UNIT 1 : READING

WHY TEACH READING?

For extensive reading practice students could:

 read graded readers (your school or a local library might have a set of these)
 read books or magazines that you recommend based on students’ individual interests
 join a library or use an e-reader.

For extensive listening practice students could:

 listen to audio versions of graded readers, podcasts, audio books, radio programmes
 watch and listen to any authentic material that appeals to them - TV shows, songs,
documentaries, films, and so on.

TOP DOWN PROCESSING

- easier to recongnise style of print or language
- if you know the culture
- using our general knowledge to help us make sense of what we are reading
- occurs when we use our existing general knowledge to help us make sense of a written
text.
- top-down processes (using our existing general knowledge) to help us make sense of what
we are reading.
- Bringing your cultural knowledge to the text in order to make predictions about what
type of text you are going to read, what it is likely to be about, what language is likely to
be used, etc.
-

BOTTOM UP PROCESING
- physical marks on the pages (letters)
- combine marks to forms words then sentences then combine those to understand
the whole text
- decoding or making sense of the symbols on the page
- happens when we try to understand language by looking at individual meanings or
grammatical characteristics of the most basic units of the text, and moves from these to
trying to understand the whole text. 
- When we read, we employ both bottom-up processes (decoding the symbols on the page) 
-
Think about your own daily reading activities - and not just books and the newspaper. What parts
of your life require you to read? 

 Bus and train timetables

 Emails
 A menu at a restaurant
 Information on a medicine bottle
 A recipe
 Bank statements
 A map
 IKEA assembly instructions!

Reading a range of longer texts for pleasure is called extensive reading

Whereas careful reading of a text for a specific purpose such as answering comprehension
questions is called intensive reading.

Novel
Article
(EXTENSIVE)

Twitter
Catalogue
Recipe
(INTENSIVE)

Waht deos tihs msseage cnovey? 

Why cn yuo raed it wehn soem leettrs ar mssiing and oehtrs aer in teh worng positoin?

We do not read just by building up letter by letter. In fact, a fluent reader recognises whole
words and does not build up from letters to work out what the word iS

1. How is the child encouraged to use top-down processing - using knowledge external to the
written text to help him/her understand the whole meaning?

2. Most of these words have spelling that could be 'sounded out', e.g. b-u-s, d-a-n. This helps the
child understand the relationship between letters and sounds, and helps them 'decode' the symbols
- bottom-up processing. Which words are not phonetically spelled?
3. Readers need to learn to recognise 'digraphs' - that is, two letters that together represent a
single sound, e.g. 'sh' = / ʃ /. List the digraphs you can see in this text.

1 . How is the child encouraged to use top-down processing?

The picture shows the meaning of the whole text. The reader can use the information conveyed by the picture
(top-down) to help him/her decode the text (bottom-up).

2. Which words are not phonetically spelled? 

The, stopped, lights, are, crossing, road, green, called, Whiskers. Children are often taught to recognise common
words such as the and light as 'whole words'.

3. List the digraphs you can see in this text. 

th, pp, ed, ff, ss, ng, oa, ee, -ll, wh, er - when children have learned the phonemes (sounds) the digraphs
represent, then they can 'sound out' words such as 'r-oa-d' and 'Wh-i-s-k-er-s’.

Cohesive devices

Another aspect of written texts that helps us understand the text as a whole is the way
relationships between different parts of the text are marked, e.g. by the use of conjunctions. The
various ways of showing these relationships are called cohesive devices. Cohesive devices
include discourse markers (nevertheless, therefore - see next slide), demonstrative and personal
pronouns, and articles.

Discourse markers

Discourse markers are words or phrases that are used to connect speech and writing, express a
person’s attitude, and organise and manage what a person says or writes. 

Examples of spoken discourse markers include ‘like’, ‘anyway’, ‘right’, ‘okay’ and ‘so’.  

Written discourse markers include words like ‘firstly’, ‘furthermore’, ‘on the other hand’ and ‘in
conclusion’.
 1. Pre reading -development begins before learners are aware of printed letters and
words. Prior to learning about the alphabet, learners should be successful with
their oral language skills. Once learners understand words, they have an
awareness of what makes them similar to or different from each other.
2. Emergent readers- able to begin learning how to connect sounds to printed letters
and words. They learn that letters represent sounds and notice that combinations
of letters produce different sounds. This occurs when emergent readers write
words the way they sound, which is a typical part of this developmental stage.
3. Early readers- Early readers are at the beginning stages of becoming fluent. They
are usually more efficient at sounding out words and are able to recognise parts of
words and decode them.
4. Transitional readers - refine and expand their decoding skills, increase word
recognition, increase their rate of reading, increase their vocabulary knowledge,
and increase their level of comprehension.

Authentic texts
In most reading lessons, you will use the texts provided in the course book. Texts of this type
most often resemble magazine articles, but for the most part, they are not really like the sort of
everyday reading we do in our L1.

Some examples of authentic reading texts are provided in the activity below. Let’s pretend you
are planning lessons for the following learners:

A: Immigrants and refugees living in an English-speaking country.

