Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Study and reference skills
So far the techniques discussed have related principally to
developing the intensive reading skills. It sometimes happens
however that pupils learning English as a foreign language
need to develop study and reference skills in English. These
are skills which they ought of course to have developed in
their mother tongue first of all, but for most non-Western
Europeans the conventions may be quite different and
deliberate teaching of the English conventions may have to
be undertaken. Even such fundamental skills as those of
using an alphabetical sequence may have to be taught, for
example to pupils who are literate in Chinese. Exercises
involving thorough familiarisation with the sequence of
letters in the English alphabet, and with the arrangement of
words in sequences which depend on alphabetic order are
basic to quick and easy use of dictionaries, encyclopaedias
and other reference works.
Pupils may also, of course, have to develop study skills of
the kind required for the SQ3R technique mentioned above.
This is where attention given to skimming, reading for
specific points of information and practice in formulating
pertinent questions pays off. But it will be necessary to set
specific assignments for this kind of work. The skills don’t
just spring into existence of themselves, they have to be
worked for. Where the EFL teacher has a clear idea of the
kinds of content that his pupils will have to study—
sometimes the English teaching marches alongside technical
or vocational instruction of some kind—then it is clearly of
the greatest importance that the English teacher and the
teacher of the subject matter that is being studied through
English should get together to devise assignments which will
be valuable both in terms of the content and of the language
skills the pupil may acquire from them. This kind of co-
operation is all too rare, but in the best interests of the pupils
departmental and subject boundaries must be crossed.

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Reading
110