Foreign Language Teaching Methods: Reading

Rereading Strategies

Teachers can guide their students in successful rereading by helping them structure the discovery process in light of the cognitive and linguistic difficulties of the text. Learners need to be given tasks that correspond to their level of linguistic and cognitive sophistication. Learners must also be given a model of what they are going to be called on to produce, and they should be encouraged to use words and phrases from the text when writing and speaking about it.

Structuring the Rereading Assignment

In such structured rereading assignments, learners are able to act as authorized learners—authorized because they are selecting their own answers. They will, moreover, be engaging the text repeatedly as they defend their choice. They engage in a process of discovery in reading that leads to production when they participate in a class discussion or work on a writing assignment.

The following chart provides examples of ways rereading can activate different learning goals.

Rereading Activity	Learning Goal
Identify or rewrite specific grammar constructions that occur repeatedly in a text (passive voice, verbs in various tenses, cases, singular plural distinctions, etc.).	Recognizing or modifying grammar features in context and how grammar signals meanings.
Identify or rewrite statements that suggest a particular speech act (e.g., a command, an argument, a plea, etc.).	Recognizing or using language that conveys speaker or author intent (pragmatics).
Look for text features to revise in another genre (changing a conversation to a description or a news report to a diary entry).	Recognizing or discussing how changing the genre of the source text changes its rhetoric and the order of presenting its information.

Writing During Rereading

The note-taking and short writing required by structured reading assignments are useful in helping learners process and recall textual information.