Reading Minus | Adaptive Literacy Intervention for Reading Proficiency

Making the most of written texts in the English course

Ideas for developing reading and other language skills in the English class

► Come across besides: Thematic exercise and classroom activity index for avant-garde English language reading texts.

Approaching the written text -
The classic reading comprehension technique

Reading comprehension – the ability to understand a written text – is 1 of the core skills required for certification by nigh of today'southward internationally accredited English language tests, such equally TOEIC, TOEFL and the Cambridge get-go document, advanced, and proficiency qualifications. Equally such, its importance cannot exist underestimated.
For the purposes of automobile marking or rapid marking, comprehension exercises presented in the context of exams or examination papers are nowadays largely reduced to multiple selection questions (MCQs).
Nevertheless while classic multiple choice questions are very widely used used for testing purposes because marking them is very quick and uncomplicated, and can even be done by computer, they are by no ways the only way of testing students' comprehension of a document, and they are certainly not the only, nor even the all-time, fashion of using texts in a learning , rather than a testing, context. There are many kinds of comprehension exercises and activites,  as outlined below.

"Comprehension" is thus an activity that tin exist used for ii quite unlike purposes, which are all too frequently confused :

• learning - developing students' abilities to read and understand a written text and its vocabulary,
• testing -  testing students' understanding of a written text .

In other words, classroom preparation for comprehnsion exams or tests volition not be all-time achieved by simply giving students past test papers or exam papers with nothing but multiple pick questions to test their skills, but by resorting to a whole lot of other methods designed to develop, rather than only test, students' ability to understand a text.

Earlier students can understand a text, they first need to learn how to read it; and while just reading through a text in one case may be sufficient for the high-flyers in some classes, for about students who read a text in a foreign language, a single reading is not enough.
In practical terms, when comprehension activities are being used as a learning technique, rather than a testing technique,  the showtime stage of comprehension involves reading a certificate at least three times, frequently in different means. The 3 bones ways of reading a document are: a) private silent reading, b) instructor reading or playing the certificate to the class, and c) students reading the document out loud, taking turns.
Each method has its advantages; but combined in succession, the result should be even better.  Many teachers observe information technology hard to know what to do during the silence that reigns (hopefully) when students are asked to silently read an commodity which may accept them five to eight minutes, even more than. For this reason, it is often best to begin any reading comprehension chore, by asking students to read an article at home or by themselves, before coming into form. The instructor can so exist more than usefully employed piloting students through the two other stages of the reading process - students reading the document in plough, and finally the teacher reading the whole document dorsum to the class.
Betwixt the dissimilar reading stages, students and teachers can explore and elucidate whatsoever vocabulary and grammer issues, so that by the time the teacher makes the final reading, the document and its content are now familiar, and the principal difficulties have been ironed out.

    The above procedure can be applied to virtually any reading resource ; but information technology is just a offset. At that place are many more means of getting extra value out of a written document, and by doing so developing students' skills not just in comprehension, but in expression, retentivity, grammer, deduction, and a lot more.
What to do side by side depends on the nature, the difficulty and the content of each certificate. It will besides depend on the type of learners, and the classroom context. Reading, by itself, is just the first part of whatsoever use of written documents in the English class.
Each commodity in the Linguapress annal comes with i or more than - sometimes several - classroom exercises or activities. These include cloze or multiple-choice exercises which tin either be used for general classroom presentation on a connected screen or whiteboard, or be used individually by students on their computer or phone. See thematic exercise index to choose advanced EFL texts in function of specific classroom activities.

    Hither are some more means to make all-time use of written documents in the English form.

X more ideas for working with manufactures and stories in course.

Hither is a list of  different ways of working with manufactures and stories in the language class. Each is suggested as a classroom exercise activity for one or more of the articles in the Linguapress archive; simply each can be suitably used with many other articles.
 Working with a continued whiteboard or projector. Many of the ideas below can exist more than constructive when used with a connected whiteboard or screen on which the text and or exercises tin exist projected. Any article in the Linguapress drove tin can be projected onto a screen for classroom use; a growing number of these manufactures are now accompanied by interactive exercises (including dropdown multiple-choice exercises) that can exist used to great consequence on a screen or whiteboard, and even more than effectively using a smartboard. Practise types that can be used effectively on a classroom screen or whiteboard are marked 💡

