Ped.

en Ingls
EFL Methodology

Theoretical principles on how to teach

reading and vocabulary

Students:
Javiera Carrillo Ibez
Natalia Cuevas Pereira
Teachers:
Roxana Correa
Theresa St John

October, 2017

Theoretical principles on how to teach reading and vocabulary

 In this paper, it is going to be presented the theoretical principles on how to

teach reading and vocabulary. Reading is one of the skill of English that teachers

need to help students to develop in classes, among with vocabulary to have a better

understanding of what students have been reading.

To teach any language, teachers need to know the principles on how to teach

the skills and systems that are necessary to communicate effectively. Skills in

English are four to be developed, and those are speaking, writing, listening and

reading, which are necessary to be acquired for any person who wants to learn the

language. Systems are integrated into the skills, and they are related to

pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

This paper main focus is how to teach reading and vocabulary in an L2

environment, according to three authors, which are Patricia Amato, Paul Nation and

Jeremy Harmer. Furthermore, they research about those aspects of the

language, and on how to teach them effectively.

According to Amato (2005) reading should be taught through three phases.

Firstly the pre-reading phase, allow students to think about what they know about the

topic and to predict what they will read. Therefore, the aim of this stage is to reduce

any possibility of students giving up on the readings due to the lack of knowledge

that they might acquire before reading any text. Secondly the during-reading phase,

here the teacher should plan activities to help students to have a better

understanding of the text, also teachers can use multimedia materials as videos,

audios or movies to set a context for students. Additionally, those activities are

mostly use when students may read by their own. Thirdly the post-reading phase, the

purpose is to check and enrich the comprehension of the text and the topic of the
lesson. To accomplish all the previous stages, Amato indicates that teachers should

plan the reading lessons. Another author who refers to the topic is Harmer (2001,

p.210) which states that students need to be involved in both extensive and intensive

reading; in other words, he wants to express that students need to know the two

reading styles, and which of them prefer as a reading task. Moreover, reading should

follow a sequence, and that sequence depends on the task the teacher gives to the

students.

Related to vocabulary, Amato (2005) wrote that the acquisition of vocabulary is

neither simpler nor fast, due to students need to be exposed to the words many

times. Moreover, she states that

Students know a word best by trying it out for themselves, explaining its meaning in

their own words, experimenting with synonyms and antonyms, and connecting it to

their own storehouse of knowledge in a variety of ways, including writing and

speaking. (p. 268)

As it was stated before, if teachers want to teach vocabulary, it would be an

outstanding idea to use more than once all the words in context, just to be sure that

students would acquire the words. Another author related to teaching vocabulary is

Nation (2009, p. 38), he state that vocabulary should be taught only in intensive

reading and its focus should be on high frequency words. Furthermore, he states

three principles to teach vocabulary in intensive reading, the first is that high

frequency words should be the focus, the second is that low frequency words should

be taught quickly, and the third is that teachers should teach vocabulary through

strategies as guessing from context, repeating, and so on and so forth.

Consequently, for Nation, it is better to teach words that students will use frequently.
 On the one hand, Amatos (2005) view on how to teach vocabulary is related

to her own reading stages. In the pre-reading stage, it is better to teach vocabulary in

context to prepare students for the reading. The during-reading stage is the most

useful way of teaching vocabulary, because students are actually reading the text, so

they may have some vocabulary issues that can be solve in the moment. The post-

reading stage is for students to reinforce those words which were difficult for them.

Besides, Amato state that vocabulary teaching should be mainly for papers related to

science or maths, those whose vocabulary is specific and necessary to reach a full

understanding of the reading. On the other hand, Nations (2009 p.37-38) view on

how to teach vocabulary is related to his language-focused learning strand, but

including activities as multi-word cards, intensive reading, etcetera.

Overall, it may be said that reading and vocabulary teaching can be taught as

an integrative process, thus they complement each other. Knowing vocabulary in

context it is going to help students to understand better any text, even more if they

are facing specific vocabulary as in scientific texts. However, when students are

facing texts which vocabulary that is not difficult to understand, it is better for

teachers to not teach this system of the language, because students can infer the

meaning using tools as a dictionary. Moreover, it is essential for teachers to have in

mind that their role in classes is to help students during the reading process. Also,

reading according to the authors is not an one step process, because teachers need

to create the correct pre-, while and post- environment or context for students to

reach an overall understanding of their readings. Finally, the writers of the literature

review agreed on what Amato state at the very beginning of her paper, that the main
goal of teaching reading and vocabulary is for students to become independent

readers.

References

Amato, P. Snow, M. (2005) Academic success for english language learners. New

York:
Harmer, J. (2001). Reading. In The practice of English language teaching (pp. 210-

227) (Third edition ed.). Edinburgh: Longman.

Nation, I.S.P. (2009) Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. New York: Routledge.

171 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-98968-8