ELTeCS Session – April 14th, 2010

Creative Reading

Pete Simms&

Sasha Clarke

What are the different ways you use reading in class?

Why?

Discuss with the person next to you.

Stages of a reading lesson

A reading lesson can broadly be described in three stages:

• Pre-Reading

• During-Reading

• Post-Reading

Look at the extract from a textbook. What is the aim of each stage?

Stage Question Stage Aim

Pre-reading

1 e.g. to introduce the topic and activate any previous knowledge in the students.

2

During – reading

3

4

Post – reading

5

‘What do you think?’

Stage Question Stage Aim

Pre-reading

1 e.g. to introduce the topic and activate any previous knowledge in the students.To encourage students to relate to the text

2 To familiarise students with the textTo encourage prediction of text content To introduce genre and format of the text

During – reading

3 To read a text for detailed informationTo encourage reading part of a text and not necessarily the whole textTo focus the reader on particular content of the text

4 To test comprehension of the textTo extract the key information from the textTo prepare students for the following task

Post – reading

5 To present the content of the textTo test understanding of the text by explaining to another studentTo give the text ‘real world meaning’ by using it for communication

‘What do you think?’

To encourage retention of text content through giving opinions on itTo expand on the themes of the text

Pre-Reading Brainstorm – Your Ideas

Pre-reading is one of the most important stages in the reading lesson. It can mean the difference between involved, motivated students and distracted bored ones.

• Look at the example text from ‘Action Pack 8’.

• Brainstorm a few pre-reading tasks that could connect with the text and explain their aim

Activity/Procedure Aim

Creativitymeans that we value ideas and innovation. We try to be imaginative, inventive and resourceful in our approach.We aim to present the best in creativity, encourage people to be creative and to create new ideas in an atmosphere of trust.

Here are a few of our ideas:

Activity/Procedure Aim

Discussion Questions

• Pairs or groups discuss ideas• Students write questions and share with group

E.g. ‘Think of 3 inventions you couldn’t live without.’

Introduce the topicActivate previous knowledge Personalize the topic.Generate more interest in the topicMake students more receptive

Prediction

• Students write questions on things that they would like to learn from the reading.• Questions can be used for gist reading, as students skim and scan the text for answers. • Students answer their own questions or swap with another pair or group.

Encourage prediction, provide a purpose and make the text more comprehensible

Visuals

• Focus on the pictures or use other visuals of famous inventions and elicit vocabulary connected with the topic.

Provide an immediate connection to the textMake the text more accessible from the start

During-Reading Rather than just reading a text to themselves there are a number of more creative and effective ways to tackle the reading of the text itself.

You will each be given instructions for a task to be done during-reading.

Read the instructions then explain the activity to another person with a different coloured paper.

Task A Task B Task C

…Jigsaw Reading

By reading information and then restating it to another person, we have just done another type of task called…

This is another great way of focusing students on a text and encouraging them to read the test ‘actively’ and for a purpose.

Creativitymeans that we value ideas and innovation. We try to be imaginative, inventive and resourceful in our approach.We aim to present the best in creativity, encourage people to be creative and to create new ideas in an atmosphere of trust.

15 minute

Break

Welcome Back

Post-Reading

One of the greatest difficulties with reading in a foreign language is simply not knowing what a word means. Whatever the language level, this is bound to happen.

So what can we do about it?

What does ‘vexillology’

mean?

Meaning from Context

I went to the shops and bought some apples and ghorks.

Here’s an example of a simple sentence with a word that we don’t know (and in this case it’s not a real word).

What could it mean? and more importantly… How did you work it out?

The process we went through was…

ghorks. Grammar Noun – Countable - Plural

Context

Shop with apples + ?

Computers

Fruit and vegetables - Probably fruit

Lexis

‘apples and oranges’

We still don’t know if this is the right meaning but we can have a very good guess. Try with some more examples.

So, to recap…

A reading lesson might contain:

Pre-Reading

During-Reading

Post-Reading

• Brainstorming

• Prediction Questions

• Visuals

• Discussion

• Running Dictation

• Gap-fill

• Reading Races

• Reordering a text

•Jigsaw Reading

• Comprehension

• Meaning from Context

• Discussion

Thank you!

Pete & Sasha

ELTeCS Session – April 14th, 2010

Creative Reading

Pete Simms&

Sasha Clarke