specifically identified language needs. The following suggestions should help
you to gain maximum pedagogic benefit from the authentic written texts you
use.
1 Work with meaning first. Before looking at the language of a text in detail,
it’s best to ask learners to work with it as a piece of communication. There
are a wide variety of tasks you can use to create an enjoyable learning
activity and/or a simulation of likely text to use outside the classroom. You
can go on to look at detailed language in the same lesson, and you can also
save up texts learners have worked with for later language study.
2 Grade the task to suit your learners’ level. The most accessible tasks are
those that rely more on existing knowledge and expectations than on the
specifics of the text. Tasks that demand quite complex language processing
in limited time are more challenging, and so particularly suitable for
advanced learners.
3 Use the text to improve reading strategies. Authentic texts are likely to be
particularly demanding in terms of unfamiliar words and patterns. So they
provide a good opportunity for you to teach coping strategies, for example,
by helping your learners to infer the meanings of unknown words and to use
a dictionary where appropriate, for example to look up key words.
4 Think about background knowledge. Any reader needs appropriate
background knowledge to interact effectively with a text. Think about what
your learners might need to know about to appreciate the text you are
offering them. How can you best activate the awareness they already have?
And, if you think their awareness does not match the assumptions of the
text’s author, how can you bridge the gap?
5 Look at the overall structure of the text. Some text types have organizing
patterns associated with them. Advertisements, for example, often point out
a problem and then offer their product as a solution. Newspaper reports
often begin with a very brief summary of the story that leaves out key
details. They then go over the points again adding these details. If you are
working with a particular text type and you can identify a typical pattern,
share this with your learners. Knowledge of a text’s pattern can make it
easier to understand its language.
6 Think about writer purpose. Your text was produced to impart
information, and also as part of a specific social relationship between writer
and intended readers. By discussing probable writer purposes, you can
increase learners’ understanding of why a text is as it is, and this can help
them to understand it better. For example, we might speculate that the
newspaper writer referred to above has the purpose of attracting a reader to
read the story (hence the brief summary), and then inducing the reader to
read to the end—hence the withholding of key details!
7 Look at how the text hangs together. If you study it closely, you will find
that certain key words and phrases are repeated again in sentences and42 LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM