Blog for ESL teachers

If you’ve ever watched a student dig through a long text and whisper, “Where is it?”, you already know why scanning reading matters. When I first taught reading scanning to a room of sleepy adults, the energy changed: heads went up, eyes moved faster, and answers appeared. In this guide I’ll show how I use scanning in real classes, from quick setups to ready‑to‑use tasks and worksheets—without drowning in less information than we actually need.

Intensive reading is a key approach in EFL and ESL classrooms, focusing on careful, detailed analysis of shorter texts to develop learners’ comprehension, vocabulary, and overall language awareness. This type of reading is essential when students need to understand how English works at a deeper level—how sentences are structured, how meaning is conveyed, and how specific linguistic features function within a text. Intensive reading also supports accuracy, encourages close attention to detail, and helps learners acquire strategies for dealing with challenging passages.

In this article, you will explore what intensive reading is, why it plays an important role in language teaching, and how it can benefit learners at different Prociency levels. You will also find practical techniques, classroom procedures, and guidance on how to manage intensive reading tasks effectively during lessons.

Have you ever watched a group of motivated adults go completely silent the moment you say, “Let’s read a book in English”? I certainly have. For years I saw that mix of panic and guilt in my students’ eyes—until I discovered extensive reading as a calm, realistic way to build reading fluency without overwhelming them. In this article, I’ll unpack what is extensive reading, what are the types of extensive reading, which skills it develops, and how to build an extensive reading plan that really works.

“Do we have to read the whole article?” — if I had a dollar for every time I heard that in class, I’d be writing this from a beach mansion. The funny thing is that my answer is often “no”. What my learners really need first is skimming reading, and yes, many of them still google strange things like reading skimming, skim reading or “how to read fast” the night before an exam, hoping for a miracle trick.