Reading: Stage the tasks

So, you finally settle on a text that you want your students to work on. Now it is high time you thought about tasks. Any reading task should consist of 3 stages: pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. All of them are crucial for a fulfilling and successful reading lesson. Unfortunately, some of them might be omitted in coursebooks. Nevertheless, with due diligence, any reading lesson from a book can be salvaged, no matter how poorly it was written.

Pre-reading tasks

The main aim of the pre-reading stage is to familiarise students with the topic of the text and help them connect with it. The following ideas might help you achieve this goal. Make it personal. The majority of students will be happy to see in you not only a teacher but also a person. We usually ask our students a great deal of questions, but we rarely reveal facts about ourselves. Of course, oversharing is not what we want here; telling about snippets of your life, however, may help you bond with your students even better. That is why it is a good idea to introduce the topic of the upcoming reading by telling about your personal experience with it. You can also tell about someone else who you know, and, obviously, it should not necessarily be completely true. Anyway, such stories will make the reading more relevant to your class.

1. Discuss the topic

Another way of involving students in the topic is a discussion. Let them discuss an opinion on the matter, reflect on the story you have just told, give a question to talk about, etc. Speaking about the topic will help students recall some useful vocabulary as well.

2. Predict

Ask students to predict information that they might find in the text; let them think about vocabulary that can be there (you may also give some prompts); or give them pictures, elicit the vocabulary behind them, and ask them to think about the plot of the story based on the words. For these tasks different pictures, quotes, headings, etc. may come in useful.

3. Pre-teach vocabulary

During the pre-reading stage it may be a good idea to pre-teach some of the vocabulary items from your text. Bare in mind that you should not include all the words that your students do not know in these exercises. The only vocabulary that needs pre-teaching is the one that is required to complete the reading task(s) successfully. Everything that goes beyond can be either skipped as not relevant or deduced from the context.

While-reading tasks

All the tasks that are there can be divided into 2 groups: skimming and scanning. Skimming - otherwise known as reading for gist - is usually given first. As the name suggests, these tasks help learners familiarise themselves with the main idea(s) of the text and give them better understanding of where to search for information for further exercises. It is a good practice to set a time limit for skimming, as well as ask the learners to read fast and not pay attention to the words that they do not know. Not only will it help to eliminate the problem of late finishers but also help students overcome their difficulties with reading in the long run.

Scanning activities are divided into reading for detail and reading for specific information. A lot of teachers consider these two to be the same thing, though. In the majority of cases it is not very essential as the approach to these tasks is basically identical. Scanning requires from learners more precision and attentiveness. It is advisable to ask students to predict the kind of information (or maybe even particular words) they will need to find. Moreover, make sure your task is clear and manageable (ideally, do all of the tasks yourself first).

Post-reading

At this stage your learners can reflect on the ideas of the text, discuss some questions, or even do a project as a follow-up activity. Post-reading activities aim at showing learners the use of a text as a source of information for further activities.

You can also read:

Back