The reading material consists of bubbles, short dialogues, longer conversations, passages of various lengths, leaflets, brochures, timetables, menus, tickets, signs, travel programmes, ads and notices. This wide range of reading materials aims at an absolute exposure to authentic text-types. The aim of this variety is developing reading strategies and skills. So the ultimate objective is that you will be able to read and understand a text either at school or in your daily life.
At school, Reading is about reading a text (of any type mentioned above) to answer questions related to the text or what we call Reading Comprehension. And understand its meaning and the way of dealing with it.
There are many activities that can be dealt with during the reading comprehension such as:
- Skimming (identifying main ideas).
- Scanning (locating specific information).
- Understanding vocabulary in context, finding synonyms and opposites.
- Discovering the organization of a text (introduction, conclusion, paragraphs, and linkers).
- Contextual reference (referring back to a word mentioned in the reading and understanding its referent).
- True / False statement either to justify or correct.
- Multiple choice alternatives (choose the right answer or alternative).
- Questions to answer.
- Scrambles paragraphs to rearrange.
- Completion of statements.
- Table completion.
- Word building (finding nouns/adjectives/verbs that have the same meaning as the ones indicated).
So where you read something for the sake of Reading (you read the text just for pleasure, you don't have any purpose behind reading it), you don't have to think about these activities (type of questions). But if you are reading a text for a purpose, then you will obliged to answer some of these questions in order to understand the text.
