Teaching Reading Skills in Form Five

Abstract

I suppose we are all familiar with the following type of reading lesson. We choose a text, we get students to read it, and then we ask them questions on it to see whether they’ve understood. Sometimes we help them by explaining some of the new vocabulary. Or we try to guide our students to ‘unlock’ the meanings of the text by themselves, asking ‘prompting’ questions, or by eliciting from them information which can guide them to the correct meaning of a sentence or ‘chunk’. Often we try to get them to deduce the meaning of individual words instead of just telling them.