- Job leaflet

- Dosage of medicine
B: Adults who LOVE everything British. They’re learning English in their own country, but it’s
mainly for when they go on holiday to the UK.

- Hotel broucheiour

C: Teenagers learning English in their own country.

- Article about homelessness in new York

- Fan website

D: Business people who need English to communicate with other business people, in English, but
who won’t spend a lot of time in an English-speaking country.

- Biuness leaflet

- International conefeence on finance

For each example of an authentic text, consider which group of learners it would be most
appropriate for. 

Common reading activities

PRE READING

 Read the first line of the text to the students and ask them to predict the content and
language they will find in the rest of the text.
 Choose a few words from the text and give one set to half the class and the other set to the
other half of the class. Each student must explain their keywords to their partners.
Together they then predict the story from the keywords.
 Provide visuals to act as a discussion related to the text (without the students realising
they are talking about the text).
 Get the students to come up with questions related to the topic of the text, which they then
ask each other in groups. The questions can be anything. For example, if the text is about
a football player, questions could be: How often do you play football? Is football popular
in your country?

WHILE READING

 Divide the text in half. Each student only reads half the text and must work in pairs to
construct the meaning of the whole text. This can be done by simply cutting the text in
half or by cutting it at random places—which method is best will depend on the text.
  Let the students come up with questions from the text which their partners must then
answer.
 Take out a number of sentences from the text. While they read, the students must put
them back in the correct place. This can also be done with words instead of sentences.

POST READING

 Let the students answer questions which will relate the text to the students’ lives.
 The students can present a follow-up to the text—what happened next?
 The students can write a letter to the editor commenting on the text.
 Teaching reading doesn’t need to be a complicated process. If you break it down into
these three stages (pre-, during and post-) you should find planning and executing a
lesson plan easy.

WORD CARDS =. BEGINNER

Students have to put the words in the correct order. It’s also useful to use colours to represent the
different parts of speech (noun, verb and so on) to help your students recognise sentence patterns.
If you do use colours, remember to keep these consistent from class to class.

MATCHING WORDS WITH PICS =BEG

There are numerous games you can play with your class using a set of cards. You could simply
get them to match the words and pictures with a partner. For revision, you could play a memory
game where all of the cards are turned over. Students have to turn over two cards and match the
image with the words. If they find a matching pair, they keep them. The student with the most
matching pairs wins.

JUMBLED SENTENCES = INTERMEDIATE

Students have to put sentences from a paragraph in the correct order.

DEVELOPLING SCANNING SKILLS = INTERMEDIATE

Students have to obtain certain pieces of very specific information (for example, dates mentioned
in the text).

DEVELOPING SKIMMING SKILLS - INTER

Students have to read over the text quickly to get the gist or the general idea of the text.
More advanced students will also be able to complete higher order activities, such as:

 reading a text, then writing a summary or critique

 discussing content in detail
 identifying the writer's attitude
 reading long texts independently, followed by discussion in class.

Adapting teaching material from a coursebook

To give them exposure to a wider range of texts, you can vary your lessons by using authentic
reading materials in lessons. Remember, when you’re looking for useful reading material, try to
think about your students' needs, interests, and current level of English.

- IMPROVE COURSEBOOKS
- Ask questions
- Does the activity establish the context of a lesson
- How many introductory activites are there
- How is the vocab actually taught
- Is it approporiate target vocab
- Don’t try to teach more than 10 words per lesson
- Pre teach your learners any target vocab before the listening or reading
- Is there an adequate gist tasks
- Do the follow on activites flow logitiscally on from the listening or reading activities

Reading lessons and activities

Jumbled paragraphs

This is the procedure for 'jumbled paragraphs':

Step 1. Copy the reading text and cut it into separate paragraphs. 

Step 2. Divide the class into groups and give each group a set of paragraphs.

Step 3. Ask the students to decide on the correct order of the paragraphs. 

You can use the same procedure for sentences. This can work well with lower-level learners. 

This activity requires students to read intensively. It helps students understand referencing
and the use of cohesive devices.

Simulations
A 'simulation' is an elaborate role play, in which all students take on a role and improvise a
scenario, as in the hospital example below.

Step 1. Set up the situation. Students familiarise themselves with the situation by reading a text or
texts.

Step 2. Each student is then allocated a role within the scenario. They read their role cards.

Step 3. Students then communicate with each other while attempting to accomplish a task. 

For example, students read a set of newspaper clippings about a patient mix-up in a hospital.
After reading, students are informed that they will take part in a simulated press conference. They
are then allocated roles. Examples could include a spokesperson for the hospital, the two patients,
the doctor, the administrator, along with a group of journalists. 

The students are then given some time to prepare. The journalists need to write some questions to
ask, whilst the others need to prepare what they would like to tell the press about this situation. 

The teacher can then oversee and manage the simulation.     

This activity can be used at lower levels providing the language in the texts is appropriately
graded. 

Devising your own comprehension questions

Jessica Johnson was on the way to a funeral when she received an email from her university saying she’d
committed a very serious offence: she’d plagiarised an essay.

