Comprehension, Interpretation, Critical Evaluation, Text Processing and Mediation, Scanning, Skimming, Intensive and Extensive Reading, Reading for the Gist, Reading for Specific Information, Bottom-up Processing and the list goes on! More or less, we are familiar with reading skills and sub-skills but the question is "Are our students?"

We are often frustrated by the fact that students do not automatically transfer the strategies they use when reading in their L1 to reading in the target language. Instead, they seem to think reading means starting at the beginning and going word by word, stopping to look up every unknown word. Apart from asking them to do more and more reading practice, we should show them how to read. In this article, we are exploring ways in which we can help our students develop reading skills so that they can tackle any type of reading task while having fun in an exam preparation class.

Text by: Angeliki Bakogianni

Teaching Activities: Open Cloze

1. Race to the Board

Display a gapped text on the IWB. Divide the class into pairs and give each pair a pack of post-it notes of different colour. They have to write the missing words on the post-it notes and run to the IWB to fill in the gaps by sticking their post- it notes.

B.  All Around the Classroom

Give each pair a gapped text. While the students are trying to fill in the gaps, write the missing words on sticky notes and put them on the walls around the classroom. Then ask the students to walk around the classroom and check or finish their task.

Tips & Techniques

1. Type out the completed text and give it to your learners. Ask them to predict which grammar words the examiner took out so that they understand the types of words which are removed.

• As a class, keep a record of the types of words commonly taken out of texts. Display it on the wall and add to it each time you do an Open Cloze.

• Do an Open Cloze task as a class and auction the sentences. Put learners in groups where they choose and buy the sentences.

• Give them a version that has been reduced down to one grammar point they have recently studied e.g. articles.

• Type up a text with common mistakes, e.g. “the same than”. The students must identify the wrong words and replace them with the right ones.

Teaching Activities: Word Formation

1. Brainstorming Races

Give students a couple of minutes to brainstorm derivatives or words with a single affix.

B.  List Dictation

Read out a list of words which have something in common, e.g. words which take –en to make verbs such as broad, wide, length, etc. Students listen to the list until they work out the missing affix.

C.  Sentence Halves Mingle & Match

Create some sentences that include the affixes that you are practising. Split the sentences at the affix, e.g. “They are holding a party to celebrate the achieve", "ment of their first year’s goals". Give each student 2 different halves. They have to mingle and find the student with their matching sentence.

D.  Call My Bluff

Students find derivatives in a dictionary and make up 2 or 3 wrong alternatives,

e.g. “punishment”, “punishness” and “punishation”. They read them out to another group, seeing if they can fool them about which one is the real one.

Teaching Activities: Multiple Choice

1. Where appropriate, rephrase the questions into comprehension questions without giving the answer options. For example, you could ask “Why does the writer …?” instead of asking “What is the purpose of …?

• Underline the sentences in the text that give the answer. Students read them to help them find the answer. Or, give them the answer options and ask them to find the parts of the text that give the answer.

• Give learners the correct answer and ask them to discuss why the other options are incorrect. By doing so, they will get used to spotting the distractors used in the wrong answer options.

Teaching Activities: Gapped Text

1. Show 1 paragraph and some sentences that are true according to the text. Ask students to explain why these statements are true.

• Cut up a text and give each learner in a group 1 paragraph. They describe the contents of their paragraph and order them physically.

• Learners predict the missing content of a gapped text (without seeing the options), and then compare with the original text.

• Show 1 paragraph and ask what the previous or next one is about.

• Isolate the opening lines of paragraphs and focus on different elements (e.g. pronouns) that must be about or refer to something previously stated.

Teaching Activities: Multiple Choice Cloze

1. Ask learners to make up their own questions and answer options using a short text.

• Give just 2 answer options for each question at first.

• Give learners the text with the answers included and get them to underline the language in the text which determines the answer.

• Explore in isolation groups of words which are easily confused in short gap fill-style texts.

Multiple Matching: Steps

• Read the instructions, the title and subtitle to get an idea of the text.
  • Skim the text to get an idea of content and organisation.
  • Underline key words or main ideas in the questions.
  • Think about the meaning of the questions and how the information might be expressed differently in the text. Synonyms might be used or ideas might be paraphrased.
  • Scan the text to look for more detail about the key words or main ideas in the questions.
  • When you find the part of the text which seems to match a question, read it carefully.
  • When you think you have found an answer, mark it as a potential answer rather than a definite one until you have answered all the questions.