An Interactive Approach to the Teaching of Reading

In Pakistan students find reading of the original text of novels a boring activity. This books deals with the novel “The Old Man and the Sea” as a case study to suggest some strategies that a teacher of English can adopt to develop reading skills. It suggests activities for developing students’ personal engagement with the text by determining the purpose of reading, activating prior schema, and understanding foreign culture. Secondly, it proposes activities for helping students to understand the language structure used in a text by teaching word level structures, using conjunctions to teach sentence level structures, and utilizing sequence of sentences to teach paragraph level structures. Lastly, it advises activities for helping students to develop questions and reach conclusions while reading a text by exploiting the potential of creating visuals, asking questions and seeking their answers, and forming opinions and drawing conclusions.