Today, there are many students who require learning and acquiring English as a foreign language. Either for their careers, because they are a language student or simply for pleasure or interest. This acquisition or learning opens many paths for the people in their life. Not only is it good for children, in their cognitive development, but it can also be learned by adults. It is never too late to learn. However, many of these students often run away from English because they feel that they do not learn it easily, much less understand it. In particular, Reading. And, in fact, this is the beginning of the end. Since if you don't like reading and besides that, you are afraid of English, you will lose all your motivation and you will never try again! This cannot happen. For this reason, it is good to start to develop in our students a good reading habit, but beyond that, a pleasure for reading. For, just as it is the beginning of the end, it is also the beginning of a good process for learning English. What better than before speaking a foreign language, you can understand it just by reading advertisements, understanding magazine or newspaper articles, and even much better if you can read your favorite novels fluently in their original language.
For this reason, this chapter we address from Harmer, "How to teach Reading." It gives us excellent tools to teach reading and adapt to the needs of our students. Get them to start reading, develop their vocabulary, and even their grammar! With these teaching strategies provided by the material. However, certain important factors must be considered in order to use this material to its full extent. One of them is getting to know our students well. As such, we will be able to see what type of reading could contribute the most to their educational process. Either intensive reading (which is generally used in the classroom) or extensive reading (it is what they can explore on their own at home and in their free time). After recognizing that it is the best for our student, we must start planning different activities and proposals so that slowly but progressively he begins to enjoy his learning much more and can reach a happy reading. This should be the purpose of every teacher who teaches English. Our students must reach a point in their educational process where they enjoy what they do and are not frustrated when they see that they do not obtain results, but rather have more and more reasons to continue learning.
In conclusion, as a teacher it is important to have good tools for our students, to know them in depth and to guide them continuously so that they do not abandon English out of frustration or fear. We must always follow the principles of teaching English, MOTIVATE THEM, because without this, reading would be the beginning of the end. The teacher's task should be to make reading the principle of English for people who want to learn it. So that one day they will come to a happy reading.
Wtitten by Natalia Márquez