5 Summary

To help students read for understanding, you can give them pre-reading activities. You can also encourage students to read silently, and give them something to do while they read (such as looking for answers to questions). You can give them post-reading activities in order to check understanding, practise new language from the lesson or develop their language skills such as speaking or writing. A combination of these techniques can be used with any text, from the textbook or from elsewhere.

If you would like to learn more about developing your own reading skills, see Resource 5, and if you would like to learn more about teaching reading, see the additional resources section.

Other Secondary English teacher development units on this topic are:

• Whole-class reading routines: You can learn more about reading in this unit. It discusses more techniques and strategies that students can use to develop their reading skills.
• Strategies for teaching vocabulary: This unit discusses how teachers can help students to cope with words in a text, and discusses using texts to teach words in context.
• Promoting reading for pleasure: You can learn about techniques for helping students to read extensively in this unit.