Focusing on EFL Reading: Theory and Practice

Edited by  

Rahma Al-Mahrooqi and Adrian Roscoe

This book first published 2014

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Part III / Chapter 2

To Read or Not to Read?

Omar Al-Noursi

Institute of Applied Technology, UAE

Abstract

This chapter addresses the issue of teaching reading comprehension in the United Arab Emirates. It examines the place of reading in EFL and ESL work, basic aspects of this activity, and, most importantly, the need to improve students’ overall reading levels. Reasons for students’ poor performance are suggested along with ideas for improvement. A key point to stress is that both teachers and students should understand the details of what happens in the reading process. Key words: Reading comprehension, poor performance, the reading process

1. Introduction

Since English is considered as the language of international communication, business and technology, acquiring it in the Arab world is viewed as an important goal. The ability to read confidently, efficiently and fluently in EFL is a key academic and professional skill for learners and graduates. However, concern over poor standards in most Arabic-speaking countries is constantly growing, and especially where this concerns reading (Al-Mahrooqi, 2012). According to Al-Mahrooqi, Omani college-level English readers, when they attempt to read in English, face a set of correlated cultural and linguistic challenges that preclude many of themfrom locating the main ideas in the “literary” passage. She points out that the absence of a reading culture in most Arab societies has largely contributed to Arab students’ weak reading abilities. At the school level, Negmeldin and Halla (2011b) indicate that the UAE school atmosphere is not supportive and plays a vital role in the decline of reading ability among high school students. Evidence from research also indicates that students’ performance in reading comprehension is far below international standards. Their performance in such international examinations as IELTS, PET, and TOFEL is reported as being very low and worrying.

For example, the British Council’s 2010 report on IELTS reveals that the mean scores for Arab

countries in academic reading are the lowest in the top 40 countries that are categorized by the number of candidates (Qatar 4.6, UAE 4.8, KSA 4.9, Oman & Kuwait 5, Libya 5.1 Jordan and Iraq 5.5, and Sudan 5.7). The report also shows that candidates whose first language is Arabic scored the second lowest (next to Amharic) average in the top 40 that are classified by first language backgrounds. Similarly, Marsden (2002) studied the UAE Higher College of Technology (HCT) students’ performance in reading and reported that their performance was lower than that of comparable groups of students elsewhere in the world in the Cambridge PET. Marsden and Wallace (2001) also present evidence that HCT students are weak readers in their L1 (Arabic) when compared to the “world mean”. O’Sullivan (2004) notes that UAE college students hold a negative attitude towards reading and that they have limited strategies and poor performance in reading comprehension.

Almost all of these reports highlight the same finding: reading abilities in second language

learning are in decline. However, a thorough examination of quantitative and qualitative studies of reading also indicates that beginner readers can move towards skilled status through work that is intensive and extensive.

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2. The need for improving reading comprehension

The literature reveals that teaching reading skills in both first and second language work has been emphasized over the last two decades. Learning to read for a variety of purposes has been seen as essential to success in school and college and for learning in general. Effective reading is, quite simply, a foundation skill for 21st-century learners. Much of a student’s success in school, especially now that more and more schools use English as a medium of instruction, is based on reading comprehension skills. And since these skills provide a critical foundation for academic success, not only in English but in other subjects as well, the significance of reading education should not be underestimated. Teaching reading should be done in a way that is systematic and structured. As is well known, literacy is also seen as essential for success in the workplace. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 1997 report, literacy is connected to overall economic well-being.

Clearly, reading also enhances learning in multiple ways. By way of addressing a variety of

materials to read, students are given a chance to absorb vocabulary, grammar and sentence structures as they occur in authentic contexts, thus achieving a more complete picture of the ways in which the features of language work together to transfer meaning. Theorists (e.g. Miller & Gildea, 1987; Nagy & Anderson, 1984) assert that vocabulary growth during a learner’s lifetime occurs indirectly through language exposure rather than through direct teaching, and that reading, rather than oral language, is the major contributor to individual differences in learner vocabularies.

Another way that reading benefits students is by building solid information about different topics. Students' reason for reading, whether in their native or second language, is often to become knowledgeable about a subject they are studying, and this reason is also a useful motivation for overall language learning. Reading for content information in the language classroom gives students both authentic reading material and an authentic purpose for reading. However, they should be reminded that, with so much fun and humor available in texts, there is also room for enjoyment in reading.

