According to Lewis, intensive reading means that ‘students are expected to understand everything they read and to be able to answer detailed vocabulary and comprehension questions. Intensive reading activities in the classroom, on texts which are usually not more that a page or so in length, are intended to train students in the strategies needed for successful reading, such as using connectives for predicting content or guessing the meanings of unfamiliar words using clues in the surrounding text’.
Extensive reading means students have a general understanding of the text without necessarily understanding every world. In other words, intensive reading helps to improve extensive reading but the latter also needs to be practiced in its own right, principally to give students confidence in dealing with authentic materials.
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