Module 9 – Reading work – Using Texts Effectively

Reflections on current practice/ Key questions 

Before you start to work through this unit, read the following questions and take a minute to reflect on your current ideas of teaching reading. 

 How important is reading in your classroom- think about the materials that you are currently using.

 What are the learning aims of reading. Why should your students read stories, etc from coursebooks or elsewhere? What's the point?

 What problems have you noticed your students having with reading texts in class?

 How much time do your students spend reading in class?  

 How much time do your students spend reading outside of class? 

 How much silent reading and reading aloud do your students do? 

Information and discussion on these questions can be found in the Reading Extra Section. 

Some suggestions on why reading is important and useful:

5 main points:

(i) Reading improves students’ reading skills (understanding texts, find information from a text)

(ii) Reading texts is an excellent way of learning new vocabulary and seeing how it works in context.

(iii) Reading texts can be an opportunity to see particular grammar structures in a meaningful context

(iii) Reading is interesting, and a text can be used to start class/ pair work discussions. 

(iv) Knowing the texts will help students answer some Qs in the end-of-year exams

Also:

Personalized responses to reading texts are a key component of the communicative classroom. Allowing students to use their own language to respond with their own views is a great way to encourage reading, and develop their other skills. 

Reading lesson example 

Aims To increase students' ability to predict content and increase confidence and reading ability.

Materials Copies of any text that you feel your students will find interesting. This could come from the coursebook you are using, newspapers, magazines. For the purposes of this activity, it is recommended that the text has its paragraphs alphabetized or numbered, or that there are line numbers on the text. For this demonstration lesson, we will be using a newspaper article. 

Warmer As required from list

Lead-in Put the headline on the board, and elicit/pre-teach any unknown vocabulary. Now show any pictures that accompany the text, but do not display the article. Elicit the general topic of the article, and write up a few general predictions of what the text is about. If there are no pictures, you can always draw a few stick figures on the board or choose a few key words from the text.  Do not tell your students if they are correct at this stage!

Main Activity

 Ask the students to work in pairs or small groups and to write 3 questions that they are interested in finding out the answer to in the article. For lower level classes you can write skeleton questions for them to complete. e.g. What is the name of.............. Be available at this stage for help and assistance with grammar and vocabulary. As you monitor the activity you can always provide help by giving question words as prompts: who, why, where, when, etc. 

Ask the groups to put forward their favourite question, and write this on the board. Repeat this process till you have about 6-8 questions on the board. 

Now you can hand out the text to your students. Explain that they are to read the text quickly (skimming) to see if any of the questions on the board can be answered. At this stage they should not answer the question, just say if the information is available in the text. (YES the answer is in the text/ NO the answer can not be found in the text.)

The students can now compare their YES/NO answers with a partner, highlighting where in the text the information can be found (using the line numbers or the alphabetised paragraphs as a reference).

Students can now read the text again and use this information to answer the YES questions. They don't need to write their answers, but they should be prepared to talk about them. At this stage dictionaries can be used in moderation, but only for answering questions on the board. Remember this is a reading lesson not a vocabulary lesson! 

Some of your students may feel de-motivated if there was no information in the text to answer their questions. Now is a good time to reassure your students that predicting the content of a text is a skill that will be developed over time, and it is in fact, not that important to make a 100% correct prediction!

Students can compare their answers in small groups or pairs, you can then check their answers as a whole class. Some of your students may be tempted to just read you whole chunks of the text. Encourage them to tell you the answer in their own words. 

The class can now read the text again with the aim of providing a personal response. Ask the students to re-read the text and share feedback in small groups on the following questions:

1. How interesting did you find the text? (0-10)
2. How much did you understand? (as a % or as a grade 0-5)
3. How much did you know about the topic before you read the text? 
4. Did you read any new information on the topic? 
5. Was anything surprising; was there anything you disagree with? 

Students can also at this stage read for any new vocabulary and this leads onto the perfect place to revise techniques and tactics of guessing the meaning of new lexis from context. 

Follow up work

This lesson can finish here or it can be easily extended  to provide further language work. You could for example: ask further comprehension questions; focus on new vocabulary related to the topic; use the text as a model for a grammar point; use the text for the start of a discussion.  

Alternatives 

Reading can be extremely difficult for many of our students, and this is often because they lose confidence in their own ability to relate to or understand a text. 

This problem can be overcome by allowing students to predict the content of the text, and write their own tasks to be completed by their fellow students. After completing this exercise, you can then move onto your own focus for the text, or simply end the lesson.  This exercise works best if the text that you are using has numbered paragraphs or line numbers. As mentioned above, and with any reading activity, it is best if the text is related to the interests of your class. Reading can often be a solitary activity, if you wish to make your reading classes even more communicative you could use a running dictation. 

NEEDED:

1. More examples of exercises and tasks that can form part of a reading lesson

2. Some simplification of the above so it's easily read and understood by the target audience

3. A brief summary/conclusion, perhaps with some next steps for the reader