Reading also has cognitive effects that extend beyond getting the meaning of words or gaining

new information. These accumulate over time. Cunningham and Stannovich (2004) say that avid reading boosts analytical thinking. Readers not only improve their general knowledge but, more importantly, are able to spot patterns quicker, thus giving their analytical skills a boost.

Finally, reading everyday materials intended for native speakers can provide ESL learners with

insights into the lives and worldview of those who speak the target language. When students access newspapers, magazines and web sites, they are exposed to culture in all its variety, so that monolithic stereotyping begins to break down. And knowing about the target language culture is also said to facilitate second language acquisition.

3. Approaches to dealing with a reading text

The term ‘reading’ is used in different ways, which has caused much confusion, but most researchers now focus on the term’s cognitive aspects – the mental processes readers actually use in comprehending texts when engaged in different types of real life reading. Grabe (2009, p74) defines reading as “a combination of text input, appropriate cognitive processes, and the information that we already know”. His definition, however, while defining the main elements of the reading process, is in some ways deficient. Yet it is crucially important to understand everything that happens when we read. The literature mentions the following approaches to teaching reading:

A. The Bottom-Up Approach: This stipulates that readers must decode the meaning of any text

and that students can read only when they are able to sound out words in a text. Unlike the top-down approach, it ignores readers’ background “schemata” and emphasizes the ability to de-code or put into sound what is seen on the printed page. Teachers using this approach focus on decoding skills and spend almost no time helping emerging readers to recognize what they bring to the information in the text.

This approach has been criticized for many shortcomings. One is the fact that it is difficult to

account for sentence-context effects and the role of any prior knowledge of the text topic in

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facilitating word recognition and comprehension. Evidently, it is inadequate for improving reading abilities because it underestimates the contribution of readers by failing to utilize their knowledge of language and how it works. Although knowing the meaning of unfamiliar words is helpful, it does not ensure that readers will be able to process them rapidly and accurately and thus constructively interact with the text.

B. The Top-Down Approach: This focuses on what the reader brings to the reading process. The

emphasis is on readers as they interact with the text. They are seen as active, making predictions, processing information, and reconstructing the author’s message. They sample the text for information and contrast it with their knowledge in order to make sense of the written text.

However, according to Webur (1984), the top-down model is essentially a model of the fluent

reader and does not account for all the needs of students who are developing their reading skills. Eskey (1988) points out that, with many texts, the reader has little knowledge of the topic and cannot generate predictions. Also, this approach, which tends to de-emphasize the perceptual and decoding dimensions of the process, is good only for strategic and fluent readers for whom perception and decoding have become automatic.

C- The Interactive Approach: Many commentators recognize the value of and need for both the

text and the reader in the reading process, so these are amalgamated in the interactive approach, which stresses what is in the text and what a reader brings to it by using both top-down and bottom-up skills. Good readers are both skillful decoders and good text interpreters. In order to read with fluency and accuracy, students need to master both their bottom-up recognition skills and top-down interpretation skills. The illustration below explains how the interactive approach works. The drawing clearly shows that comprehension is a multipart process that includes a combination of interrelated elements that depend on one another.

Figure 1 Source: Heuristic Thinking of Reading Comprehension by Rand Reading Study Group (Snow, 2002).

Learning to read, contrary to widespread belief, is neither natural nor easy for most children.

Research has shown that, unlike spoken language that is learned with almost any kind of contextual exposure, it is a learned skill. The teaching of reading aims to equip learners with the strategies relevant to their reading purposes, the nature of the text, and the context of situation. In line with this view, English teachers are encouraged to assist students to read for academic purposes in order to develop into strategic readers (Hudson, 2007). Contrary to the popular theory that learning to read is natural and easy, it is indeed a complex linguistic achievement. For many foreign language learners, it requires major effort and incremental skill development. Moreover, teaching reading requires extensive knowledge and skill, developed over years by intensive study and supervised practice. It is

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a job for an expert.

Research has also shown that good readers do not skim and scan lines in a book. They process the letters of each word in detail, although they do so very rapidly and unconsciously. Those who comprehend well accomplish letter-wise scanning with relative ease and fluency. When word identification is fast and accurate, a reader has ample mental energy to consider textual meaning. But knowledge of sound-symbol mapping is crucial in developing word recognition: the ability to sound out and recognize words accounts for about 80 percent of variance in first-grade reading comprehension and continues to be a major factor in text comprehension as students progress through the grades (Grabe, 2009).

