Having a reading skill is much emphasized during school times. Students are expected to master skills relating to reading. In this global era, anyone has equal chances to grab the world, but it requires skills which are much related to the ability of decoding information in the form of printed or written resources. Because of this, being good and strategic readers will bring great benefit to them. They can move faster and farther ahead. As a teacher, however, it is not an easy job to do. Many teachers have difficulties in teaching reading. Most students are reluctant to participate in reading class. They get bored easily in a reading class for they have seen the activities monotonously.
It is true that a reading class is very potential to rise up problems since most teachers are trapped with the reading media which are in the form of textbook and any other written sources. This will bring to the activities focusing on answering questions and doing many worksheets, which have been the favorite activities in the reading class but turn down students’ interest and engagement.
The following activities are worth trying to begin engaging and easy ways:
1. Pre-reading activities
a) Show several pictures to students relating to a topic of reading subject and ask them to provide words or sentences about the pictures.
b) Make one or more simple sentences about a topic, but not too many or complex that will stimulate students responds. Drive them to explore everything that will reveal any important information relating to the topic.
c) Ask students to list words, verbs, nouns, adjectives or phrases as many as possible relating to a topic.
d) Ask students to write or say something about what they expect or like and dislike about a topic.
e) Provide an animal or human picture with enough space to put sentences in the head for the subject and the body (neck to feet) for the predicates of sentences.
2. While-reading activities
a) Give students charts or tables relating to a topic and ask them to complete or fill.
b) Spot some mistakes or irrelevant information in a text and ask students to identify and then make some corrections.
c) Provide main ideas as many as paragraphs and ask students to match, or do the other way around.
d) Do the activity like “pairing up word”. To do this, you just delete verbs, nouns or adjectives which have strong collocation with the words and ask students to guess what the appropriate words to put in given gaps.
e) Ask students to make some logical connections by drawing circle and straight lines to connect a word or phrase in each sentence.
3. Post-reading
a) Ask students to rewrite the text by modifying some words or phrases or sentences as they like. For example, they might change “One day” into “In a beautiful morning”, and so on.
b) Ask students to paraphrase or make a different form of the original sentence since they think it has a unique form in comparison with their native language sentence form and find out whether it is acceptable or not.
c) Ask students to find other texts whose topics are similar and ask them to list the similar words, phrases or values among the texts.
d) And ask them which text they think better and why.
e) Ask students to guess what texts are trying to say, the writer’s purpose of writing the text.
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