Critical reading skills, strategies and directions for ESL/EFL learners

Shuhban Ali Siyal
The critical reading skills, strategies, models and directionshelp student to learn English for academic purposes as English foreign language (EFL) and Englian second language (ESL)learners. English is becoming the dominant source of everyday communication and the language of research and technology. It also plays an important role in a student’s academic learning in the settings of higher education where English is a main source of instructions. As ESL and EFL learners, they use specific strategies and built-in habits of daily reading, use different strategies to remove the complexities of reading texts and develop important underlying reading skills, better understanding that’s why they use the strategy so often. These strategies also helpto improve their writing and translation.The students understand the process and rememberthe information when they come across for reading material reading material. To be concerned with academic students where English is the main source of instruction, the students need of reading skills. It is essential because the students need reading to purse their studies by acquiring and getting more skills and strategies to get and to understand different academic reading texts in a critical and creative way.Krshen ( 2007) points out the vital role of extensive exposure to comprehensible input either through reading or listening in ESL/EFL acquisition in the development of grammar, vocabulary. These identify the symbiotic relationships between reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge and how thesedepend on each other to produce the actual meaning that author wants to convey. Many researchers looked at reading as a final product where the focus is on meaning or as an interactive process where the focus is on the different levels of involvement between reader, text and the activity. Theeffective reading includes the active and critical processes where the reader asks many questions to approach the text by implementing diverse reading skills, strategies and models, such as, prediction, skimming, scanning,comprehensive, appraisal, reflection, bottom up and top to bottom and finding the structure of the text. The reading strategies are international deliberate plans you use to help your readers understand their reading. The strategy is flexible and can be adapted to the requirements of the reading task. Good readers applying many strategies to understand the texts. They help students to know and master different reading strategies, enabling them to become competent and independent readers. Reading strategies are mind games in which readers interact with written material in different ways. This includes planning, determining reading objectives, choosing what to read before reading, monitoring comprehension while reading, and evaluating the reading experience. EFL/ESL reading is often defined as the process of unlocking the meaning of related texts by using both bottom-up and top-down approaches to the reading process in which the reader is able to read accurately and fluently, to decode phonological, lexical and semantical meaningand to draw on background information stored in the long-term memory. These are the three ways or to empirical studies that should be done comprehensively for ESL/EFL learners. First of all, the reader should understand the underlying meaning of the text. Second, reading is a gradual process of bringing together and synthesizing information from various sources. Third, reading is about combining information gained in passages with schemes stored in long-term memory to decipher meaning. Oxford (1990) stated the six multiple types of reading strategies.These are cognition, memory, compensation, metacognition, emotion, and social strategy.Cognitive strategiesare used to manipulate language, these include the use of notes, summaries, predictions and contextual cues. (CONTINUE…) Memory strategies include strategies that help you to remember and to retrieve information. The techniques that help reasoning, guessing, and using dictionaries when learners use strategy to plan, organize and assess their reading, it means they rely on metacognitive strategies. Emotional strategies refer to the techniques that learners use to encourage themselves and reduce their fear. The final set of strategies are the social ones which involve cooperation with other individuals such as working with peers, questioning and asking for correction. Critical reading in College English teaching for EFL learner is classified into two modes of teaching, that is, skill-oriented mode and critical thinking oriented one. The former centers on improving or enhancing undergraduates’ basic English skills, such as listening, reading, writing and speaking in cultivating ability to think and express critically with the use of English. Critical reading involves three sequential steps or strategies;comprehension, It is a strategy where we use the method of preview in order to become familiar with its content beforegoing to a deep reading,one must have a bit knowledge about a text, a passage or a book that what’s the passage theme about?, what does text actually describ? And where should the passage be analyzed to cultivatethinking.Appraisal strategy is used after the comprehensive reading. While understanding or getting the meaning of text, one would judge that which things are positive or negative, right or wrong in the text. Reflection is strategy to give personal opinion about text either in favor or against. Infact, Critical reading strategies enable readers to differentiate the major viewpoints from the minor ones, drawing inferences, understanding the writer’s position, evaluating whether the evidence listed in the text is relevant, effective or logical, and also reflect on the text and its impact on the readers’ value, attitude and way of thinking. As a rule, critical thinking strategies are identifying what is important in the text?, distinguishing opinions from fact, Secerning reasons from bias,evaluating the evidence (in other words, is evidence relevant,,evaluating the coherence of a text, deciding on whether the reader is on the side of the writer’s point of view or against the writer’s take, finding a good argument even if the reader does not agree with the writer’s viewpoints, evaluating the text from the standpoint of consistence in its argument, reflecting on other evidence, points of evidence that are related to what the text is about,associating and comparing what is being read with what the reader has read previously, reaching on the conclusions on the basis of the reader’s own reasoning or evidence and clarifying the discrepancy between the writer’s understanding and the readers.