Reading and Writting are the two skills students are kind of reluctant to perform whether in a guided class environment or out of it, and it is even strongly noticeable among teenagers.
There is no doubt that reading is a useful tool for language adquisicion in terms that it nourishes students with vocabulary knowledge, grammar awareness, accurate spelling, and efective writting among others. And it is an important part of teacher's job to stimulate the develop of the skill throughout his o her students.
On the path of motivating students for reading we need to make a distinction between extensive reading and intensive reading. While extensive reading involves the joy of reading for pleasure, intensive reading refers to detailed-focus on the construction of texts and ususally takes place in a classroom environment.
Both, extensive and intensive reading, are a great source for language understanding. However, it is important that it be well guided and graded according to the student's english level, and in this matter, there is plenty of material we can find whether online of offline for assessment. I dare to recomend you Penguin Readers where you can find great graded material for extensive reading that can be used as intensive reading as well according to how the teacher designs its class.
Some principles Jeremy Harmer provides in his book "How to Teach English" prompt us to design our reading lesson plans in terms of:
- Encourage students to read as often and as much as possible.
- Engage students with what they are reading.
- Encourage students to respond to the content of a text, and explore their feelings about it, not just concentrate on its construction.
- Prediction is a major factor in reading.
- Match the task to the topic when using intensive reading texts.
- Exploid reading material to the full.
And as Krajka says, among other authors, bringing authenticity to the reading content will surely motivate students to read. Contents or activities that enhance the willing for reading through jigsaw reading, reading puzzles, using news websites, reading poetry, event descriptions, and others. Websites suggested all along this class, I have checked some of them and I surely find them useful.
How I applied this to my classes? - This is what I did: Pre-Intermediate Students are going to look for a news about any natural disaster occured in the last twenty years on two different websites and seek a difference in the information provided by the broadcaster, and by tomorrow are going to report orally to the class.
I was really surprised with the results of this activity, and I have found several others to make my students read with no feeling of indisposition. I kind of agree with what Tomoko Kurita said lines above about the students level for the reading activities in the websites suggested; however, we can make it work at different levels with just a bit of creativiness.
On the other hand, and to complete the skills development, Writting is as quite important as the others. Writting gives our students consciousness of the language they are using in a process that gives them more 'thinking time' than the time they get when they attemp spontaneous conversations. This allows them more opportunity for language processing, that is thinking about the language.
In this matter, taking our students involved in writting activities, it is important to make a distinction between writting-for-learning and writting-for-writting according to Jeremy Harmer. The kind of writting we ask students do will depend, as most other things do, on their age, level, learning styles, and interests. At lower levels, we may give them clear models to follow.
When writting-for-writting, we will want to involve students in the process of writting; this typically involves planning what we are going to write, drafting it, reviewing and editing what we have written and then producing a final version. In a process that should be considered pleasant in different contexts: when emailing, posting on a website, giving opinions of any topic in a written format, fulfilling applications, designing brochures and guides, publishing poems or stories, etc.
The process of correcting written work should not fall into
over-correction, in which case it could have a very demotivating effect. Rather than this the teacher has to achieve a balance between being accurate and truthful, on the one hand, and treating students sensitively and sympathetically, on the other. Here is where ABCD Methodology comes to be quite useful. We must give clear instructions and the conditions to write, thus the correction focuses just in the condition given. For example,
Basic level students will publish on Facebook a short activities-description of a family member using apropriately the adverbs of frequency studied in class and the simple present tense by friday. This ABCD objective gives the teacher a component to measure: the proper use of frequency adverbs in conjunction with the simple present tense.
