The significance of developing reading skills and the use

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DEVELOPING READING SKILLS AND THE USE OF ONLINE TEACHING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Kadirova Firuza Rustamovna
Department of English, Samarkand StateUniversity, Samarkand, Uzbekistan [e-mail]

Abstract

While teaching a foreign language to students, reading skills has great impact along with other skills such as listening, speaking and writing. Reading is about understanding written texts. It is a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other strategies to help them understand written text. Through reading in a foreign language, the student enriches his knowledge, of the world around him/her. He/She gets acquainted with the countries where the target language is spoken. Reading develops students'



intelligence. It helps to develop their memory, will, imagination.
Generally, it has been observed that many teachers don't develop this skill in the students in the right way, and even provide little time for it. It is, therefore, necessary to work to know about reading skills and to incorporate them in in teaching practices. In this paper an effort will be made to analyze reading skills of the first-year students
of the International Programming faculty of Samarkand State University.
In order to do so the students will be provided reading materials Their patterns of difficulty, that affect their comprehension will be highlighted.


Keywords: reading skills, online teaching, good readers, distance learning, Moodle

Introduction

In traditional and non-traditional foreign language teaching and learning reading is most emphasized in many countries (Susser & Robb, 1990). Meanwhile, in comparison with the teaching of other aspects of language use-such as grammar, listening, speaking, and writing-reading has received the most attention from English as Second Language (ESL) teachers (Aebersold & Field, 1997). Grabe and Stoller (2002) claimed that becoming a highly proficient reader in a second language is very difficult. It is also found that many non-native English-speaking students have difficulties in understanding what they read, especially complex, academic texts (Snow, 2002). Reading effectively in a foreign language is one of the most challenging activities for many students at school. Certainly, this important skill helps students