The ability to sound out words is, in fact, a major underpinning that allows rapid recognition of

words “by sight.” Before children can easily do this or decode words, they must have at least an implicit awareness of the speech sounds represented by symbolic units (letters and their combinations). Children who learn to read well are sensitive to linguistic structure, recognize redundant patterns, and connect letter patterns with sounds, syllables, and meaningful word parts quickly, accurately and unconsciously. Effective teaching of reading entails all these concepts, presented in an order in which children can learn them (Nuttall, 1996).

4. Causes of poor performance in reading comprehension

By the secondary grades, students are assumed to have acquired basic reading skills that enable them to comprehend different types of text. Despite the fact that researchers and policy-makers have all but abandoned attention to secondary-level remediation in order to focus on improving high school students’ reading abilities, reading levels are still, as indicated earlier, unsatisfactory. In the section below, I will present an account of the causes.

4.1 Lack of motivation

Motivation is critical for SL and FL reading because it has been reported as influencing such key aspects of language as reading strategies, language proficiency and interaction with speakers of the target language. Research has shown an interaction between affective and cognitive processing (Guthrie and Wigfield, 1999). These researchers additionally hypothesize that the coordination of motivational and cognitive processing increases text comprehension. This leads to a question about what motivates young people to read. Asselin (2004) and Schiefele (1999) point out the importance of intrinsic motivation in reading. Classic intrinsic motivators are interest, curiosity, challenge, social connections, and self-efficacy. Similarly, a number of studies (e.g. Brozo & Flynt, 2008; Gee, 1999) suggest that reading instruction that engages students in reading (1) links outside literacy activities to the process, (2) uses varied texts, (3) provides authentic incentives to read, (4) advances collaborative learning, (5) offers choices and options, and (6) challenges students to play a vital role in their own reading process. Consequently, students’ situational interest, which is linked to their intrinsic motivation, is likely to increase. If the teaching activities adapted by the teachers are not directly connected to these motivators, then we must not be surprised if the motivation to read is low.

Thus, motivation and engagement, though different, can feed and influence each other. It seems

that second language learners view reading in English as a school subject and academic task, while reading a text in their mother tongue is seen as an interesting activity (Wurr, 2003). Wurr also argues that these beliefs stop learners from transferring strategies for positive reading from L1 to L2. However, this phenomenon could also be viewed as explaining the lack of engagement and interest demonstrated by some students in reading in English. Learners seeing English reading as purely for narrow academic and professional purposes may be less inclined to read for anything other than these limited reasons. Students in general are not interested in reading and at best only read for very ‘narrow’ purposes and do not usually read for fun or entertainment.

4.2 Difficulty of the text

Another challenge when learning to read may lie in the text itself, in its language, for example, especially when there is a mismatch between the text selected and students’ language level. Even teachers cannot often agree on what texts should be taught, although they generally agree that they should promote intellectual development, independent thinking, be interesting to adolescents and

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meet certain cultural and aesthetic standards (Agee, 1998). Struggling readers all share the same problems, which are weak comprehension, lack of interest and confidence (Arvidson & Blanco, 2004). They spend much time looking up or guessing the meanings of words and this might result in regressive eye movement and losing sight of the plot or the bigger picture before they reach the bottom of the page or end of the text. To avoid frustration and lack of participation, it is vital to ensure that the language of the text matches students’ proficiency level and that there is a match “between the linguistic expectations in the language syllabus with those of the linguistic component syllabus” (Ganakumaran, 2002 p.65). Unfamiliar vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure hamper students’ understanding. They tend to misinterpret or fail to recognize key words and focus instead on the less important parts of a text (Fecteau, 1999). Facing unfamiliar or difficult words, phrases or sentences, they use their lower-level reading skills, looking at a sentence or phrase for clues, instead of using such higher-level skills as inference or relying on the context to guess a word’s meaning (Sarjit & Rosy, 1999).

Lack of the cultural literacy assumed by the writer also adds to the difficulty of a foreign language

reader. This happens when students do not have access to the author’s background knowledge, allusions, and general knowledge the author assumes is present in the target audience. Cultural codes are essential for readers to make meaning of the text. Also, when the text topic is unfamiliar to the reader, whose background is totally different from the author’s, it is hard to make sense of the text. The gap between the student general and cultural knowledge and that found in the authentic text was reported to undermine the activation of global strategies and made the readers tend to use text-bound and local strategies (Al-Mahrooqi, 2012).

4.3 Misunderstanding of the reading process

Good readers usually read slowly, and reread very often to grasp the writer’s message. They work hard to make the text comprehensible and consider their first reading as an approximation or, as it were, a rough draft. While they’re reading, they interact with the text by asking questions, agreeing and disagreeing with its messages, and linking what they read to their life experiences.

However, our students, affected by teaching practices, think that a good reader is someone who

reads fast and sounds out words correctly; so they push themselves to read faster not slower, without understanding what they read. They assume that the teacher will explain the text for them. Consequently, teachers regularly do this, hence making students’ reading difficulty into a vicious circle, their willingness to oblige in this way depriving students of the practice and challenge they need to grow as readers.

Instructor perceptions of the reading process significantly affect the way we teach reading. In the

Arab world, according to Mourtaga (2006), teachers always keep to the syllabus dictated by the ministries of education and do not develop, generate or supplement it with different text genres. Some teachers still see reading as an exercise in reading aloud pronouncing. Students usually focus on vocalization and sounding out words in clusters, without comprehending the text. Instead, they flounder in the text’s ambiguities. Therefore, many of the difficulties students face are sometimes caused by teachers’ misunderstanding of the reading process (Miller and Yochum, 1991).

4.4 Weak first language basis

Studies have shown that a strong basis in a first language fosters school accomplishment in a second language (Cummins, 1979). Brown and Zwann (1996) conclude that the transfer of L1 reading strategies is the facilitative effect of a high L1 reading ability shown by readers with a low L2 proficiency. They also assert that readers with a high L1 reading ability tend to be more accurate in their “paraphrasing” than those with a low L1 ability. This finding is echoed in Yamashita (1999), who reported that readers with a high L1 reading ability showed a significantly higher proportion of successful rather than unsuccessful “local strategies”, while readers with a low L1 reading ability did not show any such facilitative effect. This suggests that readers tend to transfer and use their L1 strategies in the process of L2 reading. In her study on challenges facing Omani students, Al

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Mahrooqi (2012, p.27) concludes that “… student reading in Arabic is underdeveloped, which makes a positive transfer of learning into English almost impossible.” However, teachers should keep in mind that these L1 strategies are not always effective in helping second language learners build a proper meaning from the text because of their weak proficiency in English.

In the Gulf area, because of a valued oral tradition, there is a lack of a reading culture across

society (Shannon 2003). Standards of reading in Arabic are also low. The phenomenon of ‘diglossia’ may exist to some extent with UAE students, just as it does in other Arab countries where standard Arabic is actually students’ second language and colloquial Arabic their ‘mother tongue’ (Thompson and Thomas, 1983). An implication of this is that many UAE students lack any general background knowledge and global awareness that could facilitate their English reading development. Wurr (2003) concludes that L1 and L2 involve separate words and worlds. He adds that many students in the case studies he reports on believe that reading in English as a second language is an extension of schoolwork, an academic task, while reading in the mother tongue is associated with personal pursuits and interests.

On top of that there is a lack of a reading ‘habit’ in both the L1 and target language (TL) for a

majority of learners across the Arab world in general. Rivera (1999) reports that learners literate in their native language progress at a faster rate when learning English than those illiterate in the language they speak. This is why the Massachusetts Department of Education, for example, funds classes in native language literacy as part of the continuum of ESOL classes in the DOE-funded ABE program.

In the Arab world, education systems have failed to create a reading generation or a sufficiency of

good writers, both of which are primary conditions for creating an encouraging reading environment. Haker (2004) wrote as follows in the Guardian: “The Greater Middle East region, once the cradle of scientific discovery and learning, has largely failed to keep up with the modern knowledge-oriented world…Arab output of books represent just 1.1% of the world total.” In comparison, Iceland produces more than 250,000 items of new fiction every year.

Another challenge that schools in the Middle East world face is students’ resistance to reading at

all and to extensive reading programs in particular. Getting students to read extensively, when possible, is the easiest and most effective way to improve their reading skills because it is easy to teach reading in a favorable climate where reading is valued and viewed as a source of enjoyment (Nuttal, 2005). Even in content subjects like science, arts, and geography, students seldom read books; instead, they depend on notes and summaries written by skillful teachers. Thus when preparing for tests or lessons in these subjects, students read a few unrelated, simplified statements and thus have no chance to analyze a text and construct their own knowledge. What reinforces these faulty practices is the type of questions that students are usually asked to respond to, which largely focus on reproducing information, not on constructing new knowledge.

