Abstract
Reading is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges English teachers face. Whether they are native teachers working in an English-speaking country, or non-native ones, a great number of them are constantly struggling to get students to read a few paragraphs, when they barely have the patience to watch a ten-minute clip on what they should be reading. With the student having the possibility to access the Internet and find a great deal of information on the literature they are assigned to work on, they no longer feel the need to pick up a book and make the effort of finding it out for themselves. Students nowadays refuse to engage in reading for many reasons. Some of them find reading too time consuming and opt for the “good-old-copy-and-paste” approach when they come across relevant information on literary web pages. Others lean on the information they gather from film adaptations, even if they know it differs greatly from the one they can find reading the original books; and others are petrified of having to read a piece of literature which had been written in a language or style they have difficulties understanding. While it is true that each student is different, most of them have one opinion in common when it comes to reading – it is just not worth it! Most of the time, all they care about is receiving a passing grade, and in order for them to get one, all they have to do is skim through the summary section at Sparknotes. When doing so, they produce a “satisfactory” answer to a complex and more demanding question and simplify a segment the author had spent a great deal of time and energy to compose. However, if students look at reading with resentment, it does not mean that teachers should exclude them from participating in the classroom activities and direct their full attention to those few students who beam at the thought of literature. On the contrary, no matter how challenging the task, it is our job as educators to instil motivation and interest and engage uninterested students to participate in the classroom reading activities without them feeling pressurized. In the first part of this paper there will be mentioned several reasons why students refrain from the reading activities as well as some of the reasons why reading is so essential for their intellectual and personal development. Lastly, as the main purpose of this paper, we will look at some of the most effective strategies that could surprisingly have most of the students in the classroom, if not all, discover the excitement of reading. This will be done by selecting some of the strategies that had already been used in the classroom and which have proven to be successful.
Publisher
Institute of Knowledge Management
Subject
General Chemical Engineering
Cited by
1 articles.
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