Teaching Reading

Reading was not something the average person did until a few hundred years ago, but now, with the wide availability of public education, teaching reading has become a big part of what teachers do. Reading requires some specific skills and teaching reading can help develop these skills. But teaching reading is not as simple as just making printed texts available to students.

It was though, until recently, that all teaching reading required was drilling in the reading of text. It was supposed that since children acquire spoken language without any instruction, just by being exposed to spoken language that this is what teaching reading required, exposing the child to enough written material so that they would develop the necessary reading skill on their own as a natural course of events. But recent studies indicate that teaching reading requires much more than this because children do not develop reading skills the same way that they develop speaking skills. Reading is about comprehension so teaching reading must be about helping students develop and expand their comprehension skills too.

And as this usually will not happen on its own, teaching reading must focus on helping students understand use some basic strategies for reading. In order to be successful readers, students need decoding skills, thinking skills and vocabulary acquisition. If teaching reading can help a student develop and enhance these skills, then teaching reading will have done its job and the student will be a successful reader.

Teaching reading needs to concentrate on phonetics so that students can decode words that are unknown to them. This is the only way that teaching reading will help students acquire vocabulary which is critical for successful reading. In fact, vocabulary is so important that if a student can somehow acquire enough vocabulary, even without phonics, he can be a successful reader. Teaching reading by using phonics just makes the whole process so much easier and empowers the student to acquire more vocabulary on their own. Teaching thinking skill is also important in the art of teaching reading.

Students need to be able to think logically and correctly about what they are reading in order to read with comprehension. Teaching reading needs to instruct the students in the skills of summarizing, predicting and using imagery as they read. this method of teaching reading will allow for greater comprehension which after all, is the goal of reading. A revolution is taking place in the art of teaching reading. Teaching reading is becoming a much more defined and monitored act and this is good for teaching reading and for the students.

< Back To Reading Previous