[jbyrne]

Reading can be applied in many ways.

1. Its the mental process. Seeing how words collocate (fit together). Seeing the structure of a sentence. This helps them to build their own sentences and utterances.

2. Reading introduces them to a wider body of language and contexts than they can get in an English classroom. This is true of ourselves as well. Personally my vocabulary took off at about 16 years of age, when I started reading the New Scientist, The Economist and other academic magazines. My speech changed as I became more well read.

2. Pronounciation. If you teach your students the phonemic script. You can demonstrate how a dictionary look up of the phonemic spelling of a word, will allow them independently to pronounce any word with over 90% accuracy. This is testable and verifiable in an English class.

Teach the script and then choose 10 words you are sure they do not know. Really really difficult words are good. They will surprise themselves. I have done this with Thai students. No problem, it worked.

There are 44 phonemes in (British) English. Please note there are 3 standard charts of the phonemic script. 1 British and 2 American. So it can be a little confusing. However, most EFL student book dictionaries are British and use the British script. The computer dictionaries seem to use one of the American ones. It does not really matter, the scripts are similar, just be aware of it.

Hope this helps