Becoming a Reading Teacher: Connecting Research and Practice

This book encourages readers to think about reading not only as an encounter with written language, but as a lifelong habit of engagement with ideas. We look at reading in four different ways: as linguistic process, personal experience, collective experience, and as classroom practice. We think about how reading influences a life, how it changes over time, how we might return at different stages of life to the same reading, how we might respond differently to ideas read in an L1 and L2. There are 44 teaching activities, all founded on research that explores the nature, value and impact of reading as an authentic activity rather than for language or study purposes alone. We consider what this means for schools and classrooms, and for different kinds of learners. The final part of the book provides practical stepping stones for the teacher to become a researcher of their own classes and learners. The four parts of the book offer a virtuous join between reading, teaching and researching. It will be useful for any teacher or reader who wishes to refresh their view of how reading fits in to the development of language and the development of a reading life.

Jane Spiro is Professor of Education and TESOL at Oxford Brookes University, National Teaching Fellow and Research Lead for Applied Linguistics. Her book Changing Methodologies in TESOL (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) forms the core of the MA in TESOL in the School of Education. She has run programmes for teachers of language and literature worldwide, including Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Kenya and India. Her doctorate was on the role of creativity in language education (Bath University 2008). She is a published poet and novelist: her resources for the teaching of language through creative writing include Storybuilding (2007) and Creative Poetry Writing (2004), with Oxford University Press. She was co-editor of the journal Reading in a Foreign Language in its first incarnation in the UK. Her most recent publication is Crossing Borders in University Learning and Teaching (Routledge 2022).

Amos Paran is Professor of TESOL at the IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. His background is in teaching EFL in secondary schools in Israel, and he has worked and taught internationally, including visiting appointments in Chile, Germany and Hungary. He has also written EFL coursebooks including supplementary skills books for reading comprehension, and his doctoral work looked at processing words and reading times in L1 and L2. His current areas of interest are using literature in EFL, reading in EFL and distance education, and he has published extensively in these areas, including co-editing Testing the Untestable in Language Education (with Lies Sercu, Multilingual Matters, 2010) and co-authoring the Teachers’ Handbook Literature (with Pauline Robinson, OUP, 2016). He is a tutor on the free MOOC, Teaching EFL/ESL Reading: A Task-Based Approach. He is the book reviews editor of the ELT Journal and co-convenor of the AILA research network, Literature in Language Learning and Teaching (LiLLT).