The role of reading in improving speaking skills in the context of teaching english as a foreign language

 
LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY 
Walter R. Hill briefly describes reading as „what the reader does to get the 
meaning he needs from contextual resources‟.[3] Hedge claims that „through 
extensive reading learners advance their ability to guess the meanings of unknown 
words and phrases from clues in the context‟.[4] Krashen and Terrell state that 
„reading enables the learners to comprehend better which is an important factor that 
can develop language competence they need for conversations‟.[5] Via reading, 
language learners have the ability to learn vocabulary that is likely to facilitate their 
speaking performance and their usage of speaking structure in the target language. 
Grabe [5] has proposed a strategy for developing reading skills that includes three 
components that may affect students‟ speaking performance. These include: 
1) Automatic recognition skills 
2) Vocabulary and structural knowledge 
3) Knowledge of the formal structure of discourse
Thus, it is a generally accepted fact that reading helps students to acquire the 
appropriate vocabulary and grammatical structure of the sentence. From reading 
students understand how words combine together. 
Vocabulary skills include recognizing, guessing, and predicting meaning of 
words using headings, subheadings, and non-verbal context. In this regard, Levelt [6], 
„vocabulary has a central position in forming an utterance with appropriate meanings 
and with syntactic, morphological, and phonological structures‟. With a close 
understanding of his statement, it seems that two points are offered. First, vocabulary 
is always needed in the formulation stage. In other words, no speech is likely to be 
produced without vocabulary, and vocabulary is essential for speaking representation. 
Second, the lexicon which consists of lemmas and lexemes includes not only the size 

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