- Title
- Strategies to support students' reading success
- Creator
- Askie, Helen; Hodgson, Sue
- Relation
- EA Journal Vol. 26, Issue 2, p. 63-68
- Publisher
- English Australia (ELICOS Association)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- A few years ago a major demographic change occurred in many Australian universities due to the increased numbers of students from the Middle East. These highly articulate students had little trouble with speaking and listening, but reading often presented difficulties. At the University of Newcastle Language Centre, we responded by introducing special ‘skills’ classes to identify and remediate students’ individual problems. Teaching these classes was challenging, but over time we developed approaches that proved very effective in improving reading skills. In our efforts to improve our students’ reading, we began to realise that we had been concentrating on reading practice rather than reading strategies. We needed to draw students’ attention to the strategies that good readers automatically use when they read. Thus, activating background knowledge, predicting, context, vocabulary, gist, skimming, scanning and so on are all integral to our reading lessons. However, we had also observed that many of our students’ comprehension problems were due to their lack of understanding of the structure of a text. The following teaching strategy is our attempt to deal with this issue. We are not suggesting that every reading lesson be handled in this way, but we have found it to be a very useful teaching tool that could be utilised in any classroom to minimise reading problems.
- Subject
- English; English teachng; individualised reading; language skills; reading comprehension; reading skills; reading strategies; higher education; teaching methods; University of Newcastle, English Language Centre
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1061293
- Identifier
- uon:16928
- Identifier
- ISSN:1449-4496
- Language
- eng
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