Principled Approaches to Teaching L2 Reading
By Michael Rabbidge
An approach that claims to be principled must be built upon ideas and experiences that include knowledge from fields of research as well as address practical concerns. Grabe and Stoller (2020) offer such a basis for their principles of creating an effective L2 reading curriculum. They have shared this list of guiding principles across a number of accessible texts (see end of text for more details) in an effort to start a dialogue on how to improve L2 reading curriculums in order to help students improve not only reading abilities but also improve student motivation to read L2 texts. This is considerably important given that most new knowledge and traditional academic knowledge are bound to the English language.
This blog will most likely be the first in many references to these principles as we seek to understand how to create more effective L2 readers in the classroom and beyond. The first of the principles from Grabe and Stoller is “Asking students to read for well-defined purposes, rather than simply asking students to read for no purpose at all, should guide reading and re-reading tasks”.
This principle criticizes the simply read approach, which asks students to read and answer questions. The purpose is clear, but it is lacking any meaning for the student beyond doing what the teacher asked, and this is the problem. It doesn’t address the fact that we are trying to create skilled readers who read willingly and often as part of their time in the real world.
So then, what are well-defined purposes? These are purposes that are guided by actual reading strategies, like scanning for information in a news article, or skimming a text to get a general understanding of what the text is and if it is worth reading. Academics often need to read to for any number of reasons, such as evaluating content, criticizing content or integrating and synthesizing new ideas. Re-reading is the same, with purposes equally variable.
As a teacher, one way to assist students in developing the ability to read for many different purposes is to model reading strategies. Assuming students know how to read at an advanced level just because they can in their L1 is a false assumption. Teacher modeling of reading strategies involves using something called a think aloud protocol. This is where the teacher reads a text aloud, and then says what they are thinking. This method allows students to be exposed to the ways in which more proficient readers of a language think while reading, and can make explicit the different types of reading strategies that may be employed in a given reading. This in turn can be employed to show how to read for certain purposes.
For more examples of how to engage with principle I highly recommend reading the following books
Grabe & Stoller. (2020). Teaching and Researching Reading. Routledge
Newton et al., (2018). Teaching English to Second Language Learners in Academic Contexts: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. Routledge