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mercoledì 28 agosto 2019

Reading and the challenges of teaching reading


I belong to a generation of readers. Reading was my favorite past time during the summer and  I  read plenty of books as a teenager  while I was not  at school.

Today my students are not  so fond of  reading. They love surfing the web and  chatting online. Most of them  just read a book because they are asked to write  a short summary about it.
Some have  many books and  read them in their  free time while  others just  go to the library and borrow what they need to read. Some sell the books they have bought as they do not love books.

They  are asked to read a book and this is bad as they will never enjoy the pleasure of touching and reading a book. This  approach to reading will influence  their reading habits  as  they will never  develop  as learners and will not be ready to continue  learning and reflecting on what really matters.




The article  presented online in the  website about  self-development  underlines that there many reasons for underlying the importance of reading: just check it and you will agree that reading can be an important activity and you will also develop as a learner

 https://www.selfdevelopmentsecrets.com/benefits-importance-reading-books/

Their infographics has a long list of benefits related to the  habit of reading. I cannot but think that reading is important regardless of your age.

Infographic about reading and its importance


When teaching languages we do need to rely on activities that can enhance  reading: a  reading club can be something we can work on. An English  reading club could help my lazy learners as we could  choose among the books to read  and we could interact on what we have  learnt.

Edutopia has presented some   ideas  shared by  educators dealing with the issue of literacy and reading:

https://www.edutopia.org/article/starting-heritage-language-book-club

Which are the main advantages for working on developing  reading skills?

  • learners can learn from mistakes
  • learners   can learn about  grammar while reading
  • by scanning  texts learners can build bridges between their language and the other language that they are learning
An interesting activity shared online  is  Collaborative Reading: check this video released by Edutopia- the young  learners are getting engaged and are learning while  reading.


I feel that teaching needs to find new  bridges into the learner's paths as today's learners are different and they might not love reading but  they also need to be trained and helped to develop their critical thinking skills.

Learning and reading about  heroes and important people  who  are admired by our learners is the first step to find reading texts and topics to cover for our syllabus: Shelly  Terrell has  given a lot  of tips in her blog and you can read more about this  online



I must support  reading activities  in my classes  this year: the challenge is to get the learners into reading for pleasure and for learning. 




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