Unit 3 The Teaching and Learning of ESOL

Module 2 Listening and Reading

At the end of this module you will:-
a) know what the four skills and their categories are

b) know ways of training learners to develop listening and reading skills

c) understand why learners have difficulty with listening

d) be able to identify the sub-skills needed for successful listening and reading

e) consider a range of exercises to check reading comprehension and learn what types of exercises to avoid

f) begin to be aware of how a skills lesson is put together
The Skills – Introduction

There are 4 primary language skills, referred to as speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is important to distinguish between them (though they are very much interlinked in many situations) as they demand different abilities. For example, giving a speech requires a different skill from understanding what you hear when someone else gives a speech, or from presenting the information in the speech in written form, or from reading what someone else has written on the subject. All these four skills must be included in a general English teaching syllabus.

There are courses in English for Specific Purposes, which need to be heavily weighted in one or two of the skills, eg courses for telephone operators teach more listening and speaking. However, even courses as specific as that need a certain amount of the other skills – a telephonist may need to read a memo, or leave a written message for someone, thus needing the skills of reading and writing.

There are further sound reasons for including all the four skills in the syllabus and often in a single lesson:

1. People get tired after a certain period of activity and they need
a change of activity. The saying ‘a change is as good as a rest’
certainly applies to the language classroom.

2. In any group there will be several different styles of learner. Some students need to write what they learn in oral practice because they get comfort from the written word, others will not need to see the written word. If you give the class the chance to hear and say and see and write a piece of language you will be catering for all styles of learner.

Skills and the textbook

Some textbooks put emphasis on one or two skills and either omit or downgrade the others. Books which lay great importance on grammar often focus mainly on reading and writing, whereas audio-lingual course books concentrate on listening and speaking (they are, however, course books which have been written and need to be read). Before taking on a new class, look carefully at the textbook to see if it provides insufficient practice in all the four skills. Plan ahead and be ready with supplementary material should the book be lacking in practice in any particular skill. Writing is the most commonly neglected! Authentic texts, readers, recordings of dialogues, extracts from DVD and contemporary news downloads or articles from the internet will be very useful for this purpose. Start making your collection now!
Although real life communication rarely consists of only one of the four skills, it is important to look at the skill areas separately to begin with in order to identify what learners need to be able to do, and how we, as teachers, can best help them acquire that ability.

What mistakes do teachers make? Look at these confessions.
I translate words in texts for my students when they ask me.

I play the recording over and over as many times as the students want me to, usually about 4 or 5.

I usually give my students the transcript to look at while they listen.
If I don’t, they never understand.

I like having discussions, but the same students talk all the time.

I don’t use long texts in class because my students can’t read long texts.

I don’t do writing in class except writing down board work and some worksheet completion, as it wastes time. My students write for homework.

I translate unknown words for my students before they read a dialogue or text, otherwise they couldn’t read it.

Think about these as we go through the next two modules.

Two types of skills

The 4 skills are traditionally divided into receptive and productive skills. As the names suggest, the receptive skills are those which enable the learner to understand language and to receive information via language. They are listening and reading. The productive skills are those which enable the learner to produce language. They are speaking and writing.

One misconception is that the receptive skills are passive and the productive skills are active. Because any act of listening or reading is supposed to have an aim – whether it be understanding the main idea of a text, identifying the characters in a play or deciding on your attitude to the speaker’s opinion – the listener of reading is actively involved in the process.
In this module our focus will be on the two receptive skills: listening and reading.

Part 1. Listening skills

When teaching listening skills, we have to make sure a range of training techniques are employed and not rely on students to ‘pick up’ by themselves what the language sounds like. This rarely happens, and a failure to employ training techniques may lead to the situation where learners may be highly competent in written skills, or have an excellent knowledge of grammar, but are unable to comprehend the simplest of listening passages. It is essential that we recognise areas of potential difficulty and plan our listening activities and materials accordingly.
First, however, we need to consider problem areas in listening and then possible solutions to those difficulties.

