Academic reading within a foreign language teaching context

Our long life experience as techers has shown us that in many classrooms students are asked to read texts and believe in them or find specific information contained in them. Thus, reading literacy tends to be defined as the ability to encode and decode texts, the ability to positively react to the texts without questioning them, ignoring the students' background knowledge and their critical thinking skills. This book intends to raise teachers' awareness for the need to improve the teaching learning process in general and the teaching of Reading, particularly in a foreign language context. The central argument in the book is that just as in the teaching of first language speakers, second and foreign language students also need to be taught how to approach the texts they read and see them as not finished pieces of information but just suggestive ways of providing information. The book therefore provides some useful insights into the teaching of reading as a foreign language through a process of re-examination and continuous reflection on the teaching practices.