Discovering Joy in Reading

Abstract

By the time the freshman enters the university he ought to have passed the ”learn to read” stage. After all, the student in Taiwan has studied English since junior high school, which means that he or she has had at least 6 years of English prior to college. In fact, in recent years many students have had more than 6 years of English due to the growth and popularity of the ubiquitous language institutes in this country. Therefore, by the time he starts the university, the student ought to be ready to ”read to learn.” Many of our students come to the Freshman English Reading class with this expectation too. They look forward to doing the assigned reading where they will learn something about the values, opinions and attitudes of a western or foreign culture that underlie the language being studied. However, when a reading teacher meets an enormous class (Freshman Reading course tend to have as many as 60 students per class) of diverse proficiency, out of frustration, s/he often resorts to using the reading material as a source of model sentences, or, more frequently, to follow the old translation method. In either case, the reading course tends to be a mere extension of supplementary exercises for vocabulary improvement and grammar explanations, with all cultural content lost in a jumble of words and sentence structures, and, most important of all, with the disappearance of much of the joy of reading and learning gone. The writer assumes that most teachers want their students to understand that reading is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The goal of this paper is to introduce a modified Sustained Silent Reading program suitable for the EFL/ESL setting whereby reading is seen not as a chore but something to enjoy. In addition, this presentation reports on how bringing pleasure reading into the reading classroom can not only improve their vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension, but also change the confidence, attitude and reading habits of our students.