4 Summary

Good readers use a variety of techniques when they read in any language. They:

• ask different kinds of questions about a text as they read it
• use their knowledge of the language that they are reading and their knowledge of the world to make sense of what they are reading
• identify what is important in a text so that they are able to remember and reconstruct a text if necessary.

You can use creative classroom activities to help your students to develop these skills when they read any kind of text in English. These kinds of skills will help students to understand lessons and texts better, and they will also help them to read texts outside the classroom and in their future lives. They will also be useful techniques to use when reading any text in any language.

If you are interested in developing your own reading skills, you can find some tips and links in Resource 3. You can find links to articles about teaching reading in the additional resources section.

Other Secondary English teacher development units on this topic are:

• Supporting reading for understanding: You can learn more about reading in this unit. It discusses how you can encourage your students to develop ways of reading English texts independently.
• Promoting reading for pleasure: You can learn more about teaching literary texts in this unit. It builds on the approaches of Supporting reading for understanding.