OVERVIEW
Reading courses focus on building students’ ability to read academic materials, as well as other texts they may read for pleasure or their communication and test-taking needs. First-year students especially need to: 1) improve their reading strategy use; 2) develop reading fluency; 3) acquire general and academic vocabulary. Therefore, the first-year course focuses on both intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading focuses on being able to more effectively and efficiently comprehend the key points of somewhat challenging (yet still motivating) texts. Extensive reading, mostly done out of class, involves reading a great amount of less-challenging texts for pleasure in order to build one’s fluency and to reinforce language incidentally. Second-year courses may focus more on reading accuracy and explicit strategy training.
DIFFERENT LEVELS
The main difference between first and second year courses is that courses in the second year will try, wherever possible, to incorporate more academic texts into lessons.
TEACHING APPROACH
The teacher will introduce basic reading strategies to help students to comprehend a text’s main points more efficiently. This includes previewing the text, focusing on one’s goal (reading strategically) and coping with unknown vocabulary (inferring meaning, ignoring words, dictionary use). Students should aim to note down key points or summarize the text in English or Japanese, and they should also try to discuss the content in English. A language focus on the text may follow (i.e. reviewing target vocabulary or structures in the text or translating key sections).
If the course is organized by topics, oral or written projects (such as poster presentations) can be done at the end of the unit. Periodic timed-reading tests may also be done to check students’ reading rate and general comprehension ability. In addition, extensive reading is strongly recommended using graded readers, while higher level classes may be given the option of choosing authentic texts.