Like everything in life,
too much of a good thing can turn out to be a bad thing. The same principle
applies to reading for learning a language or honing your skills in your first
language.
My point is that there is
too much of intensive reading in course books but not enough extensive reading.
Intensive reading can help
focus on grammar issues and is useful when the teacher needs to assign a number
of words which will be learnt and tested and hopefully added to the learner’s
active or passive vocabulary. It is also useful when the teacher tries to
introduce the learner to the subtleties of different styles of writing.
However, if intensive
reading is not complemented by extensive reading – to the extent that the level
of the students allows – it makes teaching and learning dry, unimaginative and,
what is more to the point, slows down progress in and appreciation of the
language taught.
A structure or a word that
has been presented in a short text must occur in different contexts and
registers before it is safely stored in the learner’s long-term memory. The
teacher can achieve this by exposing the students to different kinds of reading
material.
The choice of the material
and the goals that will be set at the end of the reading activity depends on
the students’ level and interests but also on the teacher’s expectations each
time s/he engages the students in reading.
Personally, I use all
kinds of reading material – songs, poems, readers, extracts from novels and
newspaper and magazine articles on a multitude of topics.
I know my students quite
well so I choose books or topics that will stimulate and maintain their
interest. I sometimes stretch the students by giving them a text that is
challenging for their level of English but my expectations are lowered
accordingly.
I will illustrate with an
example.
One of my favourite novels is School
for Love by Olivia Manning. There is a part at the beginning of the book
where the orphan boy Felix first meets the only relative left after his
parents’ loss, Miss Bohun, who evidently tries to take advantage of him though
he is too young to realise, but the reader does. The boy seems to instantly
forge a link with the cat left there by an army officer and his wife before
they left for England.
I gave this extract https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KSVJ2UVA5S3hVMWM/view?usp=sharing to B1-
level students asking them general questions which elicit their understanding
of the atmosphere and the relationships between the people.
Some of the questions I
ask are:
·
Who is
the boy? (someone who has lost his parents)
·
Who is
the woman? (a relative who is offering accommodation but not for nothing)
·
Whose cat
is it? (Miss Bohun’s – left behind by an English couple)
·
Do you
think Miss Bohun buys the cat food in the Old City? (too mean for that kind of
thing)
·
Is it fair
for Felix to share expenses with Miss Bohun?
·
How do we
know she is trying to exploit him? (She put down Telephone and Kerosene twice)
You could add questions to
this list depending on your students and their response to literature.
After I had explained a
few words I picked out as more important for my students and for understanding
the extract, I asked them to imagine they were Felix and write a letter to a
friend so as to explain how their circumstances have changed after the loss of
the parents and how they feel about Miss Bohun and the cat.
Each student demonstrated
a different approach to the task, which made the activity all the more
rewarding.
Now for more advanced
students I created a word-formation exercise and kept the number of questions
down as you can see in the document below:
