Some Recent Approaches to EFL Reading Instruction

Abstract

It may very well be that the language acquisition skill most thoroughly studied so far in this century in relation to native speakers of a language is reading. Likewise, the type of material most commonly available to the second/ foreign language teacher is in the form of reading. Unfortunately there seems to have been a gap in scientific study of the reading skill as it applies to the non-native speaker, especially one in the intermediate stage between phoneme/ morpheme/ phrase recognition and fluency development. The purpose of this article is to outline some of the problem areas in the teaching of reading of a second/ foreign language, especially at the intermediate level and to set up some hypotheses concerning the methods of developing the second-language reading skill. The discussion, then, will include first a general survey of the state of second-language teaching programs with some comments on norms for the evaluation of student progress. The second part of the discussion will contain some more specific theories concerning materials, teaching methods, and motivation. The general direction of the argument throughout is that a better understanding of the personalis tic insights of modern psychology can lead to a far more effective treatment of the reading skill in the second-language curriculum. While the viewpoint of the writer is that of the English-language teacher in Korea, the principles, mutatis mutandis, would apply to other second/foreign language teaching situations.