Most people have an innate curiosity about things and ideas, people and events. When they read stories, especially those concerning crime, love, or adventure, they not only want to find out what is happening or has happened, but they generally make some kind of guess as to what is likely to happen next. Where there is no such curiosity on the part of the reader, a detective story becomes a pointless tale of violence that few intelligent people would take the trouble to read. Teachers can exploit this innate curiosity when teaching pupils to read a foreign language. Teaching of a certain kind may actually inhibit curiosity. This can be particularly serious when teachers are trying to teach reading and comprehension to students who have little or no written literature in their own language, and where the tendency has been to treat written texts in a "school language" like French or English merely as material for commentary, definition, analysis, manipulation, or translation, but never, never, as a medium of communication--a means of finding things out or making them happen. It is noticeable that in most of the language textbooks used by such students, although the reading texts are in the target language, the instructions for doing exercises and so on are in the mother or vehicular tongue. The latter remains for them the "real" language; the target language is just something one has to study. In this article, the author describes briefly some of the ways he used to arouse curiosity and deepen comprehension. (Contains 1 footnote.)