Finally, Hayes and Schmauder (1999) argue that the ESL reading comprehension difficulties

exhibited by native speakers of Arabic may result from deficient letter and word identification. Abu-Rabia (2002) echoes this concern pointing out the roles of phonology, morphology and sentence structure in Arabic reading and emphasizing the key role of trilateral-quadrilateral roots in Arabic visual-orthographic processing. This lack of proficiency in basic decoding skills is compounded by a lack of linguistic skills.

4.5 Writing style and text organization

Writing style and structure are also believed to pose a problem for students in trying to comprehend texts (Davis et al., 1992; Al-Mahrooqi, 2012). The participants in Al Mahrooqi’s study mentioned earlier reported that the wider the gap between the content of the passage and their native culture, the more difficult and more confusing they find the text. They also gave examples of incidents in their classes where they could not realize the hilarity of an event or a description in a literary text. If the writer is from a different background, students need to be aware of the cultural norms in the author’s world in order to identify examples of language deviance and their significance. Some passages of the IELTS tests, for example, are widely disliked due to an abundance of metaphorical language and imagery that students fail to interpret (Kamariah, 2009). Linguistic

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structure can be especially confusing e.g. the use of irregular punctuation, compound words, capital letters and organization. Although literary texts provide contexts in which ESL students can learn more about the L2 culture (McCafferty, 2002), unsuitable texts can create distance, especially cultural distance, between text and readers (Saraceni, 2003).

Besides linguistic skills, students also need background knowledge to fully comprehend texts that

address international topics (Horowitz, 1990) and are written by authors who assume their readers share the same background knowledge and perhaps norms. When students encounter unfamiliar cultural phenomena, they tend to interpret their meaning based on their own culture, which might produce an erroneous representation. Sometimes students are faced with a cultural reference totally unfamiliar to them, having no parallel in their own culture. At other times, they might come across something familiar to them that might represent something else entirely in another culture. An example is death, symbolized by the color black in Western society, but associated with white among Muslims. Understanding culture is made even more difficult since the values which shape characters and their point of view are not explicitly portrayed in many academic and literary texts. The Omani students in Al Mahrooqi’s (2012) paper indicated that they had to read a story or a part of the story more than once to figure out its meaning, and in many cases they stopped reading the story. They attributed this to the difference between the learners’ culture and the author’s culture, and the use of unfamiliar idioms and expressions, not to mention the metaphorical style. She concludes that familiar content facilitates student prediction and increases comprehension. Gurnam and Ganakumaran et al. (2003) attribute students’ misunderstanding to teachers’ lack of cultural awareness, a lack of support material that addresses cultural issues, and introductory classes that pay minimal attention to textual cultural elements.

Several studies have reported the positive effects of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension

(Alptekin, 2006; Steffensen, Joag-Dev & Anderson, 1979) and on vocabulary learning. For example, Pulido (2003) and Steffensen et al. (2004) demonstrate that when students are familiar with cultural norms, they make a better interpretation of the text than when they are not. Further, in cases of new cultural norms, students tend to refer to their own culture, which results in poor interpretations of the text.

4.6 Teaching practices

The teaching of reading in English and Arabic in Arab schools is believed to be ineffective. Mustafa’s (2002) research, based on interviews with UAE schoolteachers and school graduates, reveals that much school-based language teaching is grounded on out-of-date methodology. He reports that teachers in UAE schools use the transmission model to deliver information and concludes from interview data that ninety per cent of teachers see reading as a pronunciation exercise and teach only one strategy that enables students to obtain explicit information from a graded passage. He also mentions a minimal use by staff and learners of the school library in the schools he studied.

Despite the great importance of improving reading levels, still very unsatisfactory, in schools,

colleges and universities, current teaching practices have failed so far to effect an improvement. There are several reasons. Most of the existing textbooks are old, teacher-centered and ineffective in learner situations and do not allow sufficient time or activity to enhance reading skills. The main teaching method is not learner-centered, so student involvement in learning through question and discussion is insignificant. The oral lecture is the dominating method, where the role of learners is not that of active participants. No chance is given to them to communicate or interact with the teacher or among themselves. Teacher activities mainly consist of a simple oral presentation during class time. No proper tasks or exercises for intensive reading are given in class and there is only rare use of productive technology.

