Reading Comprehension in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

1. Introduction
3. Approaches in reading in EFL classrooms
4. The Strategies in Reading in EFL
5. Differences between reading skills and reading strategies
6. Hints to develop reading skills
7. Reading Strategies
8. Background knowledge
9. Predicting
10. Self-monitoring and self-correcting
11. Identifying main ideas and summarizing
12. Making inferences and questioning
13. Procedural prompts
14. K-W-L
15. Intra act procedure
16. W's and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why and How)
17. Types of Reading
18. Biblography

Introduction

There are massive amounts of research literature available discussing the different reading strategies which suggests that reading comprehension is strengthened when students work methodically and systematically to improve their reading skills. In order to become good readers students must have the ability to apply different strategies in order to build meaning for themselves and as teachers, we need to teach students how to think about these strategies as they read.

So as to have students motivated teachers need to build a variety of experiences relevant to the topic of study and use a variety of materials in their classrooms to better accommodate the individual student needs, interests, and abilities (Shelley, 1997). Students who do not have a strong foundation in basic decoding and comprehension skills become struggling readers. Remedial readers never see reading as something they could do — it was something to be avoided (Collins, 1997). Their poor reading ability denies them access to the content of papers they have to study. Thus, reading will be viewed as an activity where we construct meaning for ourselves, it is an active, cognitive and affective process that involves complex thinking.

Furthermore, the capability of being able to comprehend what has been read is a requirement for success in all aspects of learning including beyond the educational years. Thus, in order to reach a qualified identity in their fields students should learn to build English language. Also students need to research about lots of subjects in English. While doing this, they have to read in English since most of the sources are written in that language, just because of this, the university students need to improve their reading abilities.

Reading is a systematic process for the students to learn, so they face different problems when reading in English. However, the problems are very different from each other and also the problems vary according to different departments, classrooms, courses and so on. To cope with these difficulties students need to make connections between prior knowledge and new information assisting the construction of meaning and comprehension. This is to ensure that the students build confidence and interest about reading. A pre-requisite to improve the performance of the reader is assisting and motivating students. Educators want students to read information, make critical decisions about it, form their own opinions and respond intelligently (D"Archangelo, 2002).

Good readers are extremely active as they read, as is apparent whenever excellent adult readers are asked to think aloud as they go through text" (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the upcoming text, read selectively what they already know, note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met, and revise their prior knowledge.

Reading

Reading is one of the important skills of a foreign language that is aimed to be taught to students in EFL courses. Also it is not an easy course to comprehend for the foreign language students because reading is a complex process. The first definition of the reading is from Goodman (1988).It claims that reading is interaction between writer and the reader.

Reading is a receptive language process. It is a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to thought.