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Reading is not just the ability to recognized words, but the students also need to make sense of what they reads. Reading is also a very complex process that requires a great deal of active participation on the part of the reader. It is an active thinking process involving the interaction between the reader and the print. That is to say, the reader’s schema (former or previous knowledge) about the topic to be read and his language knowledge (vocabulary and grammar) directly affect his understanding of the reading material and in turn, the new information about the topic contained in the reading material will enlarge the reader’s former schema. Nowadays, there are two ways that people do reading: Reading aloud and silent reading. The purpose of loud reading is to share information with others, silent reading it is an individual activity with its main purpose for getting or extracting information. But people may have some obstacles in reading. 1: The lack of vocabulary. 2: The lack of background information about the reading material. 3: Can’t finish the reading material in specific time. 4: No patience in too long reading material. 5: Complex sentences structure. Here are three parts when teachers teach reading: 1, Pre-reading 2, While-reading 3, Post reading. Pre-reading activities 1, Predicting - Make students closer to the text to be read and make reading more intriguing and purposeful and likely result in better comprehension. Predicting based on the title, vocabulary, T/F questions. 2, Setting the scene - This activity means getting the students familiarize with cultural and social background knowledge relevant to the reading text. 3, Skimming - means reading quickly to get the gist. Ask students to put subtitles for different parts of the text into the right order. 4, Scanning - means to read to locate specific information. The key point in scanning is that the student has something in his mind and he or she should ignore the irrelevant parts when reading. We can also ask students to scan for vocabulary. We can pre-teach some words within the semantic area of the theme. This does not mean that we are teaching reading following a Bottom-up model, because the schema of content is activated after the students have scanned the text. BUT Something to bear in mind when conducting scanning: Set a time limit, Give clear instructions, Wait until 70% of the students finish, Make clear how you are going to get feedback, Answers to the scanning questions should be scattered throughout the text rather than clustered at one place. While-reading activities Focus on the process of understanding rather than the result of reading. Teachers can use Some transition devices like: Pictures, drawings, maps, tables, tree diagrams, cyclic diagrams, pie charts, bar charts, flow charts, chronological sequence, subtitles (providing subtitles), notes (taking notes while reading), etc. Post-reading activities Post-reading tasks should provide the students with opportunities to relate what they have read to what they already know or what they feel. In addition, post-reading task should enable students to produce language based on what they have learned. Also, there are other tasks: role play, gap filling, retelling, writing. All in all, the teaching of reading should focus on developing students’ reading skills and strategies rather than testing students’ reading comprehension. We should view reading as an interactive process. Reading in the classroom can be divided into 3 stages: pre-reading activities, while-reading activities, and post-reading activities.