“I was completely shocked because I hadn’t realised I’d done it.”

The teacher needs to devise questions that require full understanding of the language and ideas in
the text, and encourage readers to think about their own responses to the text.

For example:

 Why do you think the communication from the university would have been particularly
upsetting for Jessica?

This requires understanding of the phrase 'on her way to a funeral', and students need to think
about Jessica's feelings in that situation.

 What does plagiarising an essay mean?

This checks understanding of 'plagiarise'.

 Why was she so surprised? Answer this question without repeating words from the text.

This checks understanding of 'shocked' and requires students to rephrase 'I hadn’t realised I’d
done it,' which they will not be able to do if they don't understand it.
Usual procedure for a reading lesson – introduction

1 Introduce topic (warmer/lead-in).

2 Pre-teach vocabulary.
3 Teacher sets a simple task to encourage students to read
quickly through the text for general meaning. A short
time limit is given. First reading + feedback.
4 Teacher sets more detailed questions/task. More time is
allowed. Second reading + feedback.
5 Follow-up activities (speaking or writing).

TIP DON’T GET THEM TO READ ALOUD

Notice that this procedure does NOT require students to read aloud. Reading aloud is something
teachers often include in a reading lesson, but it has very little educational value.

In a second language, the students' pronunciation tends to be affected when they try to read aloud,
making it difficult for other students in the class to understand what they are saying.

You may occasionally:

 Ask students to read out something very short, such as the answer to a question
 Use very short pieces of text for pronunciation practice

But do NOT ask your students to read aloud as part of a reading lesson, nor to read whole essays
or presentations. It will not improve their pronunciation and it will not help them understand the
text.

It is generally not helpful for teachers to read aloud a passage which students are supposed to be
reading. In a reading lesson you are aiming to develop their reading skills, not their listening
skills.

he first three stages - rationale

Look at the first three stages of a typical reading lesson below:

Stage 1:

Warmer/Introduce topic

The topic of the reading is introduced before students read the text to engage the students' interest
and help them make predictions about what they are going to read.

Stage 2:

Pre-teach vocabulary
Reading a text with a large amount of unfamiliar vocabulary is extremely difficult. Students
usually focus so much on the new words and phrases that they lose sense of the meaning of the
whole passage. When planning the lesson, the teacher should identify which vocabulary items
students might not know and select those that are key to understanding the passage. These are
taught in advance of reading so that students recognise them when they read.

Stage 3:

Read through text quickly   

Give out text. A quick read-through reinforces what has been done in stages 1 and 2 ‒ it gives
students a general idea of the content of the text and means they see the new vocabulary in
context. It encourages them to read quickly for general meaning, rather than getting stuck as soon
as they see something unfamiliar. Give the students a task before they read so they have a reason
for reading.

helping students' confidence and motivation:

Provided you have chosen an appropriate text for your class (an interesting and relevant topic at
an appropriate language level), then, when students do stage 4 of the reading lesson, they will be
able to answer all or most of the questions successfully. This builds their confidence and will
motivate them to read more.

Planning a reading lesson for a B1 class

2.4 million lottery win for street sweeper

A Southampton street sweeper has won £2.4 million on the National Lottery.

New multimillionaire Javed Kahn, 62, has already hung up his broom and tunic, resigning from
his job just hours after finding out he had won the Saturday lottery.

Javed, a grandfather of four, has already bought a brand-new Mercedes-Benz hybrid car. He has
already promised to buy a new house to share with his wife Rachel, 51.

He might also buy new homes for his children Leila, 26, and Zane, 30, as well as treats for his
two grandsons and two granddaughters. He has started planning a luxury holiday for the whole
family.

Javed, who bought his winning ticket from his local supermarket said, 'I wasn't going to check
my numbers on Sunday as I wanted to go out, but Rachel made me check them before I went. I
couldn't believe it when I saw I had all six numbers! I went crazy. I was shouting "We've won!
We've won!” Rachel just burst into tears.'
Javed has been playing the lottery since it began in 1994. He has never won more than £10
before. He has decided to give his best friend and colleague, Simon, a large gift, too. 'We've
worked together for twenty years,' said Javed, 'Of course I want to share my good luck with my
best friend.'

The original article was accompanied by two pictures: one of Javed with his wife and daughter,
and one of his friend, Simon, with his broom and in his work tunic, working as a streetsweeper.

Check

Your task now is to copy and paste this text into a vocabulary checker (VocabKitchen.com is a
great example). 

Paste the text into the vocabulary checker, select the CEFR option and see the result. 

Notice how the words are colour-coded to the CEFR levels. You may see some uncategorised
words in grey. This doesn’t mean that they’re not categorised for different levels, just that they’re
not categorised on this particular website.

The words you need to focus on are those that are at and above the level your students are
studying (B1), and those that are 'off list'. So we are looking at B1 words and above, and 'off list'
words. You are looking for items (words and phrases) that are key to understanding the specific
text, and items which will be useful in the future. So you are thinking both about your students'
understanding of the text used in a particular lesson, and their general vocabulary development.

