Reading Comprehension in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

1. Introduction
3. 
   Approaches in reading in EFL
   classrooms
4. 
   The Strategies in Reading in EFL
5. 
   Differences between reading skills and reading
   strategies
6. 
   Hints to develop reading skills
7. 
   Reading Strategies
8. 
   Background knowledge
9. 
   Predicting
10. 
    Self-monitoring and self-correcting
11. 
    Identifying main ideas and summarizing
12. 
    Making inferences and questioning
13. 
    Procedural prompts
14. 
    K-W-L
15. 
    Intra act procedure
16. 
    W's and H (Who, What, When, Where, Why and
    How)
17. 
    Types of Reading
18. 
    Biblography

Introduction

There are massive amounts of research literature
available discussing the different reading strategies which
suggests that reading comprehension is strengthened when students
work methodically and systematically to improve their reading
skills. In order to become good readers students must have the
ability to apply different strategies in order to build meaning
for themselves and as teachers, we need to teach students how to
think about these strategies as they read.

So as to have students motivated teachers need to build
a variety of experiences relevant to the topic of study and use a
variety of materials in their classrooms to better accommodate
the individual student needs, interests, and abilities (Shelley,
1997). Students who do not have a strong foundation in basic
decoding and comprehension skills become struggling readers.
Remedial readers never see reading as something they could do —
it was something to be avoided (Collins, 1997). Their poor
reading ability denies them access to the content of papers
they have to study. Thus, reading will be viewed as an activity
where we construct meaning for ourselves, it is an active,
cognitive and affective process that involves complex
thinking.

Furthermore, the capability of being able to comprehend
what has been read is a requirement for success in all aspects of
learning including beyond the educational years. Thus, in order
to reach a qualified identity in their fields students should
learn to build English language. Also students need to research
about lots of subjects in English. While doing this, they have to
read in English since most of the sources are written in that
language, just because of this, the university students need to
improve their reading abilities.

Reading is a systematic process for the students to
learn, so they face different problems when reading in English.
However, the problems are very different from each other and also
the problems vary according to different departments, classrooms,
courses and so on. To cope with these difficulties students need
to make connections between prior knowledge and new information
assisting the construction of meaning and comprehension. This is
to ensure that the students build confidence and interest about
reading. A pre-requisite to improve the performance of the reader
is assisting and motivating students. Educators want students to
read information, make critical decisions about it, form their
own opinions and respond intelligently (D"Archangelo,
2002).

Good readers are extremely active as they read, as is
apparent whenever excellent adult readers are asked to think
aloud as they go through text" (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).
Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text, gain an
overview of the text before reading, make predictions about the
upcoming text, read selectively what they already know, note
whether their predictions and expectations about text content are
being met, and revise their prior knowledge.

Reading

Reading is one of the important skills of a foreign
language that is aimed to be taught to students in EFL courses.
Also it is not an easy course to comprehend for the foreign
language students because reading is a complex process. The first
definition of the reading is from Goodman (1988).It claims that
reading is interaction between writer and the reader.

Reading is a receptive language process. It is a
psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic
surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning
which the reader constructs. There is thus an essential
interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer
encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to
thought.