Bad Reading Habits

One of the receptive skills to be taught when teaching a foreign language is Reading. We know that students mostly try to avoid Reading activities as they find it boring, not every article can interest everyone, they get distracted, etc.

This becomes even worse when we don’t stage the after reading activities appropriately, by adapting them in a way that will trigger students’ interest and willingness to read (You can read more on “After Reading Activities” here).

Here are some bad reading habits that kill the vibe altogether.

Distractions

Reading requires focus and failing to provide the students with that can result in not comprehending the text, not going deep into the details, etc. Distractions can be many:

• The teacher moving around the classroom, preparing for the next activity — as it is the case with the listening activities, when the teacher should stand/sit still, without drawing attention to him/her, the same should be done during the reading activities. It is very easy for the students to lose focus, especially when working with young learners, so keeping still will help them to develop that skill.
• Not enough books/resources — it is quite common that students forget their textbooks or that we don’t have enough copies for everyone. This can be very distracting, as students will need to share a copy and considering that there are different reading speeds in the classroom, students can lose the focus and/or the interest.

Reading Ahead

Students do this to see how the story ends, to find the answer to the question that has not been asked yet, etc. This creates a disbalance in the flow of the lesson, as some students do not get an equal amount of time to read and digest the material.

To avoid this, you can deliver the text in paragraphs and discuss one at a time. Alternatively, you can distribute the text between a group of students and have them each read one section as described above.

Skimming and Scanning

Someme students feel lazy to read the full text and read some sections of it to get the main idea of the text and be able to answer a couple of questions. The read either the first two sentences of each paragraph, or just the dialogues in the text, or merely scan the text altogether to get some names/numbers/dates, etc.

To avoid this, it’s best to develop exercises that target more deep level understanding and are oriented on details, so that the students make sure to read the full text.

Not checking the words

Before setting up a reading task we, as teachers, conduct a slot pre-teaching the key/challenging words/phrases to the students. However, we cannot predict it all. Mostly, students fail to check the meaning of the words that disturb them to understand the whole message of the sentence and end up misunderstanding the text.

To avoid this, it’s best to encourage the students to check the unknown words for them with a dictionary and double-check it with you if necessary. This doesn’t have to be done in open class, as the words can be different for different learners. It is best to assign this as an individual task for every learner and create responsibility towards their reading.

Unable to read long texts

This point is not about habits but teachers should still keep it in mind. In old textbooks, one could find a lot of long texts about quite unrelated topics to second language learning which were not only boring but also quite outdated. Students were made to read those texts, memorize the information and then retell. Nothing can  be more of a buzzkill than a long and uninteresting text if you want your students to enjoy the reading process.

Instead, we should have shorter and more actual topics. In case the text is long anyway it’s always a good idea to split it into paragraphs and ask each student to read one, share what they read with each other. This will help them develop attention to details, listening comprehension, the skill of summarizing, etc. This will also develop a level of responsibility among them, as they will need to tell the part they read to their peers.

Irrelevant tasks

Some pre-reading tasks like reading to find specific information (dates, years, names) can also get very boring especially when working with learners with a higher competency level. This is surely helping the students to acquire the skill of skimming and scanning which is quite useful in exams, however, it kills the art of reading.

Instead, why don’t we try to develop questions that will get the students to think about the answer, rather than merely copy-paste it from the text. These questions can be ones that are asking for the student opinion about the events happening in the story, the alternative solutions, the possible outcomes, etc.

We are more than sure that you can come up with some more bad reading habits. Let’s share with each other.