‘Off list' or 'unlisted' does not mean that these words are too advanced for any student, just that
they are not included in the list of words in this particular computer program. The teacher,
therefore, needs to make his/her own judgements about which of these items the students may not
know. 

 It is surprising that million is 'off list'*, but we can assume that students would know this word,
and millionaire, so they could work out the meaning of multimillionaire.

If you think the context or students' existing knowledge will enable them to work out the meaning
of some words and phrases in the text, then do not pre-teach them. Working out meaning from
context is another useful reading skill that students need to develop.
Phrases

Notice that the profiler does not recognise phrases and idioms, so items in the text, such as 'burst',
'tears,' hung' 'up,' 'street' and 'sweeper' are listed as single-word items, whereas what the students
need to know are the whole phrases:

To hang up your X X X - hung is listed as a single item at B1 level, but the whole phrase here is
'Javed… has already hung up his broom and tunic’. This is a phrase students at this level are
unlikely to know.

'To hang up your X X X' is a colloquial phrase that suggests you have given up a career or habit. 

This means that the vocabulary items we should pre-teach are:

 the National Lottery (noun)

 a street sweeper (noun)
 a broom (noun)
 a tunic (noun)
 to hang up your... (irregular verb: hang - hung - hung)
 to resign (regular verb)
 brand-new (adjective) (students will already know new, but brand-new may be
unfamiliar)
 a treat (noun)
 Mercedes-Benz hybrid car (noun)
 a luxury holiday (noun) (students will definitely already know holiday, but it is worth
checking that they understand the meaning of the whole phrase)
 to burst into tears

NB Profilers are frequently updated as words which are unlisted are categorised. Occasionally
items are recategorised. The results here show what we got at the time this page was written. You
may find that your result is slightly different when you do the activity. 

Planning how to pre-teach the selected vocabulary

Which ones do you think you could convey the meaning of by using pictures or realia? Look back
at Unit 2 for ideas.

 the National Lottery (noun)

 a street sweeper (noun)
 a broom (noun)
 a tunic (noun)
 to hang up your... (irregular verb: hang - hung - hung)
 to resign (regular verb)
 brand-new (adjective) (students will already know new, but brand-new may be
unfamiliar)
 a treat (noun)
 Mercedes-Benz hybrid car (noun)
 a luxury holiday (noun)
Here are some ideas on how you could convey the meaning of these words using images or
realia:

 The National Lottery - use an actual lottery ticket (for whatever country you are working
in).
 A street sweeper, broom, tunic  –  use the picture of Simon from the article.  Point at
these items in the picture and try to elicit them from students. If they don't already know
the words, then tell them. 
 (Brand-new) Mercedes-Benz hybrid car, a luxury holiday - find pictures to illustrate these
(brand-new can be covered by finding a picture of a brand-new Mercedes).

 ften it is helpful to begin with something that is definitely familiar, e.g., you could elicit
'holiday' by showing this picture and asking 'What is this girl doing? Where is she going?‘

 You could then ask ‘Is she going on an expensive holiday?’ 

 Then show a couple of pictures of luxury holidays and say 'What about these holidays?
Are they cheap or expensive?' (Students say 'expensive') 'Quite expensive or very
expensive?' (Students say 'very expensive') 'Are they comfortable?' (Students say
'comfortable') 'Listen: they are luxury holidays. Everyone repeat: Luxury.'

 Remember, as far as possible, elicit the vocabulary from the students. Only tell them the
new items if no one in the class already knows them.

The teacher should decide how to pre-teach the items selected according to what best suits the
material s/he is using. We will look at how the teacher could do a vocabulary presentation, but
there are other ways of introducing new vocabulary, such as getting students to match new items
with their definitions (a matching activity).

The next two pages show one way that you could elicit ‘treat’.
Meaning, form and pronunciation
For each new item you teach, you should make sure that the students copy down the new items
for spelling, and make notes on grammatical category and meaning. 

So during the vocabulary pre-teaching stage, the class looks at the form and meaning of the new
vocabulary items. Remember that you should also pay attention to pronunciation as you introduce
each item.

If you look at the spelling of each of the items we selected for this text, you can see that the
pronunciation is quite straightforward. Even where the spelling is not totally phonetic, these
words contain digraphs or strings that are already familiar to B1 students, such as -oo-, -ign, -
tion-, or -ea-.

Even so, it would be useful to transcribe the less obvious items phonetically. You should also get
the students to identify the stressed syllables.

Vocabulary consolidation activities

Having introduced the topic and the vocabulary, if time allows, you could further check your
students' understanding of the vocabulary with, for example, a sentence gap-fill exercise or
simply a list of jumbled vocabulary items and definitions that they have to match. Two examples
are given below.

Complete the sentences using the words and phrases we have just looked at.

1. When my dad retires my parents are going to take a ___________ holiday in the Caribbean.

2. When I was at school I had to wear a horrible grey _______________ as part of my uniform.

3. This room is really dirty! Don't you ever _______________ the floor?

atch the new vocabulary with the definitions (e.g. A → 4).

