Strategies for Developing Reading Skills

Abstract

Language instructors are often frustrated by the fact
that students do not automatically transfer the
strategies they use when reading in their native
language to reading in a language they are learning.
Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at
the beginning and going word by word, stopping to
look up every unknown vocabulary item, until the
reach the end. When they do this, students are
relying exclusively on their linguistic knowledge, a
bottom-up strategy. One of the most important
functions of the language instructor, then, is to help
students move past this idea and use top down
strategies they do in their native language.