146 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Finding your way around
Helping your students to identify the structure of a reading text is a useful
way of focusing the mind, so be aware of how the text is put together. This
means looking first at the title and pictures that introduce the topic. Next,
read any subheadings or just the first line of each paragraph, which should
each contain a slightly different idea to the previous one. Is there an introduc-
tion and conclusion? Point these out too.
Now that you’re aware of how it all fits together, you can make the text less
intimidating for your students by showing them these signposts. Reading in
another language can seem really daunting but once students know how to
find their way around the text they should be more positive about this skill,
especially if they’re likely to enter higher education in English.
Getting the gist
You get the gist of a text by skimming it, or reading through it fairly quickly
to form an impression of what it’s about. After the pre-reading task, students
should glance through the whole text quickly.
An analysis of the structure, which I talk about in the preceding section,
involves skimming.
Try giving your students a multiple choice of answers and ask which places,
numbers or characters are mentioned in the text. They can find the answer
by glancing through without reading each line.
Set a time limit of just a few minutes for all skimming activities.
Getting down to the nitty-gritty
After the students take a good overview of the text it’s time for a closer look
at the details. This is called scanning. Students can’t spend as much time as
they want analysing every word in the text but they do have more time than
the skimming stage. They now read to find specific, not general, information.
A typical comprehension exercise involves scanning, whether it involves true
or false questions, multiple choice or filling in missing words.
It’s more fun if students read different texts in groups and write their own com-
prehension questions to test their classmates.