Vocabulary Definition
A) a tunic 1. An informal way of saying someone is giving up a job or
hobby.
B) luxury 2. A competition in which you a buy ticket with numbers. If
your numbers are chosen, you win the competition.
C) to hang up your… (e.g. running shoes, 3. Very expensive and/or pleasant and comfortable.
boxing gloves, police uniform)
D) a lottery 4. A sleeveless jacket. Usually part of a worker's uniform.

The lesson plan so far - stages 1 and 2

Unit 5 Lesson plan - timings and interactions

Again, we have put in more detail than you would probably write in a lesson plan that you were
writing just for your own use. This is to help you envisage exactly how the lesson would proceed.
You would need to give this level of detail for an observed lesson or an assignment.

Once you have downloaded a copy of the lesson plan, read the procedures described below
carefully.

DO TASK

1. Fill in the interactions (T-class, pairs etc) and timings.

 2. Overall the two stages together - Warmer and Vocabulary - would take 20 minutes, how
long do you think each 'substage'  would take? (E.g Greet students, tell them to sit in
groups of 4 - 1 min).
3. Doing this practice task now will help you with Assignment 1.
4. You may find it useful to revise what we said about interactions and timings in Unit 1.

The lesson plan - timings and interactions

Unit 5 Lesson plan - timings and interactions completed

Planning the rest of the lesson

At stage 3 and beyond, you will need to provide activities that require and develop different
reading skills (skimming, scanning and intensive reading/reading for detail).

We will now look at what is meant by skimming and scanning.

First reading - skimming

Skim reading, or skimming, is when we look through a text quickly just to get the gist - a
general idea of what is being said. For example, imagine you were choosing a book to read in
the airport shop shortly before going to catch a flight. You would probably skim through the
'blurb' on the back covers of the books you are considering. 

Or if you received a charity appeal letter through the post, you might just glance through it
quickly to see whether you were interested in donating and so whether to keep the letter to
look at in more detail later or throw it away.

In the classroom, skimming is useful for a first reading task in order to gain a general
understanding of what the reading text is about, and for encouraging students to continuously
read a text rather than stopping every time they don‘t understand a word.
Gist (skimming) questions are essentially What is this text about? questions, though this wording
is too open to direct students sufficiently, so the questions are made more specific to the text, e.g.

 What does the writer tell us about his brother's experience? 

 Is the writer happy or sad about the situation he describes?

Do not just tell students to 'read the text to see what it's about’. This is too open and undirected.

Scanning

Scan reading, or scanning, is when we look through a text quickly to find specific information.
For example, looking at a bus and train timetable then looking down quickly until you find the
name of the town you are travelling to, and then across the different times until you find the time
of day you are interested in.

If you were looking for the definition of ‘whimsical’ in a dictionary, you would not begin with
the letter A and read your way carefully through the whole book until you came to the Ws! You
would flick through the book to the Ws, find the page of words which begin whi-, and then scan
these entries until you found the one you were looking for.

- In a classroom context scanning is very useful for finding specific information such as
names, dates, statistics and facts without reading the whole text.
- Asking students to scan for particular items is a way of getting them to look over the
whole passage quickly, though it is less likely to lead to a general understanding of the
whole text than skimming. Nonetheless, being able to scan in a foreign language is a
useful reading skill, so it is common to include a scan activity as part of the first reading
task.

Aim of Stage 3 - first reading

The aim of the first reading stage is to get the students to read through the text quickly (skim
read) in order to get a general understanding of the whole content. 

You want to encourage your students to read for gist and not stop and reach for their dictionaries
as soon as they see something unfamiliar. The teacher sets a task - and usually a time limit -
which requires them to look through the text quickly.

Devising first reading tasks

We can often use the tasks students have done in stages 1 and 2 to provide a gist task. In our
example, which uses the street sweeper lottery winner article in our lesson, a skimming task could
be to ask the students to read to see if the predictions they made about the content of the
text '£2.4 million lottery win for street sweeper'  were correct. 
The questions could be worded:

Were your ideas correct? Is the story about a street sweeper who won the lottery? 

(This might seem too obvious to even ask, but sometimes the content of the passage may be
unexpectedly different from what the title and pictures suggest.)

For scanning questions, you should pick out specific things which are quite easy to find, such as
names, place names, numbers, etc. 

Ideally, the things that students have to find when they do a scanning task should be distributed
across the text and not just be located in one paragraph (because the aim is to get the students to
read through the whole text quickly).

We only set 1 to 3 skimming and/or scanning questions for the first reading, because our main
aim is to get the students to read through the whole text quickly and, therefore, too many
questions would slow them down.

So for stage 3 we could set these two questions:

 Were your ideas correct - is the story about a street sweeper who won the lottery?
(skimming)
 Which people is Javed planning to buy things for? (scanning)

We would also set a time limit of perhaps 2 to 3 minutes for students to find the answers to these
questions.

