Little attention has been given to the task in reading instruction. This paper is intended as an investigation of the principles of task design for teaching reading.
Reading task reveals significant features. To put it more concretely, reading task is one of the resources which facilitate meaningful learning. Students learn reading skills in order to perform the task, rather than performing the task as an application of learning. And reading task has an influence on meaning construction in reading process.
Reading task is closely related to reader, text, and context in classroom : a reader may find one kind of task more difficult than another, a particular text may be more effectively organized for one task than another, a context may be more interdependently shaped for one task than another.
On these grounds, this study suggested that : 1. Reading task must lead students to engage in goal-centered activities. 2. Task for teaching reading involves students in use of various texts which are taken into account text features—readability, comprehensibility, and usability. 3. Reading task should be ill defined or ill structured at times, so that some aspects of the task are emergent and definable by the students. 4. Reading task needs to represent a real-world context, which provides students with cognitive challenges as those in the real world.