Reading skills: Suggestions to promote and motivate students to read more...

Reading is one of the easiest skills we can develop when learning English.
Why? There is no time pressure, normally you can read on your own time and in some occasions you can understand the meaning without having a high level of English.
I must admit I did not like reading when I was younger but as I grew older I realized the importance of reading and creating a reading habit.
Thanks to reading, you can improve your English in many ways as it demands a research for the meaning of new words in the dictionary.
It teaches you how to spell certain technical words but most important you can learn how to structure a phrase and improve your writing skills.
Therefore "reading" is very be transversal and can be used to develop the 3 other required skills further which are listening, writing and speaking.
As future English teachers, we will have to find ways to promote reading, like making a competition between groups, making boards on different subjects or topics found on the books they are reading.
We have to remember that, like I mentioned before, teenagers do not like reading so we may have to start by reading the lyrics of the songs they like for instance.
To start with, there is not such a thing as the perfect method for this but a number of different methods that you can use with the classroom depending on their moods and their energy levels.
When you teach a foreign language you must think of your students as small children that require time to acquire the new vocabulary through flashcards associations and illustrated books.
Always introduce your students to the reading process with small readings and increase the number of pages as you go along in their development process.
Another method is to read 2 minutes individually with the student in the classroom every fortnight. This also allows you to correct their accent although this is not the main priority, which is to get them to read something they like so that they begin to get the habit and the pleasure of reading.
Creating a place dedicated to books like a small library is also a very good idea to keep track of all the books and offer them to your students to read at least one every 3 months.
Let's not forget that our students need feedback so we need to evaluate them through some sort of  questionnaire or summary. We can also suggest a notepad containing the following information:
Book's title, date when the book was read and 3 lines in English describing their overall opinion.
We can also ask students to evaluate the book they read by adding a smiley face at the back of the book where we have previously glued a piece of paper to record this information.
By doing this, the student has an idea of the kind of book it is but we also track the popular books and the not so popular ones.
I think that reading is much more important than we think if we want to develop the other 3 skills as they complement one another so, let's start reading more!!.