2. Readability:
The reading passages selected should not only be linguistically and culturally accessible but also within the students’ reach in terms of content, topic familiarity, and conceptual difficulty. However, over-explicit texts are to be avoided because they do not allow for adequate training in the different sub-skills and strategies especially inferencing. As a matter of fact, in many classrooms, texts are made increasingly easy for students in the mistaken belief that this supports struggling students who encounter problems in reading. However, oversimplification results in texts that lack any challenge, interest or exemplars of good writing. It is better to prepare students for a text and teach them how to read it until they can make those choices for themselves.
1. Authenticity:
Authentic material, i.e. material which is not adapted or intended for mere linguistic purposes, despite its complexity and the demand it puts on the readers, is highly recommended and should be provided enough room in the syllabus. Faced with authentic passages, the students are exposed to natural input, real-life language data where the text language, with all its system of references, repetition, redundancy, as well as discourse markers that learners draw upon when reading, is kept unchanged and unadapted.
