Nowadays, educators have started to consider reading not only as a means of developing linguistic structures, but also as a way to enlarge the children's mental processes, contributing to their maturation and the expansion of imagination and creativity. In order to achieve all these aims, the teacher must select the appropriate text and design a suitable set of activities to exploit the story while providing the students with the necessary reading skills.
One of our curriculum's demands regarding reading is that everything that students might read must be related to their needs and interests. Apart from fulfilling this requirement, instructors want to produce students who can fend for themselves in communicative situations and can use reading strategies to maximize their comprehension of text, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.
For that, instruction in reading strategies is an integral part of the use of reading activities in the language classroom. Instructors can help their students become effective readers by teaching them how to use strategies before, during, and after reading; or by giving them some strategies that can help them to read quicker.
Finally, it should be said that readers could use a combination of different sub-skills to extract information at the various text levels. This sub-skills are: previewing (reviewing titles, section headings, photo captions, etc.), predicting (using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions), skimming (reading rapidly in order to get a general overview of the material), scanning (reading rapidly in order to find specific facts), guessing from context and paraphrasing (stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension).
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