TASK FOR SUBMISSION TO YOUR TUTOR

TASK 1

Listen to the sound file (Listening Task.mp3) and complete the table below:-
Problems learners haveWays we can help1.

2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
(Please submit all the three tasks together at the end of the module.)
Listening difficulties

If we compare listening to the other receptive skill, reading, the task of understanding spoken English also poses the following challenges:

 There is anxiety caused by the fact that when we hear English in real life we only hear it once and are expected to understand immediately. If you miss something in a written text, you can always return to an earlier point, read more slowly and think, however with real-life listening you don’t have such a luxury.

 Words are written the same way no matter what the speaker’s origin is (except some minor spelling differences), however when you listen, you can hear the same words pronounced quite differently depending on the speaker’s accent.

 Authentic speech contains pauses, fillers, repetitions, incomplete sentences, false starts and restructurings.

 Information is often presented in a less well-organised and more random order than in writing.

 Spoken grammar often differs from written grammar (see Unit 3 Module 1).

The recordings that we use in class often minimise these difficulties, especially for lower levels. Thus, the information will be better organised, the language used will be grammatically correct and the accent will be as ‘standard’ as possible. The teacher may play the same extract twice or several times (but even so, there may be no opportunity for a student to pause where they fail to understand and play a shorter segment several times, unless it’s a one-to-one class).

Our ultimate aim, however, should be to enable students to understand authentic spoken English. We should create opportunities for students to hear authentic language, but also be aware of the difficulties that such an objective poses and not be too demanding requiring ‘perfect’ understanding of details.

Different kinds of listening

Students should be encouraged to practise extensive listening, ie listen to the English language from various sources outside the classroom, listen for pleasure.

In this section we will focus on the listening activities that take place inside the classroom and are referred to as intensive listening, ie listening to relatively short dialogues or texts with a specific purpose. Such listening involves two main sub-skills: listening for gist and listening for detail.
Listening for gist

There are times when we listen to something in order to get a general idea of the content, or ‘the gist’, rather than specific details. Sometimes we need to recognise the function of the dialogue – for example, is the speaker making arrangements, expressing an opinion, making an enquiry; are the speakers discussing their opinions of a book they have both read or are they having a row? At higher levels – intermediate and above – students need practice in recognising attitude (by work on intonation patterns) and recognising changes in direction or topic when listening to speeches, long listening texts, or taking notes in university lectures.

A pre-listening gist question can prepare the students and encourage them not to worry about details but to concentrate on understanding the general idea.

Post-listening questions such as ‘How would you describe A’s feelings?’ allow them to interpret what they have understood without worrying about specifics.

Listening for detail

When we listen for detail, our attention is focused and we are searching for specific information in the listening passage. For example, we could be listening for details of the weather in our region, a train departure time or the football results of our favourite team. As we listen carefully, we select the information we require and ignore the rest. Because we know beforehand what we want to hear, it becomes easier to concentrate and focus our attention to listen selectively. There are several ways of training our students to develop the sub-skill of listening for detail.

a) Prediction

By asking students to predict what they are going to hear, based on a topic word or sentence, you are preparing your learners for what to expect. Guided questions help them decide what to listen for, and keep them focused on the main points. This technique can be repeated towards the end of a listening passage by asking students to predict the ending. This can be done in pairs or groups and it keeps students actively involved in the listening process.

b) Comprehension exercises

Different types of exercises will ensure that listening skills are being developed. Exercises can be set midway as well as at the end of a listening passage, and can be in the form of true/false questions, ‘wh’ questions (who, what, where), sentence completion, gap-filling, error correction, table filling, form-filling, etc.
c) Listening for language items

An exercise may require that you listen and identify specific lexical or grammatical items in a text, eg note all the past participle forms of verbs or all the superlative adjectives.
Listening for gist and listening for detail should be carried out separately from each other. It is difficult for students to do both at the same time. Check tasks to make sure that you do not have them trying to do too many things at once. When a new listening passage, a monologue or a dialogue, is introduced, students will naturally want to know what it is generally about first and discover details later. So it’s logical to begin with gist exercises for the first listening and give detailed exercises for the second listening.

