Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Reading
94
practical advice on the matter of reading quickly will be
found in E.Fry, Teaching Faster Reading.)
It should be the concern of every teacher to foster
increased general reading speed in pupils. Fluent silent
reading is specially necessary for anyone who proposes to
venture on to any kind of higher education, and when, as Fry
and many others have clearly shown, it is fairly easy to
double and treble that speed, it is obvious that the effort to
do this ought to be made.
Some relationships, within material to be read
In discussing the complex nature of the reading skill it was
pointed out that reading involves correlating elements of
language with meaning. The most familiar of all elements of
language are ‘words’ and it must be quite clear that part of
what is involved in understanding a text is understanding the
meanings of individual words in that text. Thus if a reader
does not understand the meaning of a word like fleet he may
miss the whole point of a passage which concerns some kind
of naval engagement. This particular kind of block to
comprehension is so common that it is frequently taken to be
the whole story, but it is not quite so simple as that. The
failure to recognise a particular lexical item may not be the
result of simple blank ignorance of the kind suggested above,
it may be much more subtle than this. It may be the product
of false association, as in the case of the reader who
understands ‘concerted action’ as something to do with
music; or it may be due to lack of knowledge of the limits of
derivational morphology as in the case of the reader who
understands ‘commando’ as the men under a particular
officer’s command; it may be due to a kind of folk etymology
as in the case of the reader who understood a ‘limpet’ to be a
dwarf with one leg shorter than the other; or for foreigners
especially it may arise from the existence of ‘false friend’
cognates so that a Spaniard or a Frenchman may understand
that a ‘library’ is a place where books are sold.
Understanding the meanings of individual words is not the
end either. The efficient reader needs to be able to understand
the patterns of relationships between words— the semantic

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Reading
95
patterns of lexical items. Thus he must learn to observe for
example how a series of synonyms can carry a particular
concept through a passage (weapons…arms… equipment…),
or how a general term is made more precise (The men were
issued with their weapons. Each man received a pistol, two
clips of ammunition, and a dagger), or how a technical
meaning may be assigned to a term so that it may be used as a
counter in the development of an exposition (Let us call this
first infiltration of the enemy’s defences the first wave. Once
the first wave is in position…the second wave…).
There is still much more to come. The efficient reader must
have a clear understanding of the grammatical relationships
which hold between the lexical items, and he needs to grasp
the semantics of a particular grammatical item in a particular
context. For instance a sentence like ‘We’ll change the
programme in Bremen’, may be spoken in such a way that it
is quite unambiguous, but in its written form it may be
interpreted either to mean ‘We’ll change the programme
which has been arranged for Bremen’, or ‘We’ll change the
programme when we get to Bremen’. This is a question of
whether in Bremen is related to the whole sentence ‘We’ll
change the programme’, as a sentence adverb, or whether in