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Teaching Reading Online

Peggy Hughes

Can you broach the dreaded topic of teaching reading to ESL students, get them engaged and strike enthusiasm in their minds? Photo by Julia M Cameron.

How to Teach Reading Online

Picture this. You’re an online ESL student, a fair way through your learning journey, and you’re getting wind from your teacher that it’s time to tackle reading. “Oh no”, you think, “not reading”. Reading classes conjure scenes in your mind of stuffy classrooms and boring textbook stories, of comprehension questions that ask you what color the curtains were and what Jimmy had for breakfast. You desperately want to skip it, wish with crossed fingers that your teacher forgets, and lay the groundwork for “dodgy internet” excuses on the day of your lesson. 

Now picture the other perspective in this scenario - you’re the online teacher of this student. You can see the dread in their eyes, hear the whine in their voice, feel whatever the internet version is of their feet dragging down the school hallway on the way to class. How will you possibly change their mind? Can you broach the dreaded topic of teaching reading to ESL students, get them engaged and strike enthusiasm in their minds?

You’re in luck. This guide will walk you through the ins and outs of teaching reading online, delving into research-based instructional strategies, tried and tested methods of teaching reading and the all-important question of making it fun. 

Teaching Reading Online - Skills Students Need 

Before we dive in, let’s take a moment to outline the skills that we are attempting to build in our ESL students when teaching reading online. These are as follows:

  1. Phonemic awareness, through which students learn to hear, identify and use individual sounds in spoken words. 

  2. Phonic awareness, through which students begin to understand letter-sound relationships when reading and spelling.

  3. Vocabulary development, through which students expand the number of words that they are able to understand and use. 

  4. Comprehension, through which students improve their ability to understand and interpret what is being read. 

  5. Critical thinking and analysis, through which students are able to discuss, consider and analyze text content. 

The Theory Behind It: Strategy for Teaching Reading Comprehension

The theories on what works and what doesn’t can be overwhelming, so we’ve pulled together three of our favorite research-based instructional strategies for teaching reading online. They are as follows: 

Interactive read alouds and digital annotations

Often pinned as the classroom staple for teaching reading, read alouds paint somewhat of a stagnant picture - teachers’ voices filling classrooms or, at the very best, alternating students reading two lines each of a purpose-written textbook story, so dull it will send the most overactive of students to sleep. But we are teaching reading online here, and in doing so we have been given the opportunity to take these old traditions and shake them up a bit. When it comes to read alouds, this translates to interactivity and digital annotation; getting students to write directly onto texts, to question as they go, and to engage actively rather than passively.

Flipped classroom model

The flipped classroom model is a key component in teaching reading to English language learners. The premise is fairly simple - rather than introducing ideas in a lesson and getting students to complete activities on that idea at home, instructional content is provided for students to study in their own time, while lesson time is reserved for interactive activities. The model is proven to be effective in increasing the engagement and comprehension of ESL students. The idea here is that the time you have with your student is maximized for productive, interactive activities, and you get to witness the student practicing the skills you have taught them, rather than spending precious lesson time for quiet study. 

Collaboration

Collaboration when teaching reading online might look like sessions that allow discussion between students on how they understand, interpret or feel about a text. Depending on the specifics of your classroom, there may be some varying degrees of difficulty in implementing this one. If you can get it to work, it’s been proven to lead to deeper processing of text by students, and can be as simple as sharing one student’s commentary with another. 

Applying Our Theory: Methods of Teaching Reading Online

For each of these theories, let’s take a look at possible methods that we could use to implement them in our online classrooms. 

Interactive read alouds 

    • Using tools such as Google Docs, Kami, or Padlet, students can highlight or note take directly onto texts themselves, easily marking unfamiliar words and grammar or adding in their questions and thoughts while they or their teacher reads aloud.

    • Pausing reading to allow for student summaries, questions and predictions has a similar effect, as does the assignment of follow-up tasks such as written reflections, in order to deepen and demonstrate understanding

    • Interactive reading journals are a great tool for setting follow-up exercises for read alouds. These might include, as an example, KWL charts (Know, Want to Know, Learned) for text-based-reflection, or prompts that encourage students to summarize, predict, describe or connect. 

Flipped classroom model 

    • Out-of-class work: Short reading or video materials that introduce - in simple terms - new ideas (such as grammar or vocabulary) may be provided to students. These materials are studied by students outside of the classroom.

    • In-class work: Interactive activities such as quizzes, discussions and creative exercises can be used to put learned theory into practice. For a student to whom new vocabulary has been introduced, flashcards on a platform such as Quizlet would test their understanding, while a casual conversation on the same topic will give them a chance to put their brand new vocabulary into use.

Collaboration 

    • Have a go at getting different students to annotate texts on a shared Google Doc - positing insights, asking questions, highlighting unfamiliar words and comparing their notes with those of other students.

Hey teacher, how are you going to make this fun for me? Photo by Julia M Cameron.

The All-Important Task of Having Fun 

With your strategy in the bag, your methods polished to perfection, your skill lists nailed–what more could there possibly be to do? 

Methodology and learning aren’t enough to get our students there alone - the key to teaching reading comprehension, to unlocking student understanding, and to fostering engagement is, simply, having fun. Even the most meticulously prepared lesson plan will fall on bored ears without an injection of excitement. For those of you who can’t help but mutter “easier said than done” under your breath as you read this - we’ve got you. Have a go at these three tips to make sure that you’re having fun teaching reading comprehension to your online learners. 

Gamify your teaching

Introducing challenges (such as reading bingo cards), quizzes (on platforms like Quizizz or Kahoot!) or interactive exercises (such as those found on Epic!, or Oxford Owl) will transform the task of teaching reading skills into engaging exercise.

Mix up the media

Interactive storybooks (Epic! and Oxford Owl have some with clickable elements and accompanying sounds) and the inclusion of animations can bring reading exercises to life. You might consider a “virtual field trip”, transporting a student to a mysterious new location through various sample texts, asking them to guess where they “are” and explain their answer. 

Get creative 

One of the best ways to engage students with a text is asking them to create a response. Having students write prequels or follow up stories to the reading that they have done ensures that they are digesting themes, tones, characters and plot, while getting some of those creative pathways energized at the same time. 

The Future of Teaching Reading Online is Here

Gone are the days of teacher-led read-alouds and silent students. We want questions, we want quizzes, we want activity. Far from limiting our possibility for interaction, our online platforms in fact provide solid foundations for us here, weaving our lessons into the fabric of digital interactivity and offering new opportunities for less traditional plans and methods. 

Interactivity is the name of the game when teaching reading online. Photo by Julia M Cameron.

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