SELF-CHECK 3:2 1

Here are two different listening activities:

a) listening to a group discussing the British Royal Family and deciding whether the general feeling is pro- or anti- Royalists

b) listening to the travel news for motorway hold-up information

The first involves listening for gist.
The second involves listening for detail.

1. In a) what helps you identify the general feeling of the speakers?

2. In b) what specific information/key words would you be listening out for if you were hearing this in the car south of Knutsford on the M6?
Transcript (a)
(3 speakers chatting)

A: Yeah, but I mean what’s the point of them? They don’t do anything
very much to help the country –

B: And it’s not like I mean Prince Charles – he may or may not get to be
King – it’s about being useful –

C: The Queen’s all right though and she’s doing well for 87 or 88 – how old is she now? Her mum lived to be over 100.

B: The Queen should be in good shape – wish I had that many people to
look after me when I’m old and it’s not real work like –
C: Yeah, all those dinners and stuff like parties – but I bet she gets
bored, poor thing – oh no another local Balmoral special.

A: The main problem is there are too many of them ‘minor Royals’.

B: I agree how many is it now?

A: Loads, I dunno.

Transcript (b)

News is coming in now of diversions in place northbound below Junction 19 for Knutsford on the M6. The northbound carriageway is completely closed due to a lorry shedding its load of chocolate sauce across all three lanes. Northbound drivers are being directed to leave the motorway at junction 18 for Holmes Chapel and rejoin the motorway at Junction 19. The diversions will be in place for about 6 hours and motorists are advised to use other routes if possible as tailbacks are building up back to Junction 16.
COMMENT

1. The intonation of the speakers helps identify their attitude. The vocabulary used can be identified as having mainly negative or ironic connotations. Even if we are not required to focus on each comment individually, the general number of phrases conveying negative feelings and irony suggests what the attitude of the speakers is (what’s the point, not real work, get bored, poor thing, too many of them, etc)

2. You’d probably be listening for the details of a possible detour, ie where you can leave the motorway and where you can rejoin it.

Every text that you use in the classroom needs to be looked at carefully. If you are going to design useful questions then you need to be able to identify the important points. It’s no use getting involved in teaching student about ‘Balmoral’ in Transcript (a) or ‘chocolate sauce’ in Transcript (b)!
Available materials

You may be using a course book which comes with a good selection of listening materials. However, in a teaching situation where resources are limited, you will have to search for materials yourself. On TEFL websites, you can find recordings suitable for different proficiency levels. Your ultimate aim, as has been said before, is to expose students to authentic English speech and teach them to understand language spoken with a natural speed in a range of realistic situations. So try to use authentic sources of spoken English, such as TV, radio, podcasts, or Youtube.

Higher-level learners (intermediate and upper-intermediate to some extent; advanced and mastery in particular) should be prepared to understand TV and radio broadcasts intended for native speakers of English.

For TASK 2 in this module you are going to use a news broadcast as a stimulus for listening practice. First, here is some practice designed to get you thinking about the questions you can ask based on a recording and what information students are able to access.

SELF-CHECK 3:2 2

Look at the transcript below and make notes on the following questions:

TRANSCRIPT OF THE BBC WORLD SERVICE NEWS SUMMARY, 3 FEBRUARY 2015.

The International Court of Justice in the Hague has ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia committed genocide during the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s. The judges said that while both sides have committed crimes, they failed to substantiate the genocide allegations against each other. The judges also encouraged both countries to cooperate to ensure peace and stability.

Chadean troops invaded Nigerian territory in a reported ground offensive against Boko Haram militants. It follows two weeks of air strikes against the insurgents. A Nigerian spokesman said that troops from Chad were working with Nigerian forces on the border with Cameroon.

