Teaching Reading

TEACHING READING
REASON FOR READING
Students read for: study purposes / their careers/ pleasure
Reading has a positive effect on student’s vocabulary knowledge, on their spelling and on theirwriting
Good reading texts can introduce interesting topics, stimulate discussion excite imaginative responses and provide the springboard for well-rounded fascinating lessons
DIFFERENT KIND OFREADING
EXTENSIVE: Reading which students do often away from the classroom (novels – newspaper – web pages) Richard Day “joyful reading”
Extensive reading is an approach to learning a foreignlanguage that involves reading a great deal of easy and interesting books. Students choose the books that they want to read. If a book is too easy, or too hard, or boring, the student is free to stopreading and select another one. There is a great deal of research that demonstrates that students who engage in extensive reading become better readers, enlarge their vocabulary, and improve theirlistening, speaking and writing skills.
What practical advice can you offer a teacher thinking of setting one up?
Richard
My first piece of advice is to start early and small. You need to order a goodsupply of books, the kind that I call language learner literature books written especially for language learners. They are often called graded readers. 
Then you need to set up the extensivereading library. You will also need to decide if the extensive reading will be part of an existing course, a separate course, or an after-school club.
R activities that allow students to respond on apersonal level to their books often work well. This is because they encourage learners to relate what they read to their own world of knowledge and experience. They contribute to student motivationand make student reading a resource for language practice and use in reading, vocabulary learning, listening, speaking and writing. They can also help teachers monitor and evaluate their students'...