• Paused reading: (afterwards students have already been through a text at least twice) Students close their books or comprehend the printed copy of the article; the teacher so starts reading a text out loud, but pauses at significant points (grammar points, content points, or just presently before the ends of clauses) and asks students to shout out the side by side few words from memory. This activity may need direction, specially if i or students with good memories offset to monopolise the proceedings.
• Blank fill exercises. 💡 (Cloze exercises)  Where non already suggested and included in  Linguapress article worksheets, these can easily exist prepared past the instructor, using a simple copy and paste of text from the original article, into a new word processing document.  Cloze exercises can either be based on useful vocabulary, or gramatically based - for instance by removing all the auxiliaries or modals from a text, or all the manufactures ( the, a, an, whatsoever, some, Ø (no commodity) ). But take care ! Cloze exercises need to be carefully thought out so that a) there is only one correct reply in each instance, and b) they serve some purpose.  For instance, cloze exercises that just test mutual sense may non do much to examination - nor develop - students' control of English language. Cloze exercises are a key ingredient of Cambridge FCE (B2)  and CAE (C1) testing.
• Replace the endings. 💡 Another blazon of cloze exercise, which is used in Cambridge under the heading  word germination. Instead or removing words from the document, the teacher removes all or most of the suffixes or functional endings from part of a certificate that students have studied. Endings to be removed can be exact (ed, ing, due south, Ø (no ending needed) ), or nominal/ adjectival/ adverbial (-al, -ous, -ment,  -ing,  -ly, etc)
• Question forming.💡 Select one-half a dozen short sentences in an article, and have students write correctly formed questions to which each of these sentences could exist the respond.  Example.  if you choose the judgement  "Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961.", then the questions could be "Where was Barack Obama built-in?", "What year was Barack Obama born?" and then on.
• Condensing - précis writing. Accept students produce a shorter version of the article they have been reading. This can take many forms; the bones task is to reduce an article to a given fraction (quarter, half, etc.) of its original length. A more demanding chore can be to ask students to reduce office of a text to exactly a given number of words. For example, take a paragraph with 150 words, and get students to reduce information technology to exactly 75 words. Washed in pairs, this can likewise be a good way to become students to negotiate the fine points of expression.
• Working backwards; the original interview.  Many articles in the press or media are written after a journalist or writer has been talking to an skilful or the witness to an  effect. With suitable articles, students can be invited to reconstitute an interview from data given in the article. This is a good action for students working in pairs, and can be followed, if classes are not too large,  past students acting out their sketches.
• Multiple choice exercises. 💡 These are pretty classic exercises, that accompany a lot of EFL texts on a multitude of online sites; sadly they are often very poorly idea out. MCQs should neither be too stupid nor too complicated.  An MCQ which asks: "Donald Trump was born in... a) 1496,  b) 1694,  c) 1946" does not examination reading comprehension skills, merely mutual sense or maybe general noesis.  Conversely, good MCQs should exist answerable without calling into apply information or knowledge that students may accept acquired outside the language form.  Vocabulary based MCQs should be designed  to check students' acquired vocabulary, and check their ability to read logically.
  For case, the post-obit judgement includes a word that is probably new to students, the discussion invaluable. "The thieves stole iii paintings, notably an invaluable portrait of Jan Hoots, by Rembrandt." A skillful MCQ would be: Invaluable means:  a) without value,  b) of medium worth,  c) of peachy value.  The cardinal to choosing the correct reply is the student'south power to understand the office and meaning in the sentence of the word notably.  A poor MCQ would exist a) ancient,  b)  incredible  c) expensive.  In this example, logically all iii answers could be right; the only affair that this MCQ pick tests is the reader'south caused vocabulary.
• True or imitation : 💡 the teacher will produce a number of statements based on the article, some of which are true, according to the commodity, others of which are fake. Students read the commodity and determine which of the statements are true.  Extended version of this; students must justify their answers.
• Punctuation exercise. 💡 The teacher copies office of a text that students have already read, just removes all the punctuation (not forgetting to remove capital letters). Students have to replace the punctuation so that the text again reads coherently.  Note that this does not necessarily mean reconstituting exactly the same punctuation every bit the original text. Variants may well be possible.  This is a little-used exercise but one that is very valuable. Sadly, many students, even at advanced level (including PhD students) , seem to believe that punctuation is an optional extra.
• Correct the errors. 💡 While some teachers maintain that students should never be presented with any text containing errors, doing and then has plenty of advantages. Checking for errors makes students read words very advisedly, and pay attention to all sorts of points. For creative teachers, correct-the-errors exercises tin bring humour into the classroom, and humour is an excellent instructor. The big pitfall to avoid with error correcting exercises, is that students remember the errors rather than what is right.  Mistake-correcting exercises can encourage students to await at their own writing more than carefully. This is proof-reading in an uncomplicated state.

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