Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Reading
94
practical advice on the matter of reading quickly will be
found in E.Fry, Teaching Faster Reading.)
It should be the concern of every teacher to foster
increased general reading speed in pupils. Fluent silent
reading is specially necessary for anyone who proposes to
venture on to any kind of higher education, and when, as Fry
and many others have clearly shown, it is fairly easy to
double and treble that speed, it is obvious that the effort to
do this ought to be made.
Some relationships, within material to be read
In discussing the complex nature of the reading skill it was
pointed out that reading involves correlating elements of
language with meaning. The most familiar of all elements of
language are ‘words’ and it must be quite clear that part of
what is involved in understanding a text is understanding the
meanings of individual words in that text. Thus if a reader
does not understand the meaning of a word like fleet he may
miss the whole point of a passage which concerns some kind
of naval engagement. This particular kind of block to
comprehension is so common that it is frequently taken to be
the whole story, but it is not quite so simple as that. The
failure to recognise a particular lexical item may not be the
result of simple blank ignorance of the kind suggested above,
it may be much more subtle than this. It may be the product
of false association, as in the case of the reader who
understands ‘concerted action’ as something to do with
music; or it may be due to lack of knowledge of the limits of
derivational morphology as in the case of the reader who
understands ‘commando’ as the men under a particular
officer’s command; it may be due to a kind of folk etymology
as in the case of the reader who understood a ‘limpet’ to be a
dwarf with one leg shorter than the other; or for foreigners
especially it may arise from the existence of ‘false friend’
cognates so that a Spaniard or a Frenchman may understand
that a ‘library’ is a place where books are sold.
Understanding the meanings of individual words is not the
end either. The efficient reader needs to be able to understand
the patterns of relationships between words— the semantic

---

Reading
95
patterns of lexical items. Thus he must learn to observe for
example how a series of synonyms can carry a particular
concept through a passage (weapons…arms… equipment…),
or how a general term is made more precise (The men were
issued with their weapons. Each man received a pistol, two
clips of ammunition, and a dagger), or how a technical
meaning may be assigned to a term so that it may be used as a
counter in the development of an exposition (Let us call this
first infiltration of the enemy’s defences the first wave. Once
the first wave is in position…the second wave…).
There is still much more to come. The efficient reader must
have a clear understanding of the grammatical relationships
which hold between the lexical items, and he needs to grasp
the semantics of a particular grammatical item in a particular
context. For instance a sentence like ‘We’ll change the
programme in Bremen’, may be spoken in such a way that it
is quite unambiguous, but in its written form it may be
interpreted either to mean ‘We’ll change the programme
which has been arranged for Bremen’, or ‘We’ll change the
programme when we get to Bremen’. This is a question of
whether  in Bremen is related to the whole sentence ‘We’ll
change the programme’, as a sentence adverb, or whether in
Bremen is a prepositional phrase acting as a post-modifier of
programme.
The good reader also needs to be familiar with the precise
meaning of the particular grammatical devices used,
structure words, word order, word forms and broad patterns
of sentences. (The text says ‘The airforce had agreed to create
a diversion by bombing the other side of the submarine basin
but they were late.’ How does this differ from saying ‘and
they were late’? ‘The aircraft were due at 3.40 precisely. At
3.46 the first anti-aircraft gun opened fire.’ Why not ‘The
first anti-aircraft gun opened fire at 3.46’? The consequences
of subordinating one clause to another, or choosing one tense
rather than another, or relating sentences by nominalisation
(‘The men disappeared into the night. Their disappearing so
silently was quite eerie’) and all the multifarious patterns of
the grammar in their almost incredible richness are all the
proper subject of the good reader’s attention.
So also are the patterns of logical relationships within
texts. The skilled reader makes use of the information, the

