How do teachers and professors select appropriate reading texts for their students? There are a multitude of factors which influence whether or not an individual will want to read a text for fun, let alone for a class: subject matter, ability, outside interests, etc. The article, Selecting Reading Texts for University Iranian EFL Students, written by Maryam Rezaei Ghahroudi and Ebrahim Sheikhzadeh sought to answer that question. While the article didn't provide any specific website with listings of reliable texts to share with students, criteria about how to begin the process of searching for meaningful texts were given and they were divided into 2 categories.
Directly related to the students
- students' level -students' background knowledge
-students' need -students' interest
-students' purpose for reading
Aspects related to the texts
-relevance -organization
-content of the passage -discourse phenomena
-exploitability -length of passage
-suitability -topic
-readability -political correctness
-lexical knowledge -cultural familiarization
-syntactic appropriateness -appearance
Now, even though it may take a while to filter through that information, once momentum has been achieved, finding appropriate articles, storing them (on something like a PLE), and finding similar material based on what you already have, will be much easier. I also found this article to ring true to the assignments required for this course. I enjoy reading about material that interests me and reflecting upon it more than I do just completing the assigned paperwork.
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