COMPULSORY TASK #1: Exploring my reading experience: learner and teacher

When I was at high school reading adapted short books was basically part of the evaluation. Students were required to read them in order to have a final quiz where they would be asked about the content. Back then I imagined they did it because they wanted to check how good we were in reading comprehension and in producing such answers. Of course, given the fact that this was not a voluntary task, most people did not get to finish the book or even get started. They found the task to be quite boring and meaningless.

Personally, I did not find the activity to be that boring, quite the opposite. I realised that I understood more words and expressions than I expected, and that I learned loads of vocabulary. Perhaps the challenging part was that of producing my own answers in the quiz.

Now, as a teacher, I do not use any adapted novels. I incorporate the reading competence into class by having an activity behind. That is, if my students are about to face a reading activity, there must be a meaningful task waiting for them after that. For instance, let’s take a class of 8-9-year-old students. Imagine that they are reading something on tigers. In this reading they have information such as, where they live, what qualities they have (fast, dangerous…), physical appearance (big tail, sharp teeth…), and what they feed from.

If the reading has a catchy title or a nice picture, I tend to introduce first the topic by asking them what they can see in the picture or what the story could be about just by reading the title. We will try to read paragraph by paragraph and I will make them questions just to check if they followed without problems. Meanwhile they should have underlined those words new for them, which will be later explained.

The idea is that the reading leads to the main task, which could be a mini project on their favourite animal. They should write about one animal they like and should include, more or less, the content they have seen in the previous reading. Obviously, the task must be realistic, meaning that we should plan an activity which can be fulfilled by a 9-year-old student without big difficulties. As an alternative, we could have our students presenting their project to the rest of the class, once they have produced the text where they expose their information.

Honestly, I have never thought of reading comprehension being an innovative strategy for teaching EFL. However, I do think that it is a competence that must be trained no matter what. There is a big difference reading by pleasure and reading with a language purpose. I guess the challenge is to conceal them both in the same objective.