Classroom Activities: Skills Needed for Reading Different Text Types
A. Prediction
Prediction activities encourage students to use their existing knowledge and clues in the text to anticipate what they are likely to read.
- Predicting what comes next: stop at an appropriate point in a text and ask students what they expect to come next.
- Anticipation questions: give students a title such as Women in Africa and ask them to predict the questions that the article is likely to answer.
- Pre-reading questions: ask questions which focus on the global function of the text or on the most important aspect of its content.
- Surveying a book: use the index, contents page, chapter headings and paragraph headings to predict what the book or chapter will contain. Students can also read selected topic sentences.
- Completing sentences: give students the beginning of a sentence and ask them to predict an appropriate ending, for example: It was a lovely day, so... or It was a lovely day, but...
B. Skimming
Skimming involves reading rapidly to obtain the overall gist or general meaning of a text. It can also be used to identify the main points or locate the part of a text which is most relevant to the reader's purpose.
Useful activities include setting a short time limit and asking students to identify the subject, purpose, main idea or most appropriate title of a text.
C. Scanning
Scanning involves reading rapidly in order to locate specific information. It is particularly useful when the reader already knows what information is required.
Use timed activities with clearly defined questions. Students might, for example, scan a timetable for a particular train, a newspaper article for a name or date, or a longer text for information which answers a specific question.
D. Cohesion
Cohesion refers to the ways in which the forms of language are used to connect ideas and sentences and to build up a unified stretch of text.
Important cohesive devices include:
- anaphoric and cataphoric reference;
- logical connectors;
- substitute words and expressions;
- synonyms and other ways of referring to the same thing;
- related words and lexical sets;
- collocations.
Classroom activities can include questions about reference words, identifying the words to which pronouns and other reference expressions refer, reconstructing jumbled sentences or paragraphs, and completing paragraph jigsaws in which one paragraph has been removed.
Cloze tests can also be useful for testing students' ability to recognise cohesive links within a text, since they require readers to use information elsewhere in the text to determine what belongs in a particular position.
E. Coherence
Coherence concerns the way in which the ideas and arguments in a text are logically connected and developed. Whereas cohesion is primarily concerned with the linguistic links between parts of a text, coherence is concerned with the overall organisation and development of its ideas.
Useful patterns of organisation include:
- chronological sequence;
- problem and solution;
- hypothesis and evidence;
- experiment and conclusion;
- cause and effect;
- comparison and contrast.
Students can be given paragraphs or sections of a text and asked to identify the underlying pattern of organisation or to reconstruct a text whose paragraphs have been jumbled. See From Paragraph to Essay.
F. Inference and interpretation
Inference involves using information that is stated in the text together with knowledge of the world to arrive at meanings which are not explicitly stated.
Students should learn to distinguish between what the writer actually states and what the reader can reasonably infer from it. Activities can include questions about implied meanings, the writer's intentions, attitudes and assumptions, and the interpretation of information which is not directly stated.
Questions for Consideration
One of the main challenges in teaching reading is to produce interesting lessons while respecting the maturity and intellectual interests of the students. This is particularly important when teaching adults. Many traditional reading schemes risk treating adult learners as though they were children simply because they are beginners or elementary-level learners of English.
Some of the better-known graded reading schemes include Oxford Bookworms, Cambridge English Readers, Penguin Readers and Macmillan Readers. These schemes generally make an effort to provide material which respects the maturity of adult learners who may be proficient readers in their first language while still being at an early stage of learning English.
A question worth considering is whether the publishers' headword counts correspond accurately to the benchmarks for language proficiency levels provided by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
It has been suggested that the correlations publishers make between headword counts and CEFR levels may partly reflect the considerable demand for graded readers at intermediate levels. If so, the labels used by different publishers should not necessarily be assumed to represent identical levels of linguistic difficulty.
There is also a substantial difference between the vocabulary required for a graded reader at an upper-intermediate level and the vocabulary available to an educated native speaker reading in their first language. If advanced is to represent genuinely advanced reading proficiency, a vocabulary of 4,000 or 5,000 headwords might arguably be more appropriate than the lower figures used by some graded-reading schemes.
For example, in the Cambridge English Readers series, Cambridge University Press has associated its upper-intermediate level, corresponding approximately to FCE level, with a range of about 2,800–3,800 headwords. Oxford University Press's Oxford Bookworms series begins its upper-intermediate level at around 1,800 headwords, while its highest level, extending from the upper-intermediate range towards advanced, begins at around 2,500 headwords.
These figures raise an important pedagogical question: how far can the vocabulary size of a graded reader be used as a reliable indicator of the actual reading proficiency required to understand it?
Books on Teaching Reading as a Second Language
Prediction, Skimming and Scanning
Developing Reading Skills by Françoise Grellet (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language by Christine Nuttall (Macmillan ELT, 2006)
Practical Faster Reading: An Intermediate/Advanced Course in Reading and Vocabulary by Gerald and Vivienne Mosback (Cambridge University Press, 1976)
Reading in the Language Class by Eddie Williams (Macmillan Educational, 1986)
Reading and Thinking in English: Discovering Discourse by Tom McArthur (Oxford University Press, 1979)
Cohesion and Coherence
Developing Reading Skills by Françoise Grellet (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Cohesion in English by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (Longman, 1976)
From Paragraph to Essay: Developing Composition Writing by Maurice Imhoof and Herman Hudson (Longman, 1975)
Inference and Interpretation
Reading in a Foreign Language, edited by J. Charles Alderson and A. H. Urquhart (Longman, 1984)
See especially Chapter 3, Cultural Knowledge and Reading, by Margaret S. Steffersen and Chitra Joag-Dev, and Chapter 12, Case Studies of Ninth Grade Readers, by Carol Hosenfeld.
For script-related issues, see this website's section on Basic Literacy.