Schocker Von Ditfurth's Introduction To English Language

In Müller-Hartmann and Schocker von Ditfurth’s “Introduction to English Language Teaching, the reading skill depends on the purpose and the topic. Depending on reading a text for school or for enjoyment makes a significant difference in reading competence as the learner may be more motivated to read for enjoyment other than to read because he/she was asked to do so (Müller-Hartmann and Schocker von Ditfurth 2007: 91). The authors also split the reading competence in different sub skills like prediction, expecting, concluding, the use of background knowledge and guessing the meaning from the context. The teacher has to teach these set of sub skills thus the learner is able to work with the text by himself. The goal, the learner should achieve, is not to understand everything in every text but to be able to use these tools and sub skills mentioned above.

To practice prediction and guessing, the teacher can show the learner only the title and asked him/her to use his/her imagination in order to think about the story behind it. It develops its learner’s ability to think ahead of what he/she sees

Reading is, like listening, a receptive skill. That means that the learner gets input from a text to work with. The best methods, according to “Learning to Teach Foreign Languages in the Secondary School” is to have reading tasks that are as realistic as you would encounter them in real life (Pachler et al. 2013: 214,215). The authors suggest pre reading activities like Müller-Hartmann and Schocker von Ditfurth, the learner should scan the text for additional information to get an idea what he/she is about to read. They also mention to read for a purpose and detail by recognizing the type of the text, examining pictures and title, skip inessential words, analyzing unknown words and using background knowledge to make sensible guesses (Pachler et al. 2013: 228,