TEACHING OF ESSENTIAL READING SKILLS OF ENGLISH AT THE TERTIARY LEVEL IN INDIA (Pages 11-19) by Dr. S. Rajendran in THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST / ISSN: 2350-1499 (Online); 2350-0751 (Print)

Indian students cannot keep their eyes closed in learning English which is the global language and language of science and technology. At the tertiary level, English can be learned through learning reading and achieving reading skills. There is a relationship between rea ding ability and academic performance amongst second language undergraduate students (Pretorius, 2001).There is a strong co-relation between reading and vocabulary knowledge. Students who have a large vocabulary are good readers. Good readers are good learners who achieve communicative competence in the language. Hence teaching of reading skills and too selective essential reading skills are the paramount importance at tertiary level in India. In India, English is taught as a second language. Adult students in the degree colleges would benefit from the inclusion of explicit and direct training in reading skills. Reading skills or strategies that the reader uses to turn writing into meaning and achieve independence, comprehension and fluency in reading. The important reading skills are: a. phonemic awareness, b. phonics, c. word attack skills and d. comprehension skills. At the degree level, it is imperative to develop the comprehension skills of the students to help them make sense of what they read. The comprehension skills can be classified into a. language based strategies and b. text based strategies. Language based strategies are higher order skills. At the tertiary level, students are to be taught the text based strategies to get the meaning from the written form. To make students effective readers the following text based strategies are to be taught: 1.skimming, 2. Scanning, 3.activating back ground knowledge, 4. Predicting, 5.finding the main idea, 6.critical reading,7.creative reading,8.inferring,9. Summarising. By teaching these strategies systematically, the students can be made effective readers. Keywords: reading skills, skimming, Scanning, global language, comprehension and fluency