Activities and Tasks for Effective Teaching of Reading Comprehension in Secondary Schools

Abstract

Reading is one of the four language skills that integrates the learning and teaching of other language skills. Through reading, one gets to understand his/her environment as well as that of others far and near. It gives knowledge, pleasure and heals like medicine. Reading voluntarily has however been relegated to second position as students no longer read for pleasure unless under examination situations or when reading becomes mandatory. They rather prefer to read text messages or from social media where in some cases, the language used is substandard. This paper highlights the teaching of reading that would enkindle the love of reading and the motivation to read in students. The paper does this by identifying the role of reading in learning, reading strategies and giving tasks that the teacher would use to teach reading both communicatively so as knitting together all the language skills and forms to ensure effective and student-centred reading. Some of the reading strategies highlighted in the paper include previewing, predicting, skimming, scanning, guessing meaning from context and paraphrasing. The paper also highlighted some reading tasks/activities classified under pre-reading, grammar, cohesion and logical relations, whole text organization, functions and moves, among others. It is expected that this paper would facilitate appropriate teaching of reading as well as encourage students to read and view reading an interesting and rewarding exercise.