The latest Cambridge ELT blog post is titled ‘Strategies for Success: Empowering teen students in reading classes’.
Raising awareness of and fostering these strategies helps language learners gradually tackle increasingly complex texts and tasks, eventually leading them to become proficient readers. As teachers, we sometimes sideline reading activities in class due to time constraints, choosing to assign them as homework instead. While learners can often do these tasks independently, we’ll only be able to help them develop effective reading strategies in English – or transfer strategies from L1 – through consistent focus in class.
4 common problems
Class time, therefore, is one of the challenges in developing reading strategies with teens. Additionally, I’ve identified four other common problems while talking with teachers over the years:
- “My students get stuck with unknown words. They believe they need to understand every single word in the text.”
- “I feel that my students don’t have enough background knowledge about the topic of the texts they have to read.”
- “Reading texts in coursebooks are too long! My students give up reading them before they reach the end.”
- “My teen students get lost while reading the text. They find it hard to focus.”