Enhancing EFL Students' Reading Skills with Inspirational Quotes

Enhancing EFL Students' Reading Skills with Inspirational Quotes

JARF, Reima Al

Key words: insirational quotes, reading, EFL, integration,global culture ABSTRACT Many ESL students have reading comprehension problems in English, have difficulty identifying main ideas and supporting details, identifying, verifying or recalling ideas that are explicitly or implicitly stated in the text, making predictions, inferring the meaning of difficult words from context, and making inferences. The presentation proposes the integration of inspirational quotes in the teaching of English to L2 students in class, or as an extension activity. It will show the following: (i) advantages of integrating inspirational quotes by authors from around the world and different cultures in reading instruction; (ii) sources of global inspirational quotes; (iii) Criteria for selecting global inspirational quotes such as length, topic familiarity, difficulty level, students’ proficiency level, students’ interests and their local culture; (iv) Instructional phases with inspirational quotes: (a) Before reading an inspirational quote: Introducing the inspirational quote, vocabulary overview; giving pre-questions, setting goals for the tasks, what students need to do and focus on, predicting the topic on the part of the students and giving the order in which tasks will be completed. (b) While reading an inspirational quote: Students read for the main idea, pay attention to specific vocabulary, imagery and figures of speech while reading, answer a question while reading and use contextual clues to infer meaning of difficult words; (c) After reading an inspirational quote: Discussing answers, summarizing or retelling orally the main idea, discussing difficulties, commenting on the topic, giving their impression, giving the morale or lesson learnt, providing feedback on areas of improvement, a summary of the tasks that were performed; (v) evaluation and assessment; (vi) recommendations for integrating of inspirational quotes in reading instruction.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1919