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I- Introduction:
Encouraging the students to apply reading strategies inside the classroom to enrich the students' knowledge of English can be done inside the class and can work effectively if implemented and supported well by the teachers and the Ministry of Education. There are many problems, however, which face teachers inside classrooms and play a vital role in the failure of teaching the students how to read properly. Throughout this paper I will speak about two problems which I have observed in teaching reading in Syrian state schools. Then, I will subsequently suggest solutions from my own point of view.
II- Literature Review:
1- Definition of Reading:
Reading as suggested by J. Charles Alderson in his book Assessing Reading (2000) is the "interaction between a reader and the text" through which the reader is not only "looking at print, deciphering in some sense the marks on the page, `deciding' what they mean and how they relate to each other", but he is also "thinking about what he is reading: what it means to him, how it relates to other things he has read, to things he knows, to what he expects to come next in texts" (p:3). In fact, variety of things happen as the reader reads and this process is "likely to be dynamic, variable, and different for the same reader on the same text at a different time or with a different purpose in reading".
2- The process of Reading:
Hosenfeld (1987) in his study of "How to Be a Successful Contextual Guesser" talks about the strategies that the reader uses while reading that go in the following:
a. Keeping the text in mind while reading and using it to predict meaning.
b. Skipping unfamiliar words and guessing their meaning from the remaining words or sentences
c. Going backwards and forwards in the text to bring to mind the previous context to decode unfamiliar words
d. Identifying the grammatical functions of unfamiliar words before guessing their meanings
e. Reading the title and trying to make some predictions from it.
f. Using knowledge of the world to decipher unfamiliar words.
g. Skipping words that may add relatively little comprehension to the total meaning.
Thinking about these procedures and understanding them gives us a better understanding of what should be happening inside the brains of our students and the problems they might encounter while trying to decipher the text.
III- Problems and solutions for the case of Reading in Syria:
A. Problems:
English course books used in Syria contain a lot of texts that take some of these procedures in mind (number d and e from Hosenfeld strategies) but seldom are they followed efficiently by students within the settings of our classrooms due to many problems. Teachers tend to give the direct translation of the "unfamiliar words" into Arabic (our mother tongue) without trying to decode the text. This is one of the prevailing problems that most of the teachers in Syria tend to have. Students in Syria are largely exam oriented as they think of the act of reading as only a task based issue mainly focusing on searching for few words in order for them to answer few comprehension questions in the exam. The limited time specified for the English class per week and to the reading section for each class makes the role of reading inside classrooms very limited. There is even the lack of extra resources in the school libraries available for students to practice reading outside classrooms to increase their knowledge of English both as a culture and a language. Throughout this paper I will classify these problems in two domains and I will discuss the reasons and solutions for the failure of the reading to be mastered within our classrooms in Syria from my own personal opinion as a teacher.
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