Reconsidering the Reading Comprehension Skill for Advanced LearnersA Communicative Teaching Approach

Investigations in some Algerian universities, in the field of foreign language teaching and learning, show that most of the teachers do not consider the reading skill when compared to the other three teaching skills: listening, speaking, and writing. Most of the time they assign texts or whole works to their learners and ask them to read and comprehend them and sometimes even to analyse or evaluate them assuming that students know how to read, thus reading comprehension is taken for granted. Investigations in the field, however, show that most of the learners and an immense majority of teachers cannot read appropriately. That is practically due to a total ignorance of the basic principles of the reading process and the key notions of the reading skill. In this article, we suggest a consistent definition of the reading process and explore the major points in the skill of reading comprehension for advanced learners.