Getting Started: Reading Techniques That Work From the Very First Day

ABSTRACT In presenting workshops at Department of Defense schools and other institutions, the authors have encountered teachers who like the idea of a proficiency‐based approach, but argue that it will not work for their languages, at least not with beginners. This article sets forth a number of reading techniques and activities that demonstrate the feasibility of using real foreign language texts and proficiency‐oriented tasks at the earliest stages of a beginning course.