Perhaps you are very limited in terms of resources for teaching, or you find your resources are inadequete to your learners’ needs. Here are some ideas that you can use with texts. I developed this list while working in Azerbaijan where we only used authentic material - for every level, including beginners…
Pre-reading activities
- Prediction from students’ knowledge. Give the students questions, maybe multiple choices about the text to guess the answers to – this will work best with a factual text where the students have some topic knowledge.
- Pre-teach difficult vocabulary: activates schemata and it is a way of removing hurdles, but is very passive – why not give a task and get them thinking instead?
- Prediction of vocabulary. Tell the students the topic or the title of the text and let them predict what words they’ll find in it. Then let them read to see if they are right.
- Students ask the questions. Tell the students the topic of the text. Let them make up their own questions; let them read to see if their questions are answered.
- Prediction from picture and title. If there is a picture with the text, let then predict the content of the text from the pictures and title(s).
Picture dictation. It there is an interesting picture with the text put the students in pairs. A looks at the picture and describes it to B, who has to draw from the dictation. See which student gets closest to the original picture. - Spot the difference. Students’ don’t look at the text. The teacher reads it out, or summarizes it, with some differences. Students read the text to find the differences.
- Expand headlines into full sentences
- Text from words. Teacher puts up key words from the text on the board. Students speculate on how words are linked and what the text might be about. This can work well in a narrative text when there are lots of different things in the story. Students read to see how close they were to the original.
- “ Authentic” texts. With authentic texts, students can work out their own task before they read the text. For example, they decide what kind of holiday they might want to go on before they read holiday brochures or holiday adverts.
Dictogloss. Teacher reads out a short text or part of a paragraph at normal speed. Students make notes of key words. Then in groups they reconstruct the paragraphs as near to the original text as possible, from memory and notes. This works very well done on OHTs. - Build the text. Teacher reads out about 50 of the first words of a text, and puts numbers on the board, e.g. 1_____ 2_______ 3________ 4 __________ etc. The teacher also needs to number the words him her own text. Students then reconstruct the text from memory by guessing the words. Teacher writes in the correct words. This is little more than a words version of hangman. With preparation time, the students can also run this activity themselves.
- Speed viewing. Students have the text face down. Teacher tells them that they have five seconds to find out as much about the text as possible. Then, in groups of four to six, they write down anything they can remember about the text and note it down, even single words. Then all the groups share what they can remember on the board and see how much they can speculate about the whole content.
- The Buzz game. Teacher reads out part or all of the text at speed (Students don’t see it yet). Teacher reads it again, substituting BUZZ for words that s/he want to focus on… Students have to call out/write down the appropriate word to fit the space. It can be made into a competitive game if you desire.
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During reading activities
- Jumbled Text. Photocopy text. Cut it into paragraphs or sentences (depending on length and difficulty). Students reassemble it in groups. A time limit is a good idea. This can also be done with two texts which the students have to un-jumble.
- Jumbled pictures. Students look at pictures of the text (best to do this with a narrative text) and put the pictures into order by reading.
Labeling a diagram or drawing. Students read the text in order to complete or label a diagram or drawing. - Following instructions. Students do some kind of physical activity following instructions in the text. Origami is good one for this.
- Titling the text. Students have to invent a title, or choose one from a selection.
- Use as a model for writing activities
- Writing first sentences to paragraphs
- Answering questions/ticking boxes. True/false, yes/know/don’t know, MCQ, completing a grid.
- Whole from bits. Teacher gives out small parts of the text – it can be one copy torn up – to different groups in the class. Each group has to find out what they can from each part, and guess what they can about the whole part. The teacher then takes away the texts and regroups the class so that the groups can share what they know in order to re-assemble the texts.
- Cut it down. This is a good one for boring textbook texts. Students take it in turns to cross out what they consider to be the most boring parts of a text. They can be single words, phrases or up to a whole sentence. The remaining text must be grammatical. The aim is to end up with a more interesting accessible text. Also good done on an OHP.
- Theme and rheme sentences. Students have to match theme and rheme. Often called topic and illustrative sentences in the context of paragraphing.
- References. Students trace reference throughout a text. Synonyms and antonyms words well as do anaphoric and endophoric references.
Shouting Dictation. Students sit opposite in two rows, across the room from each other, in As and Bs. As dictate to Bs a text. Best if each text is slightly different in details. - Wall Dictation. Put copies of the same text around the room or outside in the corridor. Students work in pairs or in small groups, one of them being a secretary. The runner(s) go to the text, memorize parts of it and then goes back to the writer and dictates the text. People can change roles during the activity. The first team to produce an acceptable text wins.
- Cloze tests. A cloze test has every nth. word blanked out. Students have to put them back. To make it easier, you can leave out the first letter. Students can make their own gap fills (not a cloze test) for the other half of the class. For this it is a good idea to use texts that they have previously met, and do it as a recycling exercise.
- Draw the text. Cut the text into paragraphs and give each student a paragraph. They then have to draw a picture from their bit of text. Put the pictures around the room and students should try to guess as much as they can about the text as a whole.
- Mime the text. As above, but instead of drawing the text, students have to mime their bit of text. Other students make notes as they watch the mime, and then try to summaries the text.
- Correcting the text. Students are given texts with mistakes and students correct them. To help assure top-down processing, mistakes are often logistic, or meaning related. For example, “it was raining so she didn’t take her umbrella”.
- Jigsaw reading for reordering. Different students have different parts of a text that they have to reconstruct. This can save a lot of time in the class. It has the effect of making some students very aware of what is going on in some parts of the text. A good one for improving classroom cohesion.
Post Reading Tasks
- What happened next? Students continue the story; invent a sequel to what they have read.
- Role Play. If the text is really authentic, such as a holiday brochure, or a job advert, students can role play booking holiday of going for a job interview. If newspapers are used there may be characters who could be interviewed by journalists. After the reading, set the students up in pairs to conduct an interview- this could also be recorded for another media, for example, radio. If the reading is a story, are there any scenes that the students could act out, or they can continue the story with further role play.
- Writing Tasks. Again with authentic material, there is often a natural writing task that arises from it, for example, writing a holiday postcard, writing a letter of application, filling in forms etc.
- Change the sentence. Choose a structurally interesting sentence from the text and write it on the board. Students take it in turns to change one word or clause, always keeping it grammatical and logical. See how far from the original sentence they can get whilst still maintaining the same structure.
- Deducing meaning and noticing constructions – as opposed to guessing and deducing:
- Cohesive devices
- Collocations
- Compounding
- Lexical fields & chains
- Conditionals
- The list is endless…
- Focus on Vocabulary
- Find a word in the passage that means…
- Find a word that is the opposite of…
- Find all the words connected with…
- Underline any words you don’t know. Get into groups. Share knowledge and help your neighbors with words they don’t know.
- Choose three words to look up in the dictionary. Explain them to the class.
- Choose a word from the first paragraph to gap fill the following sentence.
- Choose words from this list to fill the gaps in the text.
- Match vocabulary from the text with drawings.
- Organize vocabulary that gives problems into lexical fields. Use the Vocabox.
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Tags: dictation, dictogloss, game, list, material, Pre-reading, Pre-teach, schemata, text
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