Chapter 10: Taken as Read: Teaching Reading Lessons 145
Put together a selection of these text types:✓ Diary entries
✓ Emails
✓ Cartoon strips
✓ Food labels and ingredients
✓ TV guide listings
Working with the Text
Students should be ready for the text and have a purpose for reading in
the form of a task or question. You need to have a strategy for dealing with
vocabulary and to design a follow-up activity to expand on the same theme.
If you follow these steps, your reading lessons can really open the door to a
world of English texts and literature to your students.Getting ready to read: Pre-reading tasks
Everyone needs a reason for reading, even if it’s just to pass the time of day.
Don’t just hand out a text and expect students to get stuck in. Have them do a
bit of preparation first.A pre-reading task whets the appetite and prepares the mind for the text that
follows. As the name suggests, the task doesn’t involve reading the text but is
connected to the main topic of the lesson.So what kinds of pre-reading task can you use? You can have a discussion
about the author. Find out what the class knows about him or her. On the
other hand, if the text represents an aspect of English speaking culture that’s
unusual for the students, have a pop quiz about it or bring in some pictures.Before reading an article from The Sun newspaper, have a class discussion
about what tabloid newspapers are, and how they differ from broadsheets like
The Times. Identify the new vocabulary in the text and put six or seven of the
new words on a worksheet with their definitions. If you mix things up, you can
ask students, in pairs or small groups, to match the words to their definitions.
You can also ask what the words may have in common too.List all the numbers or locations in the text. Students can make up their own
story with them and then read the text afterwards to see whether their ideas
were similar to the text.