An Introduction to Reading Comprehension Through Exercise for Intermediate English as a Second Language and English for Foreign Language Students

For English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) students, understanding what is read is a complex and often difficult task. This project presents a teacher\u27s guide to exercises for intermediate young adult second language learners to acquire skills helpful in reading comprehension. After an overview of the philosophical and theoretical principles underlying the material, exercises are presented in four sections. Most of the texts for the exercises have been selected from periodicals, since they are a good source for reading material on themes which could be of interest to students. Exercises in Part I concentrate on how to approach a text by using key visual elements and extralinguistic clues. The exercises require students to delve into their own knowledge to hypothesize about content. Contextual guessing is the focus of Part II, which presents sentence structure, punctuation and connectives as comprehension aids. Part III explores dictionary use. Beginning with an exploration of the dictionary and dictionary entries, students move on to practice choosing correct definitions from context clues. Integrating the previous three sections, Part IV gives the student practice in exploiting visual elements, first and last paragraphs and topic sentences. The exercises are presented with instructions for teachers and students and focus principally on global--not detailed --reading