Teaching beginning‐level readers can pose a challenge to even experienced instructors. These learners have varied purposes, goals, backgrounds, and levels of literacy in their first language. Instructors should be aware of these variables and should use both top‐down and bottom‐up strategies at this level while seeking to boost student reading rate. Significant adjustments must be made in running the classroom in order to facilitate student comprehension. Teachers should simplify their language and focus students' attention on the content at hand. Teachers should also foster student vocabulary acquisition. This can be done through providing extensive reading opportunities, multiple exposures to vocabulary terms, and through the use of graded readers and realia. Finally, teachers should be aware of and address learner affective variables.

As ESL readers progress to more advanced proficiency levels, they face unique challenges. These challenges relate to the rhetorical and grammatical complexity of the texts read, the level of vocabulary comprehension required, the more advanced content faced, and the ways in which these readers must demonstrate their language proficiency. In order for advanced‐level readers to be prepared for the texts and tasks required of them, they should employ bottom‐up and top‐down approaches to reading, and effectively utilize reading strategies. Such strategy use can only take place when readers are metacognitively aware of their own reading practices. This enables readers to effectively and consciously select which reading strategies meet the unique challenges presented by each reading situation. Some examples of reading strategy categories that are useful across a broad spectrum of advanced reading tasks include previewing strategies (including skimming and scanning), vocabulary strategies (including understanding words using context and dictionary strategies), questioning, using a graphic organizer, and focusing on improving reading rate while maintaining comprehension. Advanced‐level readers and instructors can also benefit from better understanding the role that motivation plays in language study, and by implementing effective motivational practices in the language‐learning process.

OpenBU http://open.bu.edu Wheelock College of Education & Human Development BU Open Access Articles ESL programs at U.S. community colleges: a multistate analysis of placement tests, course offerin...

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