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First of all, let us think why should we teach reading? In my opinion, there are a lot of reasons. One of the main is that many of our students want to be able to read texts in English. Some of them need that for work, another – for study purposes or just for satisfaction. Therefore, we should find a way to make reading easier for them. Besides, any contact with English helps students to understand it better and memorize much more information. Reading texts also useful in studying writing, as it provides a model, what we want them to do. Also, reading is helpful in studying English in general: students may pick up punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, idioms and collocations. Lastly, it can be very interesting and entertaining and that provides success in studying. Then we should consider what kind of reading should students do? The main question here is should be the texts “authentic” or not. That happens because people are worried if “authentic” materials will be too complicated for understanding or that adapted materials could be too easy, non-natural and untypical. Thereby, as teachers, we must find a balance between probable difficulties of real English and the abilities and interests of our students. To solve this problem, we may take into consideration their level and use appropriate materials for them. For example, such authentic written materials as menus and timetables can be understandable even by the beginner students. Usually our groups consist of students with different levels, abilities and knowledge, so we may use a great variety of different types of materials: letters, play extracts, instructions, articles, stories etc. Thus, we may use texts and materials which are not written especially for some level of our students but correspond to the use of real daily life and like real English as much as possible. I suppose there are two main reading skills we should help students to acquire: scan texts and skim them. Scanning skill assists to get a particular piece of information we are looking for. In this case students do not need to read the whole text, they just able to look through it and find the relevant information. The ability to skim the text helps to get the general idea of what it is about. They will not bog down in the specifics in this case. That is why, I believe, one of the main teachers aim is to show the students the advantages and opportunities of skimming and scanning. Also, students may read for different purposes: for pleasure or with the aim to have full comprehension of the text. When reading for detailed comprehension we expect students to be fully concentrated. And while reading for pleasure, we still would like students to acquire as much new language as possible staying completely engaged in process. That leads us to the several basic principles of reading. First of all – it is very active occupation. Students must be involved in understanding the meaning of words, phrases and the meaning of the whole text. To get what was created by the author. According to the whole EFL teaching we have the second basic principle – students should enjoy this activity and be engaged. The other way, if they don’t like it, they will not get any benefits from the activity. The third principle is that students should be allowed to express their own opinion and feelings about the topics they have read. That provokes personal engagement with the sense and the language of the texts. The fourth principle is that we should match the tasks to the topics. We can spoil even the most interesting topic asking silly and boring questions after reading. Or we can involve students in even more careful work with the text using funny and challenging tasks. And the last principle is that we should use full potential of reading, we can use it for discussions, interesting class sequences. So later, we are able to use new language to Study and then Activation. In conclusion I would like to summarize, that reading is vitally important for learning English. It gives an opportunity to get the new words, idioms, collocations, grammar structures and provides a model for speaking and writing.
