It’s up to the teacher to convince a reluctant reader that reading, either extensive or intensive, is pleasurable. Only one of the many ways of obtaining pleasure is to be able to answer the teacher’s comprehension check questions the following day. Such pleasure is fleeting as ultimately the teacher and the motivation of the comprehension will be removed. The world of reading will remain inaccessible as ever to the student. The reader and eventually, it is hoped, the unsimplified authentic text provide a means for the student to keep in touch with the foreign language long after the completion of the course. After we have learnt how to drive and finally acquired our driving licenses it would be perverse to then stop driving immediately and never set foot in an automobile again, claiming that the license was our goal. Yet, this is the attitude that we foster among our students. We enable them to obtain a “license” or certificate after examinations or tests and then, in the majority of cases, we deprive them of the interest, or ability to continue contact with the second language. More rewarding than the fleeting pleasure of the correct answer and the narrow language skill that this demonstrates or practices is to grant the students access to the world of the reader and enable them to perceive the writer’s skills or aims, while practicing a wider range of language tasks. Part of the pleasure of reading is to use the ability to appreciate, for example, theme, plot, setting, and characterization, and to have the confidence to trust one’s own perceptions about what has been written and to voice one’s ideas if required. These skills are most fully developed and refined with authentic texts, but the world of the authentic text and its language may not be immediately accessible to the foreign student. The initial steps towards this world can be taken through readers. Reading in any language is an affective as well as a cognitive process.

(Slightly adapted from Class Readers by Jean Greenwood, Oxford University Press)

In the sentence fragment – ... to voice one’s ideas if required. – the underlined expression means, as used in this context, the same as to