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Robert L Davis is a Professor of Spanish and Director of Language Instruction in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. He is also the Scholar in Residence in the Global Scholars Hall and a member of the CASLS Advisory Board.

The "traditional" approach to reading in the L2 classroom goes like this:

1. The teacher assigns a text: "Read this for tomorrow", perhaps with some questions to answer.
2. Students slog through the reading, often overusing a dictionary to look up every unknown word.
3. The follow-up discussion starts with questions like "What did you think?" "Was it easy or difficult?" "Did you have any trouble with any words or passages?"

The discussion, if it ever gets off the ground, is teacher-fronted and laborious, akin to pulling teeth. The motivation for reading is usually "to expose students to this key text from the Spanish-speaking world" or "this text is good for direct object pronouns"—neither of which is an authentic, real-world reason to read.

Research in L2 reading suggests a completely different approach, which takes advantage of our natural cognitive frameworks. More attention is given to why we read (thus, text selection is paramount—see last week's article) and using the reading for a real-world purpose. Contrast the reading sequence above with the following model.

Pre-reading. The purposes of this part of a reading lesson are twofold:

1. to activate students' previous knowledge of a topic, or if it's a new topic to them, create the necessary basic background knowledge.
2. to fill in any linguistic gaps students may have that would impede comprehension: vocabulary, structures, idioms, or processing strategies (e.g. "What is the subject of this sentence?")

In the pre-reading phase, it is useful to have students preview actual sentences from a reading, to study them in detail up front, so that when they come upon them in the actual reading, they serve as an "island" of familiar material.

Guided reading activity. In the real world, we always read for a purpose. A guided reading activity gives students a reason to read a text. Typical guided activities include the following types of questions:

• Find the three sources of college financial aid mentioned in this article. (scanning)
• What is the reaction of the main character to the surprise announcement? (scanning)
• Does this writer support or oppose the proposed law? (skimming)

Other examples of reading "performance tasks" can be found at: http://pages.uoregon.edu/rldavis/readingtasks/

Assimilation and/or personalization. Once students have answered the guided reading questions, you may want to add some additional comprehension questions—low-level or factual questions that indicate a basic understanding of the text. But the real goal of the reading lesson should be to use the reading for a real-world purpose: to assimilate and personalize the ideas it contains into the learners' existing knowledge. Depending on the content and nature of the reading, this final phase of the lesson could ask students to:

• use the reading as a point of departure for further research on a topic
• respond to or refute the ideas in the text
• use the information in the text to solve a real-world problem
• rewrite the text using their own, personal information, making all the necessary changes

Follow the link below to see a sample lesson plan that illustrates the three parts of a good reading lesson:

Como usare WhatsApp (beginning Italian)