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Teacher Development Articles Helping students to move from intensive to extensive reading Bill Bowler, editor of the Dominoes series of graded readers, gives tips on now you can help your students progress to 'extensive' reading.Most teachers agree that reading regularly both inside and outside the classroom improves students' understanding of English, In class, teachers usually set short texts and ask students to read closely for meaning. In this type of 'intensive' reading, we frequently want learners to understand most of the text that they are studying and our questions are quite detailed. Outside class, we often give learners longer texts to study - sometimes even whole books - and we ask students to read for general understanding. This kind of 'extensive' reading aims for a global comprehension of the text, and our questions are less focused on detail. Extensive reading is excellent for expanding students' vocabulary and increasing their confidence in English. Reading is after all the 'comfortable' receptive skill. With a listening text, the words seem to rush by the student's ear too fast to catch, With a reading text, however, the student can easily read a sentence again if he or she didn't understand it the first time. Slower learners can read more slowly, and faster learners can read faster. When you set extensive reading as homework, you allow students to go at their own pace, and you encourage learner independence too. Of course, with mid to low-level classes we should be careful. An 'authentic text' -from a magazine designed for native speakers to read ----- may work In class where the teacher can help students with problems of understanding, For home reading, however, simplified or 'graded' texts are best, since they avoid problematic language and allow the learner to read smoothly and to enjoy the reading process. Some graded readers series give simple explanations or 'glosses' for more difficult words. These help weaker learners to read without needing constantly to go to a dictionary to look up new words. One thing that helps to start students reading extensively is to do a prediction activity in class to build up their motivation to read a particular story. You can sometimes use the cover of a book, or a few 'before reading' questions as a starting point to make learners curious about the story. Students who are good at reading always make predictions about what will happen in a story before they read it, and they change their predictions as the story progresses. To help all students acquire this good habit, it is very useful to do a prediction activity at the start of every new chapter. These days many learners don't have a very long attention span for reading. For this reason it is best to ask students to read only one chapter of a story for homework at a time, and to have a follow-up class where the students discuss the previous chapter and solve some puzzles involving the new words in that chapter. This helps to change 'receptive' vocabulary that learners can recognize into 'active' vocabulary that learners can use. These 'reading check' and 'word work' classes really support extensive reading done outside class, especially in the early stages, if a student doesn't understand chapter 1, chapter 2 will be more difficult for them to follow. Sharing the knowledge of stronger classmates definitely helps weaker learners to follow the storyline. Another good idea is to set a clear reading task each time - a task which makes learners realize that they needn't understand every single word as long as they can understand what has happened in that chapter. If you ask students; in an unfocused way: 'What happened In chapter 1?', stronger learners will retell the whole chapter in as much detail as they can. Weaker learners can't do this, and may fee! demotivated. However, if you set a more focused task, like 'Mark these 10 sentences about chapter 1 True or False' even weaker learners will be able to do it - guessing some answers perhaps. In fact, this type of task tests students' understanding, and also supports it. Those ten sentences, once corrected, give weaker learners a simple summary of key points in the chapter and help them go on to the next chapter with a better idea of the story so far. I hope my suggestions - using graded readers with glosses, doing prediction activities before reading, getting students to read chapter-by-chapter, setting focused tasks, and having after chapter 'reading check' and 'word work' classes -encourage more teachers to help their students progress from intensive reading in class to extensive reading outside class. Author: Bill Bowler Bill Bowler is an experienced ELT teacher and teacher trainer who has taught in several countries around the world. He is co-author of several courses for Oxford University Press, including the topic-based coursebooks Happy Earth and Network , the New Headway Pronunciation Course , and Literature in the Making Headway series. He is the author of The Butler Did It - a book of short original comedy sketches in the Oxford Bookworms Play scripts series. With Sue Parminter Bill is also a Series Editor and has written adaptations for the Oxford University Press Dominoes series, a collection of full-colour readers with integrated activities. Source Oxford Teacher's Club - http://www.oup.com/elt/teachersclub/adults/
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