Teaching reading and viewing to L2 learners

Reading is a commonly offered course in many second and foreign language curricula for different age groups, yet it is not a skill easily acquired by students. Given the centrality of reading and viewing in real life and their importance in the curriculum for assisting the development of other language skills in students (e.g., speaking, listening, vocabulary, and writing), teachers’ instruction is crucial to student success. More importantly, in traditional reading lessons, teachers seldom consider blending reading into viewing and viewing into reading to make the lesson dynamic and interactive. Drawing on recent research, this chapter presents a framework for teachers to develop not only students’ language skills but also strategies for further skill development through reading and viewing. Such a framework takes an inclusive approach to instructional design, which brings to the fore theoretical perspectives on such instruction as well as practical strategies for teaching reading and viewing. Strategies such as activating schemata, previewing, predicting, skimming, scanning, reading and linking, viewing (e.g., viewing digital materials on the computer screen), and connecting, using packaged instructional procedures such as D-R-T-A, K-W-L, among others, which are the bases of classroom instruction, are elaborated with reference to reading and viewing activities as an organic combination of extensive and intensive reading and viewing.

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