TESL 0170: Continued professional development report

I used many resources through my practicum such as textbooks and online resources. The resource that I found more interesting and useful was “Ready to Read More” which was the main resource of my teaching course that my supervisor gave it to me on the first day of my observation. The reading lessons of the course that I taught were based on this book.

This book is divided into chapters with different topics such as preview and predict, guess the definition of a new word, identify main idea and supporting detail, distinguish fact and opinion, etc., and it is a great book for teaching reading strategies. It is divided into eight chapters and each chapter has three readings and a lot of activities based on the topic of each chapter. This book has activities before, during and after a reading which students can work together and discuss. The activities provide opportunities for students to predict and preview a reading and complete comprehension questions and topic related activities. There are a lot of new academic vocabulary in each chapter that students can guess their meanings before the reading and see their usage in the reading. Furthermore, it has grammar tips and activities for each unit. This will give students an opportunity to improve their grammar while reading an article. The book gives students the opportunity to improve their reading comprehension by instructing reading strategies, writing by answering questions and speaking by discussing answers with a classmate or classmates.

The usage of language in this book is appropriate for intermediate and upper-intermediate students. The tips and notes of this book are clear and easy to follow. It provides explicit instruction in reading skill as well as variety of activities and practices. Teaching this book is easy; the teacher can both use reading activities in the classroom or assign them for homework. The teacher can assign students to work together and individually on different activities. She/he can change the order of activities due to students’ needs.

During my observation, the teacher used this book as the main resource; however, she used portions of each chapter and sometimes she would give students extra worksheet that she provided from another resource to help students digest the new lesson.

I can not really mention a major drawback for this book. I think one drawback of this book is lack of colors and pictures. In my idea, the first thing that usually people look for in a book is the pictures. The book does not have enough pictures and colors, so it might not look interesting to the students. Although it is a reading book, I think they could provide a CD or audio version of the book to help students practice listening. Also, it would be great if they provided an online version of this book where students could register and have access to the whole book and extra activities from their homes.

Overall, I think this is a great book to use and teach reading strategies. It provides a lot of activities and instructions to improve students’ reading ability.