Teaching Reading to ESL College Students in the Mainstream Classroom

"ESL Students open a window on the world" - Ruthellen Corbett, Tunxis Community-Technical College

For many ESL students entering the college mainstream classroom, reading involves complex interactive processes with the reader using multi-levels to derive meaning. For ESL students, reading is a challenge and they often display the following characteristics which often poses a challenge to any college professor or instructor.

For starters, ESL students are dependent on bottom up processing. This means they consult a dictionary to plod through word-by-word and for all unfamiliar lexical items. They also tend to focus on grammatical structures. They don't use their previous knowledge and prediction. They tend overlook textual clues and guess wildly at the meaning of a passage based on incomplete preconceptions. Finally, they also tend to read at a slower rate compared to those of their native English speaking peers.

Pay Attention to Cross-cultural Elements

ESL students enter the classroom with values and attitudes based on their own cultural patterns of living and thinking. Sensitivity to cultural differences must also include those cultural aspects which belong specifically to the area of academics. These areas specifically include: text organization, attitudes towards a book and its content, nature of the subject matter content and the academic discipline it belongs to, and cultural familiarity. Of course, these cross-cultural elements vary from ethnicity and background. In my teaching, I have noticed that Asian students tend to focus on minutiae working up to reading globally and such differences in reading need to be taken into account when planning instruction.

Facilitate Reading by Using Pre-Reading Discussions

Instructors and professors can facilitate ESL' reading by using pre-reading discussions to activate students' thinking. For example, one can present vocabulary that can't be guessed from context.

Previewing, Scanning, Skimming Strategies (PSS)

Previewing, scanning, skimming strategies help readers acquire a global understanding of a text without getting bogged down with minor and unimportant details which can hinder the reading process.

Help students to break text down into manageable increments.

1. They highlight the first line or a few words to get the basic idea.
2. They skim highlighted lines and write down what they remember.
3. They skim first and last paragraphs and write down what they have learned.
4. They read all the way through, cover text, write down everything they remember.
5. Finally, they read again and circle any words they don't know.

Provide Vocabulary Practice

Teachers can provide vocabulary practice after pre-reading discussions where students guess in context.

Provide Summary Writing Lessons

Encourage students to practice summary writing and provide practice sessions in how to write summaries which are essential and help them get away from the step by step style. You can also provide pre-writing assignments beginning with free-writing and brainstorming.

In short, supporting the ESL student in a mainstream college classroom involves breaking down the text in ways that are suitable to their cultural and linguistic limitations and abilities. Always encourage your students to look for the global meanings in texts, and make sure they have enough practice and pre-reading discussions before expecting them to understand them on their own.