Hence, comprehension instruction is very important in the reading process and English teachers

should pay close attention to it so that their students will develop operational reading habits. Worthy & Broaddus (2002) highlight how teacher passion about reading could have a positive effect on their students’ interest in reading. In order to engage your students in the reading process, they say, you need quality instruction and student engagement is critical for improving reading abilities. For instance, Many, Dewberry, Taylor, and Coady (2009) claim that teachers who have a good understanding of language and literacy development provide more approachable and meaningful reading instruction for

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their students.Teachers who demonstrate instructions that include establishing connections with student experiences and prior knowledge, making the most of teachable moments, and using multiple resources to support students’ reading, usually see their students’ achievements improve.

I have been observing teachers for years now and have noticed that in reading classes most teachers, even the experienced ones, do not teach it, as opposed to testing it. For instance, the teacher asks questions on the text and the students give some correct and some incorrect answers. Has learning taken place in this situation? Not very much, if the teacher stops there and does not reinforce the reading passage with meaningful and interactive class work. What adds to these unfavorable situations is the way reading is assessed in our schools, where the emphasis is on form and what the learners can do with the text. The example below unambiguously illustrates the situation:

Read and answer the question. “She gronked the floobe” Question: What did she gronk?

The majority if not all students might answer the question correctly and yet not understand what the sentence means. This example shows the need for reconsidering the types of questions and activities when tackling reading comprehension in our schools.

5. Improving Reading Skills

Having studied these interrelated causes, one can recognize that reading skills develop slowly over time as learners gain more knowledge, improve their strategic reading, and expand their vocabulary. Convergent findings of high-quality research have also shown how children learn to read and what must be done to ensure that they do. Beyond doubt, reading early links one benefit to another, creating a learning environment that will naturally improve and reinforce reading habits and skills. Donnell and Wood (1999) mention three categories of factors that affect comprehension: factors in the reader (interest/motivation, fluency and metacognition); factors in the text (concept density, organization, and style); and factors around readability (length of sentences and difficulty of vocabulary).

Specifically, teachers must understand the basic psychological processes involved in reading: how

children develop reading skills, how good readers differ from poor readers, how the English language is structured in its spoken and written form, and the validated principles of effective reading instruction. The ability to design and deliver lessons to academically diverse learners, to select proven instructional methods and materials, and the use of appropriate assessment to tailor instruction are all central to effective teaching. I will now offer suggestions that I believe will improve students’ reading skills.

5.1 Text Readability

One of the most significant factors that may involve students in reading a text and probably make sense of the information in a passage is its readability. This simply means the quality of the text that makes it easy to read and understand by the target audience. The purpose of text simplification is to provide the L2 reader with work that is accessible and understandable. Generally, simplified L2 reading texts are either adapted from authentic texts or written explicitly for the L2 reader. At the linguistic level, simplified texts are largely modified to control the complexity of the lexis and syntax (Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy, & McNamara, 2007). Overall, empirical studies that analyze the benefits of text types support the notion that the use of simplified input results in more comprehensible language and improved comprehension. For example, Long and Ross (1993) found that L2 students who read linguistically simplified texts scored significantly higher on multiple-choice items intended to assess comprehension than did those who read the authentic version.

But how can teachers identify and ensure that a text is readable for learners in their class? What should they do to measure the readability of the text? Most teachers rely on their intuition.

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Intuition, however, is influenced by personal beliefs and simple assumptions about what makes a text readable. The author’s experience as a language teacher, language learner and materials writer may determine the process of simplification and allow him or her to rely on subjective approximations of what learners at a particular level should be able to understand (Allen, 2009). The readability of a text can also be measured using certain formulas/ tools which are matched against the audience’s reading level. This is not a foolproof approach but offers a general guide to a text’s reading friendliness. With technology, however, measuring readability has become easier and more accurate. A handy tool is in MS Word itself, which uses measuring scales like the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. But at times it is rather awkward to interpret the scores because some tools don’t match readability ease with a particular age group. However, each tool provides explanations for its scores immediately below the text analysis, thus making an assessment possible.

