Research shows that practicing reading skills comprehension a lot is super important for learning a new language! Reading helps students become more fluent in the language skills overall, it strengthens the brain and brain connectivity, and it builds vocabulary. If you do a lot of reading, you become better at the other skills (listening, writing, and speaking) as well and it strengthens your comprehension of the language as a whole.
My students don’t always like to read. Some of them love it, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of the boys mainly, don’t like reading books. But it doesn’t matter to me what they read, but it does matter that they enjoy what they read. So if it’s not books but it is comics, then fine by me. And if it’s car manuals or game instructions, fine by me. And magazines go in this category too. Magazines are more specialist and geared towards people that like the subject. And students should read more, always, so we can use that fact to our advantage here.
Wanna know how I would plan a lesson around a magazine text? Grab my free Rad Reading Lesson Checklist to find out!
That’s why I like to take some time during lessons to just sit and read, for fun. For this reason, students should always choose something:
- That THEY think is fun
- That is easy enough for them; never above their level of proficiency
It means that every students practices their reading skills and comprehension at their own pace too. Reading should be as relaxed as can be for a school activity. As a teacher, you have to make sure reading really is JUST for fun too, so don’t give them any exercises to complete about it.
Magazines for great reading skills improvement
Besides the obvious choice of books, MAGAZINES make for fun reading too. Especially kids that think books are too text heavy might enjoy reading magazines more. Magazine have pictures, which breaks up the large portions of texts a student would face. Magazine articles are also short, so it will look like an easy task to just finish this one article and take it from there. And as I said, there are magazines in almost every field, so there are many options to choose from for students that have a specific interest that they’d like to explore. They can choose what they want to read.
In the picture are three magazines I think are awesome for kids. They each have a specific topic that is the overall focus of the magazine. They each have online editions too, but I like the paper ones more 🙂 Check them out!
Exercises for reading skills practice
If you do want to give students exercises to practice reading skills comprehension, you could have them check out what types of text a magazine usually contains and what the conventions are of those text types. You could have them compose a vocabulary list of words they came across while reading but they didn’t know the meaning of. They should look up those words later to improve their vocabulary.
In addition, you could have them design a different cover based on the article they found most interesting and get them to have snippets on the cover of the article’s most important points. And last, you could have them write their own article that would fit well in their particular magazine. In all cases, they should be doing something active after the reading.
Would you like some ideas on using other text types, like Menus, Recipes, Newspapers, or Brochures in your lessons? Check the links to find my blog posts on them as well!
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