TRAINING READING SKILLS IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE: A COMMUNICATIVE, INTEGRATED SKILLS APPROACH

Abstract

The present paper examines a number of effective techniques aimed at building fluent reading skills in the foreign language in a communicative class context. With part icular reference to students of English, but applicable to any foreign language reading course, we analyse the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading in a second language, as well as the principles underlying the student pedagogy best suited to the training of reading skills. Proposing an integrated skills approach to reading, we provide an overview of communicative classroom techniques and tasks which reflect the purposeful, task - based, interactive nature of real life reading and approximate to cog nitive reality, to the cognitive experience which a fluent reader inherently brings to and derives out of a text.

Keywords

• Reading skills
• strategies
• comprehension
• tasks
• communicative
• integrated skills