ESL Intermediate Readers
...ercises are good for extra activities, but students need to read and discuss their readings in an ongoing communication between instructor and classmates. It is also important for students to read a text, personally evaluate it, and share ideas with a group or a teacher/mentor to be able to correctly interpret or comprehend the style and the significant nuances or derivations of words/word phrases with the texts. As you all know, English is a highly creative language full of variations and sometimes “deviations” that cause excessive complications for SLA students trying to learn and formulate their ideas in logical and humanistic ways. Bottom-Up, “Push Backing” is significant for pre-reading instruction. Lack of adequate vocabulary impedes reading comprehension and too much Top-down guessing leads to errors in processing, analyzing, developing, and eventually causes communication breakdowns or significantly hinders the students’ self-esteem for learning anything. Students need to learn lexical aspects of texts and their contents. For example, as Richard R. Day and Julian Bamford explained in their book, “Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom”, (pp. 132 – 134), rereading timed readings helps to eva...