Some Strategies for Improving Reading Efficiency

Author: Margaret A.Dwy
FOUR GENERAL RULES
As a teacher begins to modify his approach top the teaching of reading, he should bear four important points:
• His secondary. Level students already know how to read; so the teacher task is not to teach but to transfer skills.
• Secondary students are young adults, and as young adults the understanding of a topic must be motivated; so they can be able to see their progress.

READING SPEED AND EFFICIENCY
The main goal of the reading program should be that students read efficiently.
An efficiently reader reads quickly enough so that he’s processing the meaning of the whole sentence/ paragraph.
The EFL’s student often reads so slowly that he loses in the same reading and must often backtrack to reread for comprehension.

DESIGNING WORD-RECOGNITION EXERCISES
In designing and using these exercises, two points should be kept in mind.
First. Word recognition exercises are not vocabulary-development exercises. The purpose of these exercises is not to broaden a student´s vocabulary but rather to improve his ability to focus very briefly on words for immediate recognition and comprehension.
In subsequent, application to actual reading, it is hoped that these exercise will free the student from the need to focus on common words at all; they should be so familiar that he can look at them as components of larger meaning-units. Therefore, the key words and possible answers should be within the student´s vocabulary
Second, these exercises must be very strictly timed so as to preclude the possibility that the students will have enough time to revert to sounding out the words he sees. It is crucial to keep the pace challenging; otherwise, students may lose interest in this valuable activity.

READING BY PHRASES:
There are three strategies:
1) Train students to read in phrases
The types of phrases and clauses should be highlighted in grammar lessons. And in their reading classes, students should practice to break passages up into meaning units, so at the end they can focus only the important information of each unit.
2) Phrase recognition exercises. Similar to Word recognition exercises.
3) “Read and look up”. Students will read silently, look up and say what they understood. The main advantage of this technique is that students will not depend on their books and increase in short-term memory capacity.
A NEW BEGINNING:
This techniques are the beginning of an EFU ( English Foundation Unit) reading program, which could have better results to transfer reading skills from students native language to English, by combining them with vocabulary development and reading skills activities.