How to Teach Reading Effectively

Reading nowadays  become the focus of English teaching at Junior and Senior High School in Indonesia. But in many cases, the students often find that facing the text, reading it and answering the questions are  very difficult. To make it worse, it will be followed by the losing of  their motivation to involve  in the task and in the lesson.  

Here are some tips in Teaching reading to make  the students eager in reading task:

1. Don’t let the students see the text yet! Give them a task before reading so they will prepare for the text. Use one of these ideas:

• Ask the students to come up with the word/vocabulary related to the topic.
• Prediction    : Tell the class to predict the story.
• Pictures         : Find a or some pictures related to the topic and gradually show the picture to the students while keep asking the students what they see.
• Jumbled headlines/titles :  For news item genre, jumble the title and ask the students to put it back in the correct order in a small group

2.    Vary the task. Reading will be a boring task except you vary the task and text, not only from the text book. These are some examples :

• Drawing : For descriptive, report, or some genres of text, it’s possible to let the students drawing the scenes/object from the text.
• Deduction  : Get the students to read the text and work out to think what happened in the text.
• Jumbled reading : It encourages students to think about the logic of the text.
• Make up a title: After reading a story, encourage the students to think up an appropriate title.
• Skim and Scan : Skim is reading quickly to get main idea of a text. Scanning is reading to locate particular information of the text
• Extensive reading : Encourage the students to read outside the classroom, from magazine, internet, newspaper etc
• Fishing for English : Ask the student to find any English text, and write it down. Do this regularly.