Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Reading
101
develop the skill of skimming is that which is initiated by the
instruction, ‘Find the sentence that has the word aircraft in
it.’ The pupils then all hunt busily for the word in their texts
and put their hands up when they have found it. One pupil is
then chosen to identify the place where the word is by some
agreed convention ‘On line x on page y’, and may then be
asked to read aloud the sentence in which the word occurs.
More complex variations of this technique involve
instructions like, ‘Find the sentence that tells us that the
commandos had to wait for the arrival of the aeroplanes’ or
‘Find the sentence from which we know that the plans made
for the carrying out of the raid did not go through without a
hitch.’ Notice that while still demanding a skimming reading
skill we are also demanding a deeper level of understanding
involving making deductions from what has been read.
For cultivating close and repeated reading of a text at the
plain sense level, or even at deeper levels, P.Gurrey in his
book Teaching English as a Foreign Language suggests a
technique which may be illustrated by the following series of
questions about the sentence above concerning the men who
were issued with weapons. Thus, ‘Who were issued with
weapons? What were the men issued with? Do we know who
gave the men the weapons? Can we guess? Do we know
whether the men actually received their weapons? How
many different things did each man receive? Is a clip of
ammunition a weapon? What kind of pistol did each man
receive? Was it a revolver? Why do you think so? etc., etc.’
These questions would be very numerous and fired off with
the utmost speed. They will be so easy that the great majority
of pupils will always be ready to answer and even the slowest
pupils will have some opportunity to participate. All such
questioning is for teaching. It is in fact very close to language
manipulation and pattern practice.
Questions for testing, on the other hand, usually are not
very numerous, the most common number seems to be about
ten or twelve. Very often they are written and it is clear that a
written reply is expected. They are not concerned with
fostering specific reading skills. They tend to have a high
proportion of questions directed at specific vocabulary
items, and demand definitions or explanations rather than
asking for inferences about meaning to be drawn from the

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Reading
102
context. The questions are often directed at apparently
arbitrarily chosen points in the text and do not concern
themselves with overall pattern or tone. The proportion of
questions dealing with logical inferences is high, and the
number of questions relating to the plain informational
content is low. Often the ‘questions’ are not questions at all
but are instructions for a written exercise involving summary
or rewriting the text from a different point of view. Tests of
this kind may be perfectly proper, they may indeed help to
gauge the attainment of pupils. They may even, education
systems being what they are, contribute to the pupil’s success
in public examinations by virtue of the practice they give in
examination technique, but the teacher must be quite clear
that they do not ‘teach’ reading comprehension.
The second point which the teacher needs to bear in mind is
that the choice of an appropriate text is very important in
building up pupils’ reading competence. A text which is too
difficult, where every other word has to be explained, or which
uses extremely complex grammatical constructions, or which
is about some obscure technical subject of small interest to the
pupil, is only likely to produce frustration. Similarly a text
which is too easy does not extend the pupil and it is
fundamental that learning requires effort. So texts must be
properly graded and sequenced and varied so that their
linguistic content and cultural difficulty matches the abilities
and sophistication of the pupils, and ensures a reasonable
coverage of the various kinds of reading skill they need to
develop. Thus texts should include description, exposition,
and argument as well as narrative. Some texts should be short
and dense, others should be longer and more slight.
Humorous pieces, advertising copy, official regulations, as
well as essays, feature articles and news reports should all be
included. A collection of pieces like Annabell Leslie’s Written