A lot of us people want to learn a language – I teach English and keep learning it! – and we have to practice all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For me and many of us listening may be the most difficult skill to acquire, but with practice you do improve a lot, believe me. Anyway, today I would like to tell you especially about reading. Reading books, articles, websites. And also believe me, it’s a great skill to practice. Stephen Krashen stated that by reading books you can learn a great deal of a second or foreign language, and I can assure you it’s thus. I have no big problems to read any text in English: fiction, non-fiction … except Joseph Conrad’s books perhaps, for they show to be extremely difficult for me to understand – even I had an Irish friend, Connor by name, who told me also that for him it was tough to understand, and he said that he read like one page per day, of his books. It’s curious, Conrad was Polish by birt...
One day teacher A said to teacher B, “Before a Reading activity of a text you have previously handed out to your students, I believe it’s sound to create certain eagerness to read it. I mean, make a pre-reading, a lead-in: ask them questions whose answers will appear in the text; ask your teens about the gist or details about the topic. You, read it before. It’ll be less bore than if just reading a printed text. Spur their curiosity, their thirst to read it.” Photo from www iml granada com
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