers ask and are asked ąuestions, some parts of a text are translated for better understanding. Texts are taught to memorise content and some structures presented in them.

b)    Teaching reading skills - students are not supposed to understand one text but teachers enable leamers to understand other texts. Teachers try to teach how to approach the other texts outside the classroom as well as teach skills which can be transferred, applied later on onto other texts hence this is aimed not at teaching knowledge but skill.

c)    Efficiency. Efficiency means balancing the effort that is exercised with the results achieved. When we read in our Llit is done efficiently - we use only the effort needed to understand what we want to understand. This has two implications for the classroom:

- speed^* it is important to read well and ąuickly enough, students may not comprehend the passages as well as native speakers do but they try to get at that,

—    purpose - readers must know why they are reading and what they want to get from the text. The leamer must know what s/he is doing with the text before s/he reads it. Teachers need to encourage speed and clarity of purpose for reading for the simple reason that one does not know how long it will take unless they know what they are to do with the reading passage.

d) Transfer of skills - readers usually have good reading skills in their LI, but have been discouraged from using them in foreign languages. Part of the teacher’s job is to make students feel confident with written text, and their ability to transfer useful skills from the mother tongue. Students should be encouraged to look for what they do understand, rather than emphasise what they do not understand. Teachers ought to encourage /help students to feel that they can understand things by making them confident with the reading through the transfer of skills used to cope with texts in their native language. By encouraging students to look at what they do understand, they are madę morę independent and leamer autonomy is developed.

12.3.5. Global approach to reading

Until recently, claims Grellet (1981:6-7), “...materials have concentrated on the sentence and units smaller than a sentence”. But, for efficient reading, readers need to understand the structure of larger units such as a paragraph or the whole text. If a text is studied as though it were a series of independent units, it can result in:

—    students becoming dependent on understanding every single sentence in the text, even if this may not benecessary for the completion of the reading task; this might lead to students reading all texts at the same speed,

—    students becoming reluctant to infer the meaning of sentences and paragraphs from the surrounding context.

It is therefore essential to start with global understanding and develop towards detailed understanding. As students read with greater fluency and get the gist of the text morę easily, teachers can proceed to work towards “a deeper and morę detailed understanding of the text. Similarly, when constructing reading comprehension exercises[...], it

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