---

Reading
96
signals, passed to him by the lexical and grammatical
patterns to discover the architecture of a passage, the
framework upon which it is built. He can perceive that this
sentence is a generalisation, that this paragraph which
follows is one bit of the evidence upon which the
generalisation is based. Here, and here, and here are time
adverbs showing the temporal sequence of the events in the
story, and so on. It is from this general overview that he is
most likely to gain an understanding of what the text is
really about.
There are three other kinds of relationship which concern
written texts. The first of these is the relationship which exists
between the author and his text. The skilled reader is aware of
the author’s attitude and purpose whether he intends the
passage to be taken seriously or whether he is writing
ironically, or with his tongue in his cheek, or whether he is
writing light-heartedly or with humorous intent. The author
may be writing something purely descriptive, attempting to
encapsulate a bit of experience in words, or he may be
attempting to present a narrative, expound a theory or
develop an argument. An anecdote may be recounted to
support a contention, emotion may be deliberately invoked to
cover inadequate reasoning, but at every point the author is
using what he writes for some end in human communication
and it is essential that the reader should be aware of what this
is. Reading a joke as though it were serious exposition is a very
radical kind of misunderstanding.
The second sort of relationship concerning written texts is
that which exists between the reader and the text. Obviously
the author’s purpose will be related to the reader’s reaction to
the text, but there is one kind of reader response which
involves a kind of extension of the text and which can
therefore be very important for a full understanding of it. It
may be, for example, that the text is so constructed that it
leads the reader very powerfully towards adopting a particular
point of view, or accepting a particular generalisation, or value
judgment, yet the conclusion may never be explicitly stated in
the text. So the logical implications of a text may need to be
explored as well as the syllogisms expounded explicitly in it.
To fully comprehend the point of a short story, for example, it
may be necessary to imagine what the next incident in the

---

Reading
97
narrative might be and the good reader has the ability to make
this kind of projection.
The third kind of relationship which is relevant to the
understanding of a written text is that which exists between
the text and the culture, in the anthropological sense, of the
community in whose language the text is written. The
understanding reader is aware of the precise cultural value of
verbal expressions. It is not sufficient to know that an
expression like Spiffing! means Excellent!, or some such
thing, it is also necessary to be aware that such an expression
places the user, socially, educationally and temporally. The
whole realm of literary allusion and quotation, comes in
here. It may be necessary to know who wrote the text, when
he wrote it and for whom, in order to understand it fully.
Such information is often not derivable directly from the text
and has to be acquired from some outside supplementary
source. There is, however, something of a tendency among
teachers to provide too much of this supplementary
information at the expense of paying attention to the text
itself and what it says and the priority must always be to
ensure that the text itself yields up as much as possible of
what is really relevant to its understanding. Knowing who
wrote it and when may not be relevant at all.
It is not only the cultural value of words and expressions
that is important; the ability to identify the kinds of situation,
the topics, the social classes, the geographical regions, and the
points in time to which they belong; but the value which the
text as a whole may have in a particular society. In order to
understand a play like Look Back in Anger by John Osborne,
or a novel like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan
Sillitoe and to appreciate why they are regarded as important
in post-war British literature it is necessary to have at least
some idea of the nature of the social changes that took place in
the 1950s and 1960s in England and the kinds of conflict that
these changes generated. All of this is part of comprehending a
text. It is clearly some way from understanding the plain sense
and is beginning to approach literary appreciation, but it
remains true that even quite ordinary pieces of writing like
advertisements offering French lessons at your home may be
misunderstood if the cultural context in which they appear is
not known.

---

Reading
98
Finally every reader must make some kind of evaluation of
the texts he reads. Until he does this he cannot be said to have
fully comprehended them. He has to relate what the text
conveys through its vocabulary and grammar and its
rhetorical and logical structure and the attitudes and cultural
meanings which it has to his own experience, his own
conception of reality. He needs to judge if this is really the way
men and women behave under the influence of fear, love, or
hate. The whole question of the truth of fiction needs to be
examined (is the story of the Prodigal Son a ‘true’ story?) and
so too must the validity of logical and rhetorical structures.
(Are the conclusions which the author draws from the
evidence he presents justified? Are the conclusions the author
leads us to draw valid? Is the language used in this apparently
objective description in fact ‘loaded’ so that we find ourselves
approaching this following section of the text with prejudice?
and so on.) It is only when all of these dimensions of
understanding have been seriously contemplated that full
comprehension may be achieved.
This then is a brief exploration of the nature of reading, of
the kind of thing it is, and the factors that enter into it. How
then is reading to be taught and what part does it play in
teaching English to foreigners?