Israel has demanded the scrapping of the UN enquiry into the conflict in Gaza last year following the resignation of the man leading the investigation. William Schabas has previously carried out consultancy work for the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Israeli government said that would make him biased and described the enquiry as a ‘kangaroo court’.

Pope Francis has decreed that Oscar Romero, the Salvadorian Archbishop, seen as a hero by Catholics in Latin America was killed out of hatred for his faith. The Pope’s declaration of martyrdom clears the way for the beautification of Archbishop Romero, who was murdered by right-wing death squads in 1980 while celebrating mass.

Members of Parliament in Britain are debating whether IVF babies can be created using genetic material from three people. Scientists say using the DNA of a second woman, as well as that of the mother and father, could prevent deadly genetic diseases being passed from mother to child.

Greek share prices have jumped 11 percent after the new Greek government backed away from demands for a write-off of its bailout loans. Investors took hope that a deal on Greek debt was possible.

An advert for a graphic design job in France has been withdrawn because it says the candidate should, if possible, not be a Jew. The company, the Paris-based NSL studio, has apologised. On Monday, the company was quoted as saying that they meant the candidate should not be someone with cultural or religious needs.
A wide-ranging survey into the attitudes of Afghan men towards women suggests many of them see women as subordinates and routinely sideline them. Researchers describe the men’s attitudes as discouraging.

1. What level do you think you could use this for and why?
2. What words and phrases might students find difficult?

3. What topic in the bulletin do you think is the easier to understand?

4. What topic do you think is the most obtuse or complicated?

5. Underline the names in the transcript. Will you create exercises based on the names?
6. Can you find any areas of vocabulary that you could exploit in a lesson?
7. What section of the listening would you choose to have students listen for detail?
8. What section would you not focus on at all?
9. Which sections best lend themselves to follow-up discussions?
COMMENT

1. This is not suitable for beginners or elementary. Low intermediates or intermediates could access this text in the form of a gap-fill listening activity focusing on certain words:

Chadean troops ………….. Nigerian territory in a reported ground ………………… against Boko Haram militants. It follows two weeks of air strikes against the ……………….. A Nigerian spokesman said that troops from Chad were working with Nigerian …………… on the border with Cameroon.

(Note that the missing words are thematically linked and could be a basis for discussion. Do not choose words to miss out at random.)

This listening task is best suitable for upper-intermediate students to check gist and detailed comprehension.

2. Any news item may have such words. For example, in the fourth item, such low-frequency vocabulary as has decreed, martyrdom, beautification will be challenging to comprehend as well as the proper names (Salvadorian Archbishop etc). In the sixth one, such collocations and phrasal verbs as ‘have jumped’, ‘backed away’, ‘write off’ and ‘bailout loans’ can be a problem.

3. This depends on the class, but perhaps it’s the one about IVF babies. The main idea is expressed in relatively simple vocabulary.

4. Probably the one about Pope Francis due to the numerous proper names and low-frequency words, as well as two different time periods being referred to.

5. Specific names, like William Schabas, should not be asked for – you could possibly ask the students to provide country names but no more. (The same goes for numbers; you should not check specific numbers unless you are making a teaching point, for example the pronunciation of years).

6. One idea is legal vocabulary based on the first and third news items:
court, has ruled, the judges, failed to substantiate, encouraged, biased, enquiry.

7. Any of them as long as you know why you have chosen it.

8. Unless your students are economists, the one on Greek debt may be too obtuse and difficult to expand upon.

9. The extracts about babies, the job advert and attitude to women lend themselves to a discussion about issues of ethics and equality.
Now consider the following extract:

Students can improve their listening skills – and gain valuable language input – through a combination of extensive and intensive listening material and procedures. Listening of both kinds is especially important since it provides the perfect opportunity to hear voices other than the teacher’s, enables students to acquire good speaking habits as a result of the spoken English they absorb and helps to improve their pronunciation.

