Teaching Professionally Oriented Reading Strategies to Pre-Service English Teachers

The purpose of our paper was to add to the available body of research regarding teaching university students professionally oriented reading, in particular teaching master’s level students, pre-service English teachers, professionally oriented reading. We found that reading for professional development does not appear to be a popular activity among the students who participated in our survey. We also found that the main reasons which hinder professionally oriented reading are lack of time and relevancy of the literature, the level of linguistic difficulty professional reading has, and lack of information about availability of professionally oriented reading materials. To alleviate these problems, we suggest teaching strategies for enhancing reading professional literature by pre-service English teachers, such as suggesting relevant readings and other professional resources; prompting annotations and reflections; inspiring connections between theory and practice; championing experimentation. We believe these strategies will work with master’s level students at universities offering a degree in teaching as well because academic subjects’ teachers and theses supervisors can act as coaches and mentors when it comes to engaging students into professional reading, suggest meaningful reading tasks for their students, and provide ongoing personalized and explicit encouragement and support. The article discusses implications for professional development, concludes about the positive impact of reading professional literature on the professional development of pre-service teachers of the English language.