There is no hope of improving reading skills until the reasons for NOT UNDERSTANDING the text are identified by the students themselves and they commit themselves to overcome the problems.

It is essential for teachers to realize that the process of decoding someone else’s messages is not the same with everybody. We are all different and depending on our background and style of learning we process information differently. Our problems in reading may also vary drastically.

Just like listening, reading skill is hard to teach because we have no control of the process in the reader’s mind. Still, we can affect the process indirectly by giving advice and guidance. The general CLT principle which is in favour of a great amount of input resulting in good results needs to be supported by teaching strategies on how to prepare for reading comprehension exams and how we can learn from our mistakes in taking exams.

If you are teaching senior high students, I suggest you go through the whole process once with your students and then get feedback from them if it turned out to be worth the time spent on it.

• Strategies are dealt with the students before an exam
• You, the teacher, study how the returning of the exam is to be arranged
• Arrange a student-centred lesson to return the exam
• Show the students the ‘heureka’ type of comments to be used

Strategies / tips for students in a reading comprehension exam

Let’s have a look at some strategies that are useful when students take a reading comprehension exam. Some of them are actually the same as in listening exams. Still, learning to apply the strategies does not take place over night. It also requires some practice.

Throwing the students one text or exam after another and assuming that massive input will automatically improve reading skill does not necessarily lead to success with everybody. It is better to teach the students how they should approach an ordinary or an exam text.

• Relax your body. Take a couple of deep breaths! It will calm your nerves. Being nervous won’t help you.
• Read the whole text through at first but do not stop even if you do not understand the text perfectly. This way you will have a better idea about the topic and structure of the text.
• If the logic of the text is good, you can easily spot the main ideas and sentences. The rest of the text is justifications of the arguments or examples.
• Start working on the questions only if you read the whole text first. Many ideas open up if you know the exact topic and the perspective of the writer.
• Once you understand the topic and the questions, you can guess many things they talk about. If you use common sense and your background knowledge on the topic you may find it helpful.
• Read the questions carefully and focus only on them.
• Most of the information in the text is not needed. It may be irrelevant.
• Don’t panic if you see new words. Try to guess what they mean. Very often you need not know the meaning of new words at all.
• Be aware and watch out for extreme words like ‘never’ ‘only’ ‘always’ ‘anyone’. They are often too strong.
• Link ideas that have the same meaning. For example: If the idea in the text is expressed “He used to go fishing on Saturdays and Sundays.” the same idea is in the answer booklet as “He was in the habit of catching salmon and trout at weekends.”
• So the most common technique is just to express the same idea in other words.
• If your exam consists of multiple choice tasks, use elimination technique. For example: Choice A was not talked about at all, Choice B is wrong because they said ’everybody’ which is not true, Choice D is wrong because ‘chance’ means different from ‘change’… SO the right answer has to be Choice C. You have now eliminated the wrong answers and you will answer C (even if you may not know exactly why).

Strategic tips for the teacher about returning an exam

1. Have an exam for the students and when you return it devote a whole lesson to go through the exam in detail, every question and every alternative. I explain the process in detail in the next article.
2. Demonstrate with the first two questions how the analysis is done and then let the students discuss the other questions in groups. Have star students leading the discussion without lecturing the right answers. See my next article.
3. Don’t interfere with the group discussions but take notes on the problems the groups do not seem to solve well. Answer the students questions at the end of the lesson and point out your own observations.
4. Now the students should have a vague idea what the reasons for the mistakes are. In other words, they may have identified some of the problem areas.
5. Now that the students are motivated to hear more it is time to have another lesson where you go through my strategy tips for an exam. Show the tips one by one on the screen and let the students ask questions on them. Give the list as a handout after the discussion with my copyright. Let them have it even in exams.
6. If you think your class will not be able to discuss these matters in English, let them use the mother tongue to make sure the messages get through.
7. Make each student write in English what they have learnt over these two lessons and what they are planning to do to overcome the difficulties.
8. Show them my ‘heureka’ comments on the screen as models of the kind of comments you are looking for. See below!
9. Collect the comments and give feedback on them in the 3rd reading comprehension enhancement lesson.
10. Now you have done your job: you gave your students the tools for improvement. Nevertheless, they are the ones who have to start working. Probably making use of the other strategies that I have been talking about.

The students have to come up with ‘heureka’ realizations like …

• Ah, I think I worry too much about words I have never seen and stop reading because of them and get frustrated. SO, next time I will try to guess the meanings or maybe the word is not important at all or knowing if the word has a positive or negative meaning on the basis of the context is enough.
• Ah, ‘carry out’ and ‘realize’ can sometimes mean the same OR ‘no adequate funds’ is the same as ‘not enough money’ or ‘lack of sufficient resources’. SO, my problem is vocabulary and learning many ways to say the same thing.
• Ah, I stumble over the same structures over and over again. Shortened sentences, never heard. Wow! ‘Having left for downtown’ is a shortened sentence meaning the same as ‘When I had started to drive towards the city center’ SO, I have to study grammar more because I always stop at this kind of structures and do not get the meaning.
• Ah, my mistake is that I start reading by translating the text word by word. SO, I have to stop translation tactics because it is too slow. Working through mother tongue will not do. I have to learn to think in English.
• Ah, I have been too much in a hurry. I usually start by reading Question 1 and then look at the text without knowing what the whole text is about. SO, from now on I will read the whole text through first without stopping even if I do not understand everything at first. This way I will get an overall picture of the topic and the main ideas.
• Ah, I never realized that some sentences are more important in a paragraph than others. SO, spotting of the main sentences in a paragraph seems to work for me. I will worry about the details much less this way.
• Oh, no. All these years I have been trying hard but nothing seems to work. I thought I was just stupid. Now that you told about dyslexia and its symtoms I think I may suffer from it. SO, Thanks. I will contact the special teacher and see if he can help me.

Having a talent rarely takes anyone to the top. Reaching excellence in anything requires very hard work, 10 000 hours of work, they say. Maybe that is the total number of hours needed to master a foreign language ‘perfectly’. I am still counting ...

Up to 10 percent of students suffer from some form of dyslexia, reading and writing difficulty. Luckily these days students have the courage to admit they have these problems and special teachers are trained to help them.

The text in the next article is an example of how a mature 16-year-old might be able to process a reading comprehension text. I believe that if the students are able to apply the strategies and tips given in my previous articles in this ‘test’ they will become better readers. And writers too since good writers will anticipate the reactions of their readers.

You will find the sample exam in the next article and correct answers with a ‘mature’ reader’s comments in the final article of this Reading Unit.