Extensive listening
Just as we can claim that extensive reading helps students to acquire vocabulary and grammar and that, furthermore, it make students better readers (see below), so extensive listening (where a teacher encourages students to choose for themselves what they listen to and to do so for pleasure and general language improvement) can also have a dramatic effect on a student’s language learning.

Extensive listening will usually take place outside the classroom: in the students’ home, car or on personal MP3 players as they travel from one place to another. The motivational power of such an activity increases dramatically when students make their own choices about what they are going to listen to.

Material for extensive listening can be obtained from a number of sources. Many simplified readers are now published with an audio version on cassette or CD. These provide ideal sources of listening material. Many students will enjoy reading and listening at the same time, using the reader both in book form and on an audio track. Students can also have their own copies of coursebook CDs or tapes, or recordings which accompany other books written especially at their level. They can download podcasts from a range of sources or they can listen to English language broadcasts online, either as they happen or as ‘listen again’ events on websites such as www.bbc.co.uk/radio.

Of course, radio broadcasts are authentic and as such they may cause some learning problems for students at lower levels. However, in a short article about listening to the radio, Joseph Quinn advised students not to worry if they don’t understand everything. They don’t actually need to, and they’re bound to take in a lot of language even if they are not aware of it. To make the most of this kind of input, students should set themselves a simple listening task, adopt a relaxed posture and ‘lie down and doodle’ while they listen (Quinn 2000: 14).

In order for extensive listening to work effectively with a group of students – or with groups of students – we will need to make a collection of appropriate tapes, CDs and podcasts, clearly marked for level, topic and genre – though John Field thinks that it is very difficult to judge the difficulty of a text and, therefore, difficult to grade listening (Field 2000a: 195). These can be kept, like simplified readers, in a permanent collection (such as in a self-access centre or on a hard disk so that students can either listen to them on the spot or download them onto their MP3 players). Alternatively, they can be kept in a box or some other container which can be taken into classrooms. We will then want to keep a record of which students have borrowed which items; where possible, we should involve students in the task of record-keeping.

The keenest students will want to listen to English audio material outside the classroom anyway and will need little encouragement to do so. Many others, however, will profit from having the teacher give them reasons to make use of the resources available. We need to explain the benefits of listening extensively and come to some kind of agreement about how much and what kind of listening they should do. We can recommend certain CDs or podcasts and get other students to talk about the ones which they have enjoyed the most.

In order to encourage extensive listening we can have students perform a number of tasks:

They can record their responses to what they have heard in a personal journal or fill in report forms which we have prepared, asking them to list the topic, assess the level of difficulty and summarise the contents of a recording. We can have them write comments on cards which are kept in a separate comments box, add their responses to a large class listening poster or write comments on a student website. The purpose of these or any other tasks is to give students more and more reasons to listen. If they can then share their information with colleagues, they will feel they have contributed to the progress of the whole group. The motivational power of such feelings should not be underestimated.

Intensive listening: using audio material
Many teachers use audio material on tape, CD or hard disk when they want their students to practise listening skills. This has a number of advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages: recorded material allows students to hear a variety of different voices apart from just their own teacher’s. It gives them an opportunity to ‘meet’ a range of different characters, especially where ‘real’ people are talking. But even when recordings contain written dialogues or extracts from plays, they offer a wide variety of situations and voices. Audio material is portable and readily available. Tapes and CDs are extremely cheap, and machines to play them are relatively inexpensive. Now that so much audio material is offered in digital form, teachers can play recorded tracks in class directly from computers (either stand-alone or on a school network). For all these reasons, most coursebooks include CDs and tapes, and many teachers rely on recorded material to provide a significant source of language input.

