The Importance Of Reading In The Classroom

Introduction:

Reading is beneficial in acquiring language, according to Harmer, “ The more you read, the better you get at it” (Harmmer, 2007). This means reading is a significant skill that students should practice in daily life because it will support them in being more intelligent by having a lot of input, improve their language and construct their vocabulary as well as it will help them in their careers (Harmmer, 2007). Teachers should consider reading as an important skill and try to scaffold students in simple and fun way to make students feel interested to learn. In this paper I am going to analyze my MST`s reading lesson that I observed during my teaching practice to see what worked with her students and what did not work as well

For example, use a KWL chart before reading and ask students to write what they know about the topic in the first column and then what they want to learn. This strategy in an efficient way for teachers because it supports them find out what students know before reading (Fogarty, 2007). For activating schema also I suggest to ask students to write something quickly about the topic, to measure their background knowledge about the topic and try to support them make connections between their background knowledge and their personal experience and then they can share information with their colleagues and learn from each other, so students will have input to understand the text better (Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st century, 2006). As I said visuals are very important for visual learners to learn. Indeed, I suggest to use a short video that displays something relates to the topic because students will enjoy watching it and at the same time, they will obtain some input that can scaffold them during while reading stage, according to Wright “Many media and many styles of visual presentation are useful to the language learner. Students like it because video presentations are interesting, challenging, and stimulating to watch” (ÇAKIR, 2006). In fact, I propose to use different strategies such as words organizer and word

Prediction from pictures or words is one useful strategy, so I recommend to use because it will enhance students thinking. For example, she might ask students to predict what they are going to read in the text using the title and the illustration and then students read the text and check their predictions if they were correct or not. Book covers, photographs give learners the idea of what they are going to read, in fact their brain starts predicting what they are going to read (Harmmer, 2007). Skimming which means to read quickly is also a useful strategy because it helps students to get the gist of a text (Scrivener, 2005). I think my teacher should use this strategy before asking students to read because it helps students to get the main ideas about the text, it helps students to require information that they want and to get a general sense of a topic. I propose to ask students skim the text first in thirty seconds and then asks them questions about what they read or what they understood from reading the headings and the authors` points of view (S,