Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language

Notions of reading and the teaching of reading have been in constant revision, especially in recent years. Indeed, computers have led the general public to revise their own needs, skills, and reading strategies in their mother tongues and in foreign languages. The question is no longer whether students want to read more than speak but whether they need reading more. In 1999, as a teacher I administered a questionnaire to my university students about what skills they needed to learn in the foreign language classroom with the result that spoken language prevailed over written skills. However, students today may well consider the Internet as their most significant source of information not only in academic but also in daily life. Unfortunately, as I discuss later, the importance of information technologies and the reading skills required for them (Dreyer & Nel, 2003) is not an area that is especially addressed in this book.