Disadvantages: in big classrooms with poor acoustics, the audibility of recorded material often gives cause for concern. It is sometimes difficult to ensure that all the students in a room can hear equally well. Another problem with recorded material in the classroom is that everyone has to listen at the same speed, a speed dictated by the recording, not by the listeners. Although this replicates the situation of radio, it is less satisfactory when students have to take information from the recording (though see below). Nor can they, themselves, interact with the speakers on the audio track in any way and they can’t see the speaking taking place. For many of these reasons, students may wonder why they should get involved with such material. Finally, having a group of people sit around listening to a tape recorder or CD player is not an entirely natural occupation.
Despite the disadvantages, however, we will still want to use recorded material at various stages in a sequence of lessons for the advantages we have already mentioned. In order to counteract some of the potential problems described above, we need to check audio and machine quality before we take them into class. Where possible, we need to change the position of the tape recorder or CD player (or the students) to offset poor acoustics or, if this is feasible, take other measures, such as using materials to deaden echoes which interfere with good sound quality.
An issue that also needs to be addressed is how often we are going to play the audio tracks we ask students to listen to. The methodologist Penny Ur points out that in real life, discourse is rarely ‘re-played’ and suggests, therefore, that one of our tasks is to encourage students to get as much information as is necessary or appropriate from a single hearing (Ur 1996:108). It is certainly true that extracting general or specific information from one listening is an important skill, so the kind of task we give students for the first time they hear an audio track is absolutely critical in gradually training them to listen effectively. However, we may also want to consider the fact that in face-to-face conversation we do frequently have a chance to ask for clarification and repetition. More importantly perhaps, as Penny Ur herself acknowledges, this ‘one listening’ scenario conflicts with our wish to satisfy our students’ desire to hear things over and over again.

If students are to get the maximum benefit from a listening, then we should replay it two or more times, since with each listening they may feel more secure, and with each listening (where we are helping appropriately) they will understand more than they did previously. As the researcher John Field suggests, students get far more benefit from a lot of listening than they do from a long pre-listening phase followed by only one or two exposures to the listening text (Field 1998a, 2000b). So even when we set prediction and gist activities for Type 1 tasks, we can return to the recording again for Type 2 tasks, such as detailed comprehension, text interpretation or language analysis. Or we might play the recording again simply because our students want us to. However, we do not want to bore the students by playing them the same recorded material again and again, nor do we want to waste time on useless repetition.

As with reading, a crucial part of listening practice is the lead-in we involve students in before they listen to recorded material, for, despite John Field’s comments about long pre-listening phases, what students do before they listen will have a significant effect on how successfully they listen, especially when they listen for the first time. In a recent study Anna Ching-Shyang Chang and John Read wanted to find out what kind of listening support was most helpful for students who were doing listening tests. Overwhelmingly, whether students were ‘high’ or ‘low-proficiency’ listeners, they found that giving students background knowledge before they listened was more successful than either letting them preview questions or teaching them some key vocabulary before they listened (Ching-Shyang Chang and Read 2006: 375-397). Of course, listening practice is not the same as testing listening; on the contrary, our job is to help students become better listeners by blending Type 1 and Type 2 tasks so that they become more and more confident and capable when they listen to English. But what this study shows is that activating students’ schemata and giving them some topic help to assist them in making sense of the listening is a vital part of our role.

