Untangling reading strategies and reading skills in an ESL textbook

Abstract

Successful reading comprehension in L2 involves both lower and higher level processes, being dependant on both strategies and skills. These two components are often treated interchangeably or inconsistently in the literature and such inconsistency may affect the teaching of reading. In light of the above, this paper aims at analysing how strategies and skills are developed in a series of ESL textbooks. In order to do so, a framework was developed to classify the activities as sustaining reading strategies or reading skills. A quantitative analysis was also carried out in order to better understand the frequency each construct occurred in the textbooks. The results showed that strategies and skills are used interchangeably in the series. Furthermore, strategies outnumbered skills, no linearity was found between them, that is, there seemed to be no longitudinal process of working with strategies in a way to enable them to become skills in order to foster independent readers.