Monday, November 24, 2008

Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language


After I trasferred to the Noeun High School, teacing reading has been my major concern in my class. Aactually, I feel like I am teaching about reading one paragraph not about reading the whole chapters. I want my students to enjoy reading English books ourside the classroom. This is my ultimate goal. In a classroom setting, how can we motivate students to apply metaconitive skills to comprehend what the write talks about. GTM is not enough.(And I doubt the effectivenee of that method). I want my students to think and analyzise the paragraph or books while they are reading.

Englsih Teachers, share some practical ideas with me.


I am thinking of buying "Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language" by Nuttall, Christine. Anyone interested in buying the book?

5 comments:

kelcey said...

That's a really difficult question. Since I taught low achieving studuents, my intereset was to make the class more exciting and to give them motivations, not just for English but for life itself. But as I'll move to a new school next year, I think I should be prepared for teaching reading. I'm just thinking about teaching some reading strategies like finding main ideas, skimming, scanning and so on. And I want to teach them how to express their opinions. Not easy....

Eunha said...

You are a good teacher, I think. Actually, it's my struggle, too. In my case, the more we know, the better we can understand. we can easily understand the material we have interested in. So we should think more and read more. It dosen't matter whether the book is written in Korean, or English. Read as much as possible.It's my reading stratedy.

Nicole said...

Hi Lynn,
I noticed that you commented on the inability of posting photos and music in the comments. I totally agree with you about that shortcoming. I wish that there were more functions but when choosing a blog host, I decided having the Korean/English function for problem solving and that the easy creation process was more important. Personally, I like Wordpress as a blog host for its' varied functions.
Anyways, your blog looks great so you are making do with what you have...very impressive.

Iris said...

I used to stick to GTM, but these days, I think that I have to change the way teach reading. For vocabulary, I let them try to guess the meaning of some words before reading. Because my students' ability is not that good, I told them the meaning in Korean, then let them choose the word which has that meaning. And for comprehension check up, I used not the paper worksheet but white board like Golden Bell Quiz. When I let them do it in groups, they really enjoyed it. I think the key is how to draw their attention, interest and motivation.

Song Kyeongyeob said...

Hi, Lynn....

I think most English teachers are concerned about teaching reading in a more interesting and effective way. I have bought some books about teaching reading, but they are not helpful for my class. I couldn't adapt any skill in the books to my class.
But I am sure you will be able to make use of the book well.