There are many reading strategies that appear to be very important according to a multitude of researchers. It is a difficult task to decide which strategies are the most significant. Harmer (1994:125-126) suggested necessary strategies that readers need to use when reading. These are: Calling up relevant background knowledge; predicting what will be learned and what will happen; making mental pictures; self-monitoring and self-correction; using fix-up strategies such as re-reading or asking for help; determining the most important ideas and events and seeing how they are related; drawing conclusions and making inferences; deciding "what you think"(opinion); comparing and contrasting what you read and what you already know; figuring out unknown words; summarizing what has been read. These have been broken down into five key strategies:
a. Using background knowledge
Harmer (1994:125) states that background knowledge is a crucial component of reading comprehension. Nunan (1991:114) states that the amount of prior knowledge a reader has can be a very strong determinant of how much he or she will be able to understand of the text he or she is reading. The readers who had a well-developed knowledge base are more likely to have a strong ability to recall relevant information. Background knowledge helps students to interpret reading materials in an individual way. Thus, it is important that teachers to teach students how to use their own background knowledge as a strategy for comprehending text. Closely connected to the idea of constructing meaning and using background knowledge is the related strategy of mental imagery or, 'making mental pictures', which has been considered a strategy on its own by many theorists. A student with strong background knowledge will have a better ability to understand and picture what the author is attempting to portray in the text.
b. Predicting
When students make predictions they are deciding their purposes for reading. Prediction activities work hand-in-hand with background knowledge. As students synthesize what they know with the text they are reading, it helps them determine a purpose for reading.
Using their background knowledge their goal becomes finding out or predicting what is going to happen next. Further, they are engaged in generating predictions prior to reading by first drawing upon background knowledge. Good readers are constantly forming hypotheses about what is to come in the passage they are reading. Like so many other comprehension skills this requires prior knowledge about the content and about the structure of what is being read.
By applying this strategy students are given the opportunity to integrate what they know while they read and are also faced with new information that may conflict with their own assumptions which, in turn may bolster critical thinking skills.
c. Self-monitoring and self-correcting
When students self-monitor and self-correct they are demonstrating an ability to recognize that what they are reading is not making sense and applying various strategies to solve the problem. These are also known as "fix-up strategies", which are strategies that students use when they realize that their comprehension is not proceeding well (Harmer 2003: 100).
Nunan (1991: 96) states that good readers are able to expect problems in reading and fix them up as they occur. When a student comes across an unfamiliar word, he or she needs to decide whether to re-read the sentence, read ahead, sound the word out, or look in the dictionary.
d. Making inferences and questioning
Making inferences and questioning is another strategy that even older students find quite tedious. This may be due to the fact that students are accustomed to their teachers giving them the questions. But if the teachers are asking all of the questions, students are not going to become strategic readers. Instead, they need to learn to ask themselves questions as they read. Harmer (1991:67) states that many studies which have shown having students generate their own questions lead to increased comprehension of text. It seems that by having students do this it forces them to think more deeply about the author's words and intentions, giving them a goal for reading.
e. Identifying main ideas and summarizing
Identifying the main events or ideas in a story is something that good readers also do. They are constantly pulling out ideas from the text they are reading and determining what the main points are in each segment of the reading passage. In addition they have an ability to recognize and discuss key events in a story. Harmer (1999:226) states that skilled readers have an ability to select the information they will need in order to understand the reading passage. Further, these readers also have the ability to ignore information that is not important.
Summarizing is a strategy that many students have difficulty with. It is very closely related to the previous strategy discussed in this paper. However, Nunan (1998: 130) states that summarizing is "a broader, more synthetic activity for which determining importance is necessary, but not sufficient condition." Moreover, it involves the ability to call on other strategies in order to gain a clear understanding of text. This strategy is an important one because it helps them build an informational framework. Nunan (1998:131) states that summarizing can be defined as: Deleting unimportant and redundant information, categorizing information, identifying and using the author's main ideas and creating your own main idea if the author did not clearly state his or hers.
Clearly, summarizing brings into play all of the previous strategies. Thus, students are involved in using all of the reading strategies in order to build a scaffold toward increased comprehension of text.
Another important factor that must be considered briefly is that students also need to be involved in a classroom environment where the students are active and highly engaged learners. Harmer (1999: 86) state that reading engagement should be the aim of instruction because motivational goals will facilitate intrinsic motivational goals which are essential to long term, self-determined reading. The problem of motivating students to learn seems highly related to the teaching of reading strategies. Nunan (1998:89) state that students' motivation to learn is immensely complex and continues to challenge researchers with its conceptualization and reconceptualization and its inclusion and operationalization in intervention research. Further, she argues that motivation to learn must be viewed as a concept that is intertwined with strategy learning. Thus, our students in order to become strategic, self-regulated readers need also to be engaged readers.