When applying CLT ideas in helping my students improve their reading skills I made a few startling discoveries.

• The first one was that I have no way of knowing what goes on in the heads of my students when they are reading a text. The ‘quality’ of reading was hidden from me.
• Secondly, as a result of this discovery I realized that the reading process is different for every one of us and the difficulties may be caused by many reasons and I as the teacher had no clue of them.
• Thirdly, I had not helped my students enough to find the causes to these difficulties or to find a remedy for them. It had been like ‘Read more and more and you will become a better reader’ OR even worse ‘Throw the child into the water and let them learn to swim little by little’.
• Fourthly, I realized I can make a difference in my students’ reading comprehension only indirectly; I had to make changes in what happens in my lessons and what kind of advice and guidence I could offer my students.

I had always insisted on my students studying the new chapter at home in advance. So the foundation for reading comprehension was there. It had actually been laid in the elementary school and with some students in the junior high school. When starting to apply CLT ideas in my ‘teaching’ of reading I first made a few important changes in my lessons.

• I began to use differentiation in my lessons and replaced me asking questions about the text by giving my students 3 options how to ‘check’ reading comprehension. See Point 4 in Reading strategies below
• The check was always done orally in pairs or groups, not with the teacher. So I combined reading with speaking. Reading comprehension became part of speaking practice. See more detailed account in ‘Deepening understanding of text, Part 1’
• I started to teach more and more about various strategies how to improve reading skills and how to cope with exams as well. This idea led directly to improving writing skills as well.

The most striking example of the importance of education and reading skills that I have come across in my life is what happened in Oman in 1970 when Sultan Qaboos became the ruler and turned the uneducated nation into a modern cililized country merely in 50 years.

Introduction to receptive skills and reading strategies

As I have stated earlier on that receptive skills (listening and reading), are much more difficult to teach than productive skills (speaking and writing). Speaking and writing skills can easily be measured against a criteria. In contrast, listening and reading take place in the heads of the students and we have no physical evidence on the quality of understanding.

Listening comprehension can be verified only indirectly by checking if the listeners responses make sense in the light of what was said by other people. The other way is, of course, by having an exam.

Reading comprehension is even more challenging because people often read silently on their own and there are seldom immediate situations where understanding is checked in normal life. We rarely challenge the information someone has read about. Besides, interestingly enough research has shown that the process in decoding written messages is different among recipients and may even result in arguments about the content.

The most important thing for teachers is to make the students aware of their own reading processes, strengths and weaknesses, and also of the ways other readers approach a new text. Pair and group work as well as various reading strategies serve as tools for raising the awareness but they are also keys to the remedies, keys how to improve one’s own reading skills.

Nevertheless, the situation is far from being hopeless since we can teach about reading indirectly and most of my other articles on reading deal with strategies that serve as tools to enhance reading skills of ordinary and examination texts.

The other articles related to READING COMPREHENSION are

Reading	Reading comprehension strategies in class
	Solving reading difficulties
	Reading strategies, an example how to teach them
	Reading strategies, spotting main ideas
	Strategies to be used in exams and a model lesson how to introduce them
	Sample exam for reading comprehension
	Deep level reading, returning the markes sample exam

These other articles under heading READING demonstrate …

• how important it is that the students themselves become aware of the reasons why they do not always understand a text or succeed in the exams and what they need to do to overcome the difficulties
• how complex the process of reading actually is and how differently readers may approach an ordinary or an exam text and how versatile the difficulties they encounter may be
• how the students can make use of various strategies during the exam to get better results
• how to organize the lessons after the exam has been taken and the exams are returned to the students