A New Technique for the Teaching of Reading to Advanced Students

One result of the structuralist dogma that is speech has been a relative lack of interest in the problems of the advanced student of English as a foreign language for whom the ability to read the written language with good comprehension at reasonable rates may be at least as important as the ability to converse. The materials now available for teaching reading to such students provide intensive practice in reading simplified English rapidly and in various ways attack the problem of vocabulary but show little or no awareness of the much more complicated syntax characteristic of unsimplified university-level prose. At this level the student must read by structures, not words, but many of the structures he must be able to read will be partly or wholly new to him since they seldom occur in the spoken language, especially the kind of spoken language he is likely to have heard. Thus the structure of the written language must be approached systematically if we mean to produce readers of the best books and journals and not simply better readers of simplified English. The technique described here is designed to introduce advanced students of English as a foreign language to the structure of what might be called educated written English. The theoretical orientation of these materials is transformational, but they do not attempt to teach grammar systematically; the emphasis is on just a few complex sructures that have proved especially troublesome to non-native speakers. The paper includes examples of the materials themselves.