Thinking about reading

I was at the IATFEL Poland conference in Łódz in September and one of the sessions that really got me thinking was given by Michael Swan and Catherine Walter, entitled "Teaching reading skills: mostly a waste of time?" A very similar session can be seen at http://exeteronline.britishcouncil.org. To get to this you need to register (free). You will be sent a password by e-mail which you then use to log in. The session can be found by clicking on Recorded Sessions in the right hand bar and selecting the session with the title given above. You will be able to see the slides , see the presenters and hear the talk just as if you are at the event! There is also a discussion thread which accompanies it, follow the link at the bottom of the screen when you see the recorded session.
In a nutshell Catherine Walter and Michael Swan are arguing that we do not need to teach learners how to skim, scan and other reading skills, as they can already do this in their own language. What is needed is focus on the development of language in order to improve automaticity in reading, reading speed and fluency. This is fairly radical as most course books use the reading skills approach. Catherine Walter has a Good Practice Guide on reading at http://www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/goodpractcie.aspx?resourceid=1420 which will give you more information about this. You may also be interested in this article, available online: Taguchi, E and Gorsuch,G.J. 2002 .”Transfer Effects of Repeated EFL Reading on Reading New Passages: A Preliminary Investigation” Reading in a Foreign LanguageVolume 14, Number 1, April 2002 (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl then go to Past Issues and click on Vol 14.1) This article has a full bibliography if you want to find out more. The site is an online journal called Reading in a Foreign Language and has a rich resource of articles.
For those of you teaching in gimnazjum or primary school this has important implications. Research in reading suggests that in order to understand a text we need to be able to understand around 95% of the words in it. If we understand less, then guessing unknown words is very difficult. So, rather than spending time teaching skimming, scanning etc. perhaps we need to be helping learners internalize vocabulary. Another interesting point from vocabulary research is that to ‘learn’ a word we need to encounter it about 16 times. This suggests that lots and lots of repetition and recycling of new words is needed to help learners remember. This would be a good starting point, but I recommend you watch the Swan and Walter talk as it will give you other ideas too.