Planning the rest of the lesson

Scanning is not such an effective way of getting the gist of a passage, but it does encourage the
students to look quickly through the whole text. It is also a useful reading skill that you should
encourage your students to develop in English.
Stage 4 - Intensive reading

For the second reading (stage 4 of the procedure) let’s take a look at intensive reading.

We read intensively to get a more detailed understanding of a complete text. In this part of the
lesson, you’d set more questions than you set for the first reading, to make sure students
understand all the important information. Remember: set the task before students read!

Intensive reading is done in the classroom with the aim of students finding the answers to
specific questions.

Extensive reading is done outside of the classroom, for the student’s own pleasure.

Devising second reading tasks

A Southampton street sweeper has won £2.4 million on the National Lottery. → How much has
the street sweeper won in the lottery?

Javed, who bought his winning ticket from his local supermarket → Where did Javed buy his
winning ticket?

These can be appropriate, but notice that these would not really be demanding enough for
intermediate students.

Also, because the structure of the sentence enables students to simply pick the answer out, it does
not necessarily guarantee that the students have understood the text.

At higher levels, these questions should require students to find information more complex than a
simple scanning task.

Students may also need to interpret what they are reading rather than just picking out facts. This
means they cannot simply match the question to a particular sentence in the text.

The higher the level of the class, the more demanding the questions should be in terms of
interpreting the language and the writer's attitude. You would normally set more than 6 questions
for a longer or more advanced text.

HARDER QUESTIONS
A question such as What other personal information are we given about Javed? requires the
students to process and re-present the information given in the text, not just to repeat sentences
from the text.

We could ask:

1. What did Javed do only a short time after he learnt about his win?
2. What is Javed going to do with the money he has won?
3. What do we learn about Javed's family?
4. What other personal information do we know about Javed?
5. What do you know about the UK lottery from reading the article?
6. How did Rachel and Javed react when he realised he had won the lottery?

Stage 5 - Follow-on activities

The follow-on (or 'follow-up') stage is usually set up as some kind of speaking activity. The aims
of this stage are to consolidate understanding of the topic of the text and to practise using some or
all of the new vocabulary and (if you have chosen a speaking task) to give students an
opportunity to practise free speaking.

his is our list of topics that could be used for a discussion activity after reading the article about
the lottery winner. You've probably got others on your list which would also be appropriate.

 Ask students to talk to each other about what they would do if they won the lottery.
 Students speculate about how Javed and his family's lives will change.
 Students talk about whether they have ever won or come into any money or know anyone
who has.
 Discuss whether the lottery and other forms of gambling are a good thing or not.
 Students talk about what being a street sweeper and other low-status jobs involve? Have
the students done any work of this type? Is it fair that they are badly paid?

Other possible speaking activities:

 Role plays involving people in the passage

 Role-play people who have won the lottery discussing what they will do
 Set up a debate style discussion on one of the two final topics above
 Students work in groups to begin to prepare for a formal debate in another lesson

Language required for follow up activities

there is a distinction between freer-speaking activities, which are the activities at the end of
grammar lessons designed to encourage students to use a particular grammatical form, and free-
speaking activities, which are genuinely free conversation in which students can use any form
they choose. (The task should still be designed to ensure that some of the vocabulary is recycled,
so it is not totally unrestricted.)
 - However, if the students had not yet been introduced to the second conditional form
(early intermediate is the stage when they would normally first come across it), then you
would need to word this task in a way which did not require them to use a grammatical
form they do not already know. You could, for example, write on the board:

A relative has given you £1000! What will you do with the money?

- This is essentially the same task in terms of ideas, but the wording steers students towards
using future forms which they already know rather than the second conditional.

- The freer practice stage is often the longest stage of the lesson. This is because it is where
the students have the best opportunity to express themselves and to use the language they
have been learning as well as the English they already know. This is a great opportunity
for students to take part in discussions, conversations, role-plays and other similar
activities.

FOR LOWER LEVELS

- At lower levels, students' ability to communicate effectively is very limited. Freer
speaking activities need to be short and very carefully scaffolded. Many students could
struggle to carry on a discussion for 15 minutes or more without careful scaffolding.
Rather than jumping straight into group or whole class discussions or conversations, start
by having students work in pairs or small groups to share their ideas and give everyone
the chance to speak. Then move onto larger groups, to further develop their ideas, before
starting the main speaking task. This ensures that everyone has the chance to participate
and build confidence in what they want to say. The teacher needs to give clear
instructions and examples, and provide supporting materials such as visual aids and
prompt cards. 

he final lesson plan - example

The final lesson plan is shown next. Look through it carefully and make sure you understand the
aims of each stage and the procedures followed.

Use this plan as a model for Assignment A, but adapt the nature of your tasks according to the
level of the class your lesson is for. You should set more questions for higher levels.

Using reading texts to introduce grammatical structures

Reading or listening texts are sometimes used to introduce new grammatical structures.
Normally, the text is first used for a reading comprehension lesson and then the second half of the
lesson, or the next lesson would be a grammar lesson, often following the PPP procedure, in
which the text provides the context for presenting the new grammar.