More recently and relevantly, Alptekin (2006) has shown that when the elements of a short story are nativized to make it culturally more familiar, students can make better interpretations and achieve better comprehension. Bearing this in mind, teachers should perhaps present both culture and other significant elements together and thus assist students’ comprehension. Alptekin’s approach is persuasive, since he attempts to minimize possible intervening variables in reader understanding. Working with nativized texts may prove suitable for measuring how operative the use of activities is in compensating for the lack of a relevant cultural schema. Ismail & Salim (2009), working among Turkish university students, investigated the effect of cultural familiarity on the comprehension of short stories and on whether nativizing a story or using reading activities might compensate for the lack of such familiarity. They report that considerable differences existed between the groups’ performances. The two groups that received the nativized version of the story scored higher than the other two groups. To maintain a balance between nativized and authentic passages, Al Mahrooqi (2012) suggests gradual introduction of authentic materials from the less difficult and more familiar to the more demanding and less familiar. This is believed to assist students’ comprehension and increase their involvement with the text and reading process as a whole. 5.2 Better Text selection

Another way to motivate students to read is through better text selection. The most important criterion here is probably student interest. This does not mean that the texts have to be about teenage issues only. Students like to read about adventure, mysteries and life experience. As they arrive with different backgrounds, interests and abilities, the best option is to choose texts that vary in terms of genre, topic and language level. In literacy and language development, only the path of pleasure works (Krashen, 2007). AL-Mahrooqi (2012) implies that students can also be consulted on the topics that they would like to read about.

Reading should give pleasure and satisfy student curiosity to know more. They need to learn that

texts can contain humor, fun, stories, useful information and fuel for the imagination. Guthrie et al. (2004) claim that the effectiveness of reading instruction depends not only on students’ linguistic and literacy skills but also on their level of interest. Elley and Mangubhai’s (1983) study also found that high interest storybooks helped an intervention group gain reading and listening comprehension at twice the normal rate.

5.3 Teaching Strategies

Obviously, teachers play a significant role in student education. They not only communicate knowledge but also help shape attitudes to education, school and, more specifically, to the subjects that they teach. Thus, they need to be properly trained and equipped with appropriate knowledge and skills. They first need to be taught how to read independently any text (not just those listed for the program) and to be able to arrive at their own interpretation by using critical thinking. They also need to address a text’s cultural elements, which, if neglected, might result in misunderstanding and limited student participation. Perhaps another skill that teachers need is the ability to produce their own supplementary materials. Instead of relying on the Ministry of Education or reference books, they can learn how to get information through the Internet, for example, and adapt it to suit their students’

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proficiency level and interest. It is also important to ensure that teachers are equipped with enough pedagogical content knowledge, which influences classroom practice, and which, in turn, affects students’ learning outcomes and achievement.

Using a variety of attractive teaching strategies is another way to improve student attitudes

towards and engagement in reading classes. For those with a high proficiency level, teachers can use activities where they get to practice their creative and critical thinking skills, such as in writing their own scripts, staging a drama, or even doing some creative writing. Teachers can also encourage students to be more autonomous by using computers as well as the Internet and guiding them in activities like researching information on the author’s background or a text’s historical elements. Multitasking for large classes enables students to rotate tasks so that they can try a variety of activities and work at their own pace. Dedicated teachers won’t encounter any difficulty in finding teaching resources and workable materials to enhance their students’ reading abilities.

Reading comprehension is a complex interpreting meaning process, which is largely influenced by the reader and his/her ability to accomplish the reading tasks. Teachers are thus challenged to create a conducive environment for students in which to think and explore, while concurrently offering their guiding role (as facilitators, mentors and scaffolding provider) to support students’ active roles in meaning making and constructing new knowledge (Murphy, 2002). Teachers are encouraged to develop reading strategies in their students; Yussof, Jamian, Roslan, Hamzah & Kabilan (2012), for example, maintain that implementing cognitive (story structure, questioning, synthesizing, visualizing, and inferencing) and graphic organizing (GO) are able to increase the reading comprehension performance among the subjects of their study which was conducted on high schools in Malaysia.

However, the most significant thing that teachers can do is to motivate students to read.

Negmeldin & Hala (2011a) have investigated the motivation of UAE high school students to read English as a foreign language and explored differences in motivational constructs based on gender and language achievement variables. They report that UAE high school English teachers may need to create a better classroom environment in order to enhance their students’ intrinsic motivation to read English as a foreign language. They also indicate that UAE teachers should be aware that some instructional practices might be contributing to a decline in student motivation. Therefore, they may need to use more effective instructional practices, especially among male high school students.

Psychologists and educators have recognized motivation as a key element in successful learning.

Motivation and engagement in the classroom can be increased through explicit support by using real world connections to reading and texts that are familiar and relevant. Additionally, since extensive reading has become accepted as one of the most effective strategies for motivating second and foreign language learning, teachers can further engage students in the classroom by explicit modeling, scaffolding, and coaching in reading (Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991).

