Teaching and Learning Reading Skills - Research Paper Example

 Developing students’ reading skills is one of the most basic skills that educators must focus on. Since it is one of the foundation skills in language learning, reading must be carefully and intensively taught to students as this affects students’ abilities to perform better in school. In order to address this need, it is rather important to look into the different factors that influences the students’ reading skills. Various intrinsic and extrinsic considerations should be looked into by the teacher in order to maximize their students’ reading development.

Various types of media that are available in the society that discourages the students to read more are very accessible. Television, movies, and the like do not require anybody to learn how to read. The mere fact that people should only open their eyes and listen to what is projected on the screen without reading anything leads students to become uninterested in reading. At school, there is not as much student interaction during the reading classes, thus the more the students stay uninterested.

Identifying students’ learning strategies are as important as identifying the different teaching strategies that the teachers should implement in a classroom. Children, at a young age, require activities that would make them interested in participating in a reading class. If there are not enough activities that would engage them in learning and developing their skills, more likely, the students would lose focus and resort to disinterest. Specific teaching techniques such as additional exercises and activities are necessary to encourage the students to read further.

One of the most common teaching techniques that I have observed among the teachers back in elementary was the focus on the vocabulary words in a reading class rather than the content and comprehension. There are more vocabulary exercises than those that require comprehension and analysis that may had been a lot more interesting for the children than the memorization and use of the words that teachers thought were important for the students to focus on. There is no doubt vocabulary skills should be improved as well, however, reading classes should not put much weight on the definition of the difficult words, but rather, the understanding of the students to the ideas that the reading exercises present.

In addition, reading activities were but a part of the language book. Reading comprehension exercises were limited to only a few questions for which no further exercises are added. As such, as young learners, we did not develop the initiative of reading other stories or passages that would further enhance our comprehension skills. No further reading was deemed necessary in order to make the discussion of the short stories we read in school a lot more interesting and fun. In order to compete with the other media, which affect the attention span of young learners and inhibits the development of their reading skills, it is necessary to design new strategies in learning that would improve students’ reading skills.

Early grades reading teachers should come up with more reading techniques that would encourage children to excel in their reading classes. Teachers should understand that learning must be interesting and fun for the students. Reading should be something that they should enjoy doing with their classmates in order for them to develop a fascination for reading. For instance, group reading exercises would enhance their social skills as well as help them interact with their classmates in a more fun and exciting way.

By providing them group reading activities, children will be encouraged to work together and contribute to the group to obtain a good feedback from the teacher. Individual activities such as reading in front of their classmates would challenge their individual skills and acquire an initiative to learn individual techniques to help themselves improve on their reading skills. There are other various factors that affect students’ reading skills development. Once they are identified, it would be easy to design other teaching strategies that would enhance such skills and help students acquire the necessary learning techniques in improving their reading skills.