Look at the lottery winner text again. The present perfect is repeated ten times and the context
makes the way it is being used fairly clear. Find the examples of the present perfect in the text.
In the text below, the present perfect is repeated nine times and present perfect continuous is used
once. The context makes the way the present perfect is being used fairly clear.

early all the uses of the present perfect in this passage are examples of the fourth function
described in Unit 4. An event which happened in the past but whose effects we can perceive in
the present. Often it is used with 'just' to imply recency or to report news.

 'Javed has been playing the lottery since it began… ' is an example of a repeated event or
habit in a period leading up to the present time.
 'We've worked together for 20 years’ is an example of something which started in the past
and continues up to the present.

If you were using this text not only for a reading lesson, but also to introduce the present perfect,
you might decide to simplify it slightly by changing 'Javed has been playing the lottery since it
began in 1994' to 'Javed has played… ' in order to avoid questions about the present perfect
continuous at this stage.
N.B. If you went on to use the text as a way of looking at the grammar, that part of the lesson
would be a grammar lesson, not a reading lesson.

Planning a reading lesson - conclusion

As we stated at the start of this unit, this is not the only way of dealing with a reading text.
This is, however, a very useful and effective procedure, which you should try to learn, so that
you can plan reading lessons quickly and easily. The procedure is designed to help students
approach reading texts in the same way as they would a reading text in their first language. If
you have an understanding of the reading process and reading skills, you will be able to
design effective reading tasks that will help your students develop their reading skills.

Stage 1. Introducing the topic.

Stage 2. Pre-teach vocabulary.

Stage 3. Teacher sets a simple task to encourage students to read quickly through the text for
general meaning. A short time limit is given. First reading + feedback.

Stage 4. Teacher sets more detailed questions/task. More time is allowed. Second reading +
feedback.

Stage 5. Follow-up activities (speaking or writing).

Assignment A requires you to produce different stages of a reading comprehension lesson.

Make sure the tasks you set are appropriate for the class described in the assignment
instructions, in terms of the level of difficulty and the number of questions.
Unit 3 : Teaching listening skills
Listening – What does listening involve?

- . Listening is one of the more difficult skills to master when learning a foreign language.
At the same time, it can be one of the more difficult skills to teach in the EFL classroom.
Because it’s a complex skill which requires knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and
pronunciation, it can be tricky to know how to tackle this skill in the classroom.

- We listen to a station announcement because we want to know what time our train is. We
listen to a podcast because it’s interesting. We listen to a song because it makes us feel a
certain way. This is very different from a conventional classroom listening activity, where
students listen to a recording and answer questions in a coursebook because a teacher tells
them to.

- In addition, we normally know what the context is. This might be a serious documentary,
the TV news, an advert, a soap opera, an airport announcement, or even gossip overheard
at a party. The context lets us predict what we’re going to hear in terms of both content
and language. We use this knowledge, as well as cultural and other general knowledge, to
make certain predictions which help us to understand what we’re hearing. It also allows
us to zone in and out when we’re trying to listen for something specific, like what gate
our plane is leaving from! 

It’s important to create a clear context, 

What other strategies can you use to help improve listening skills?

Consider the genre

- In real life, when we listen we have an understanding of the genre of whatever we are
listening to. This helps us process the information we are hearing. In the classroom we
can discuss the background to the listening text so that the listening is not being done in
isolation. In other words, the students can think about the participants, the formality of the
text, the format of the text and ultimately predict the content

Consider the Speaker

- Similarly, students need to think about the characteristics of the speaker before they can
be expected to tackle the content of the listening. This is done by listening to the speaker
and becoming comfortable with the speaker’s voice and accent. In reality, this is what
happens when we first start listening to someone speak and we adjust to their speech
patterns. In the classroom, this is done by allowing the students to listen to a short extract
from the listening before tackling the main task to familiarise themselves with the
speaker.
-

Get the students involved

- Invariably, we want our students to ask some kind of questions about the listening, to
ensure they have understood what they have heard. Instead of giving them questions, give
 them some time to construct their own questions based on the information they have from
the initial short extract. In other words, they will write questions about what they think
will come up in the listening. These questions can then be given to other students to
answer during the listening.

Get the feedback

- Once the listening text has been played a few times and the students have answered the
questions they can, allow some time for feedback. During this time the students can
compare the information they found out by listening for the answers to their questions.
Bearing in mind that there will be numerous different questions, there will be different
answers and different information found out. Once the content of the text has been dealt
with adequately, ask questions which will elicit a personal response from the students.

Let's look at a summary.  Native speakers:

 know the context or situation they’re listening to

 have a reason for listening
 make predictions about what they’re going to hear before they even hear it - yes, really!
 know what information they are listening for
 can easily filter out any part of the listening they don’t need to follow.

