Introduction to The Idea and Practice of Reading

Abstract

The book The Idea and Practice of Reading, edited by Joseph Ponniah and Sathyaraj Venkatesan, published in 2018 by Springer Nature Singapore Ltd., investigates from the perspective of cognitive science many important aspects in EFL/ESL reading, which includes 1) the challenges facing literacy education in the internet era of multimodal visualaudio background; 2) cognitive view on the influence of extensive reading on vocabulary acquisition; 3) the transfer of L1 reading strategies to L2 reading; 4) genetic elaboration of reading competence; 5) the effect of general reading on academic reading; 6) the effect of socio-learning on metacognition and learning autonomy; 7) implications of cognitive load theory for teaching reading; 8) the applications of cognitive semantics in teaching reading, etc. This book contains profound educational wisdom, which can be summarized as three points:1) Extensive reading is important and it should be pleasure-based; 2) Individualized teaching should be employed whenever possible; “one-trick-for-all” teaching should be avoided; 3) Background learning is beneficial to reading new content. In short, this book explores several important theories in the teaching of foreign language reading, and puts forward some solutions to common problems encountered by foreign language teachers, which can be summarized as "how to teach", "how to read" and "what to