Promote Student-Teachers’ Reading Habits and Reading Proficiency Through Reading Literacy Methods

Promoting student-teachers' reading habits is a critical aspect of their academic success and personal development. Student-teachers need to be proficient readers themselves to effectively teach literacy skills to students. However, we found that year-one student-teachers do not have strong reading habits or skills, and this can impact their study results, and their ability to teach and motivate their students’ learning in the future. This is where the use of reading literacy methods comes into play. These methods are designed to enhance student-teachers' literacy skills, improve their comprehension, expand their vocabulary, and build positive habits toward reading. This paper aims to understand the reading habits of student-teachers and discusses the reading literacy methods that can be utilized to promote the reading habits and reading proficiency of student-teachers. Data were collected by viewing student-teachers' reading notes on the template provided every week during the course to see their progress in reading, and by analyzing the questionnaire about self-reflection on their reading habits after finishing the course for one year. We found that reading literacy methods have positive effects on their reading habits our student-teachers love reading more by spending their time reading almost every day, especially when they apply the reading literacy techniques learned from the course in their reading as well. Most of them self-evaluated their reading proficiency to be more effective than before by achieving the reading objective at the appropriate time. More or less, we found that student-teachers have changed their perspective on reading even though few of them don’t have much time for reading, they are always conscious that reading is really important for their careers and self-improvement. Ultimately, this paper argues that promoting reading habits and proficiency is a critical part of teacher education and that utilizing reading literacy methods is a powerful way to help student-teachers develop a lifelong love of reading and become better equipped to teach literacy skills to their future students.