Most students find listening in a foreign language more difficult than reading for the
following the reasons:

 Readers can control the speed they process a written text. If it's difficult, they can slow
down; they can re-read sections they are having trouble with again and again. 
 In one-to-one conversations, listeners may ask the speaker to slow down or repeat things,
but much of the time, this is not an option. 
 When listeners hear something they do not understand, they often become distracted by
that part and then miss the next part of the spoken text. 
 The English language is not pronounced as it is written; students will often recognise the
written, but not the spoken, form of a word or phrase. 
 In written text, each word is written separately, with a blank space between each word.
This is not the case with spoken language. The words in a phrase are uttered as a single
unit. As we saw in Unit 3, sounds at word boundaries (where two words 'join') often
change, so, for example, 'Do you know him' sounds like 'junowim'. 
 Unfamiliar accents and dialects, background noise and other distractions can also make
understanding spoken text more difficult.

Understanding different listening skills

4 types of listening
Interactive lntensive istening

Requires: close attention and a spoken response.

Example: asking for an explanation of how to complete a task.

Non interactive intensive listening

Requires: close attention, but no spoken response is required.

Example: listening to a lecture at university.

Interactive extensive listening

Requires: only ‘general’ listening, but a spoken response is required.

Example: chatting during a family gathering.

Non interactive extensive listening

Requires: only ‘general’ listening.

Example: listening to an audio book.

Practising extensive listening and reading

As an EFL teacher, you will not spend much time in the classroom getting students to practise
their extensive listening or reading skills. This is because both require students to spend large
chunks of time merely listening or reading. Although in your lessons you’ll focus on intensive
listening and reading, it’s still important to encourage your students to read and listen extensively.
You can do this by helping them to choose appropriate texts.

Developing intensive listening skills

When you teach listening you should be aware of the impact of both top-down and bottom-up
processing.
 - bottom-up processing, when students listen and try to make sense of whole stretches of
spoken language, they need to be aware of how sounds change in connected speech.
That’s why it’s so important to teach your students natural pronunciation, no matter what
words or structures you’re teaching them. The P in MFP needs to be highlighted and
practised in every lesson you will teach, no matter the skill. The more students become
aware of natural pronunciation, the easier it will be for them to work out what words
they’re hearing.

- While this is mostly done as part of other skill lessons, you can devise a whole lesson
around connected speech, where your students could listen and identify what their
partners are saying, or they could listen to sentences and decipher their meaning in pairs
or groups. 

trictly speaking, though, the standard listening and reading lesson will usually follow this set
structure:

 lead in - create the context

 pre-teach vocabulary
 set gist task - where students get a general idea of the content of the text
 first listening/reading
 feedback
 set detail task - students have to listen or read and answer specific questions
 second listening/reading
 feedback
 follow-on task.

So, in the context of a listening lesson, the two very important listening skills the students will
practise are:

 their ability to get the general idea of what they are hearing - listening for gist 
 their ability to listen and pick up specific details - listening for detail (intensive listening).

Generally, teachers will use the audio texts which come as a CD or online with a coursebook.
There are many advantages of using audio that accompanies a coursebook.

 It’s the correct level for your students.

 Students will hear voices other than the teacher’s.
 Students will hear different accents.

 It’s good to give students more ‘real world’ practice, where people talk much faster and use
different language (slang, colloquialisms and so on). So, the coursebook material can provide
valuable listening skills development, but you should also try to use authentic materials.
Case study: Listening lesson plan

You are planning a listening lesson and have chosen to use the video ‘Imagine a world without
music’ as authentic listening material. Before students watch the video, you have worked out that
you are going to first of all set the lesson context by using a lead-in stage.

The aim, timings, interactions, and student activities for this lead-in stage are shown below. You
can select each of the five (5) hotspot icons to explore the teacher activities in more detail.

In this lead-in stage you can see that, through a series of visuals and prompts,  we have asked
students to work in pairs and consider where they would like to live - a world with music or a
world without music. This has set the context for the lesson.

Before students watch the video, your next step is to decide how to pre-teach any difficult words
in the video that will be barriers to the students understanding what they hear. When you have a
long piece of listening or reading, how do you know which words you should pre-teach? 

1. MAKE THE TASKS

2. PRE TEACH THE WORDS THAT MAY BE USED IN THE TASK

One example is the Vocab Kitchen website where you can copy and paste the text of a reading or
the script of a listening to check the CEFR level.  Don’t forget to include any questions that you
are planning to ask the students within the lesson!

Unit wrap-up and assessment

Now that you have reached the final section of Unit 5, it’s time to reflect upon everything that
you have learnt. 
Key takeaways:

 Reading and listening are receptive skills; we are receiving information.

 Reading widely is a good way to build vocabulary.
 When we read we use different processes (bottom-up and top-down) to make sense of
what we are reading.
 When teaching reading and listening it is important to create a clear context first.
 When we need detailed information, we listen or read intensively; when we need general
understanding, we read or listen extensively.
 Reading and listening lessons never just involve reading and listening to a text.
 Students generally find reading easier than listening.
 An authentic text is one that was created for native speakers and has not been adapted for
language learners.

To complete this unit, your next steps are to take the quiz to test your knowledge before
commencing your first assignment. Whilst working on your assignment, you can move on to
explore teaching productive skills in Unit 6.