Because the reading process is essentially "unobservable", teachers need to make significant

efforts to understand their students' reading behavior and to help them understand their behavior as well. It is thus vital that teachers know as much as possible about the cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds of their students, since many of these factors influence reading in an L2 context. And, while acknowledging the need and importance of higher-order processes in teaching reading, teachers should not ignore the impact of lower-level processes. Like errors in writing, reading ‘miscues’ and difficulties can also indicate developmental changes and should not be used to label students as good or bad readers (Devine, 1981).

5.4 Building a solid repertoire of words

Cobb (1999) reports that word knowledge is the key ingredient in successful reading in both L1 and L2. This, he says, is the major contributor to L2 academic reading success and is more important than other kinds of linguistic knowledge, including syntax. He bases his assertion on the work of other authorities, but also points to experience in Oman, where the major weakness of secondary school graduates entering college is in reading English texts. The root of this problem seems to be a lack of vocabulary, a deficit of fundamental importance, given research findings on reading effectiveness and the critical mass of lexical knowledge needed to achieve reading competence. Hirsh and Nation (1992) conclude that to understand an unsimplified text a reader needs to know 95% of

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the tokens. This suggests that a text is comprehensible when there is no more than one unknown token every two lines! The threshold level for vocabulary knowledge has been highlighted strongly by the work of Nation and others.

Al-Mahrooqi (2012) emphasizes the need for vocabulary sufficiency in facilitating reader autonomous abilities, which in turn would improve reading comprehension and speed. There was a common consensus among the participants of her study that lack of vocabulary was the biggest hindrance to their comprehension. Most of them reported that they had to leave the passage and stop reading it when they encountered a text dense with new unfamiliar vocabulary. 5.5 Using the Library

Insufficient exposure to English is clear in schools and across the wider community. Most schools lack a library and, if they have one, it will be poorly equipped and rarely visited. Meanwhile, promoting a reading culture at home is not among parents’ top priorities, yielding in importance to financial and other concerns. If there are books in the home, almost all will be in Arabic and about Islam.

Sadly, many teachers view school librarians as staff members who just sit and catalog books or check them out to students. But they are of course materially involved in the reading and comprehension success of the students they serve. In a rich reading environment, they support reading and literacy initiatives and the comprehension strategies behind becoming a good reader (Laura, 2011).

Reading comprehension is taught and used in all content areas, and at all grade levels, and librarians are in a position to be teachers of reading comprehension that will positively impact all content areas (Hudak, 2008). They can be at the heart of the reading program, promoting reading comprehension and working hand in hand with other educators who are striving for student success!

A vital part in teaching reading strategies in a library setting is collaboration between the classroom teacher and the librarian. Research, for example, shows that in a certain poor community that faced a huge challenge when it came to its students learning to read, collaboration played a major role in overcoming the problem. When teachers and librarians work together, young children learn to read and comprehend what they read (Moreillion, 2012).

5.6 Using technology

Technology has undoubtedly changed what people read, how they read, and when they read. The

Internet provides a gateway to almost every type of information at anytime and with immediate access. We are in an age where every document can be turned into a digital and electronic format, a practice made available through reading gadgets that have helped students enormously. The eBook, an electronic book where a digital device is used instead of real paper, has made it easier for readers to flip and browse. Added to this, multiple eBooks can be stored in a little portable device, giving students a library in their pockets! Translation and explanation are also possible from eBooks, increasing student autonomy by leaps and bounds. Another attractive feature of the eBooks is that some are editable. Students can change their setting, display, font and color. There is a real need, then, to shift from the paper book to the electronic version.

However, Grabe (2009) has noted that the introduction of the computer and Internet increases the need for effective reading skills so that students may better cope with the large quantities of information now available. Hence they should be trained to scan and skim efficiently huge amounts of information; they must also construct their own knowledge, based on the strategies they use to filter the content of different texts. Easy access to information on the web also creates a need for learners to comply with the ethics of research, guidance in which should begin as early as possible.

Conclusion

Reading comprehension skills rank among the most critical elements of a student's success in ESL and EFL. Effective reading provides the door to learning about all other subjects in schools and

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universities in the Middle East since English as the medium of instruction is so widespread. Reading for comprehension is a vital common core skill that can and must be taught.

However, research has shown that students struggle to understand texts in English and that they lack crucial skills when it comes to reading comprehension. A group of factors has led to a worrying decline in reading comprehension skills and are related to the teacher, the student, and the text writer. The fundamental step for improving reading abilities is to form a common understanding among all participants of what the complex process of reading really involves.

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