Maximizing EFL College Students' Reading Comrehension

The aim of this workshop is to show English teachers how reading comprehension can be effectively taught to EFL/ESL struggling college readers. The teaching strategies include the following: (1) Helping students understand the book and chapter organization; (2) Predicting the content of a reading text from the text title before reading, comparing a text to a building, writing the topic of each paragraph in the margin, underlining the main ideas, numbering the supporting details, circling words that signal chronological order, classification, definition, comparison and contrast, exemplification, process…etc., showing the structure of the passage, i.e. relating text title to the paragraph topics and subtopics by drawing a tree diagram and filling it out while reading, summarizing the main ideas and supporting details in a chart after the reading and helping students recognize the text type: compare/contrast, classification, illustration, chronology (3) Helping students derive meanings of difficult words from context (without looking them up n a dictionary) by using different types of context clues such as punctuation marks, definitions, synonyms, antonyms and morphological analysis; (4) Helping students decode words in context: by highlighting silent letters, double letters, and hidden sounds in a word, and identifying the part of speech of words by breaking them into prefix, suffix and root (5) Helping students connect pronouns and determiners with their antecedents; (6) Helping students connect the information contained in the text with their background knowledge; (7) Helping students understand questions by circling the question word (8) Circling key words in a paragraph while skimming; and (9) Recognizing sentence types such as passive sentences, complex sentences, embedded sentences… etc; and (10) Asking questions while reading. Sample texts will be used to show attendees how reading can be taught using the above strategies.

Prof. Reima Al-jarf
King Saud University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/aljarf