Developing Reading Confidence: Reflections and Suggestions

Abstract

In Lower Secondary schools teachers have, rightly I believe, placed the main emphasis in Form I classes on listening and speaking. Reading is used mainly as a means of reinforcing a number of basic grammatical patterns (and to a lesser extent vocabulary) which have already been explained and practised orally. Much reading is carried out under the teachers’ direct guidance within the lesson partly because weaker pupils lack confidence in reading on their own and partly because there is often a lack of sufficient simple reading material in English in the school library. Reading passages are deliberately confined to a limited number of grammatical structures, and new vocabulary (also limited in amount) is often pre-taught. This is a perfectly reasonable way to show children that they can understand a piece of written English if they are willing to recognize and remember what they already ‘know’.