Who controls the recorded material?
We said that a disadvantage of recorded material was that students all had to listen at the same speed – that is the speed of the recording, rather than at their own listening speed. Nevertheless, there are things we can do about this.
Students control stop and start: some teachers get students to control the speed of recorded listening. They tell the teacher when they want the recording to be paused and when they are happy for it to resume. Alternatively, a student can be at the controls and ask his or her classmates to say when they want to stop or go on. lt is possible that students may feel exposed or embarrassed when they have to ask the teacher to pause the recording. One possible way of avoiding this is to have all students listen with their eyes closed and then raise their hands if they want the recording to stop. No one can see who is asking for the pause and, as a result, no one loses face.
Students have access to different machines: if we have the space or resources, it is a very good idea to have students listen to different machines in small groups. This means that they can listen at the speed of a small group rather than at the speed of the whole class. Having more than one machine is especially useful for any kind of jigsaw listening.
Students work in a language laboratory or listening centre: in a language laboratory all the students can listen to material (or do exercises or watch film clips) at the same time if they are in lockstep (that is all working with the same audio clip at the same time). However, a more satisfactory solution is to have students working on their own. All students can work with the same recorded material, but because they have control of their own individual machines, they can pause, rewind and fast forward in order to listen at their own speed.
The three solutions above are all designed to help students have more control even when they are members of a large group. Of course, students can go to learning/listening centres on their own and they can, as we saw above, listen on CD, tape or MP3 players (or computers) to any amount of authentic or specially recorded material in their own time.
Intensive listening: ‘live’ listening
A popular way of ensuring genuine communication is live listening, where the teacher and/or visitors to the class talk to the students. This has obvious advantages since it allows students to practise listening in face-to-face interactions and, especially, allows them to practise listening-repair strategies, such as using formulaic expressions (Sorry? What was that? I didn’t catch that), repeating up to the point where communication breakdown occurred, using rising intonation (She didn’t like the … ?), or rephrasing and seeing if the speaker confirms the rephrasing (You mean she said she didn’t know anything? if the speaker says something like She denied all knowledge of the affair). Students can also, by their expressions and demeanour, indicate if the speaker is going too slowly or too fast. Above all, they can see who they are listening to and respond not just to the sound of someone’s voice, but also to all sorts of prosodic and paralinguistic clues.

Live listening can take the following forms:
Reading aloud: an enjoyable activity, when done with conviction and style, is for the teacher to read aloud to a class. This allows the students to hear a clear spoken version of a written text and can be extremely enjoyable if the teacher is prepared to read with expression and conviction. The teacher can also read or act out dialogues, either by playing two parts or by inviting a colleague into the classroom. This gives students a chance to hear how a speaker they know well (the teacher) would act in different conversational settings.
Story-telling: teachers are ideally placed to tell stories which, in turn, provide excellent listening material. At any stage of the story, the students can be asked to predict what is coming next, to describe people in the story or pass comment on it in some other way.
Interviews: one of the most motivating listening activities is the live interview, especially where students themselves think up the questions. In such situations, students really listen for answers they themselves have asked for – rather than adopting other people’s questions. Where possible, we should have strangers visit our class to be interviewed, but we can also be the subject of interviews ourselves. In such circumstances we can take on a different persona to make the interview more interesting or choose a subject we know about for the students to interview us on.
Conversations: if we can persuade a colleague to come to our class, we can hold conversations with them about English or any other subject. Students then have the chance to watch the interaction as well as listen to it. We can also extend storytelling possibilities by role-playing with a colleague.

Intensive listening: the roles of the teacher
As with all activities, we need to create student engagement through the way we set up listening tasks. We need to build up students’ confidence by helping them listen better, rather than by testing their listening abilities. We also need to acknowledge the students’ difficulties and suggest ways out of them.
• Organiser: we need to tell students exactly what their listening purpose is and give them clear instructions about how to achieve it. One of our chief responsibilities will be to build their confidence through offering tasks that are achievable and texts that are comprehensible.
• Machine operator: when we use audio material, we need to be as efficient as possible in the way we use the audio player. With a tape player this means knowing where the segment we wish to use is on the tape, and knowing, through the use of the tape counter, how to get back there. On a CD or DVD player, it means finding the segment we want to use. Above all, it means testing the recording out before taking it into class so that we do not waste time trying to make the right decisions or trying to make things work when we get there. We should take decisions about where we can stop the recording for particular questions and exercises, but, once in class, we should be prepared to respond to the students’ needs in the way we stop and start the machine. If we involve our students in live listening, we need to observe them with great care to see how easily they can understand us. We can then adjust the way we speak accordingly.
• Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we should lead a feedback session to check that they have completed it successfully. We may start by having them compare their answers in pairs and then ask for answers from the class in general or from pairs in particular. Students often appreciate giving paired answers like this since, by sharing their knowledge, they are also sharing their responsibility for the answers. Because listening can be a tense experience, encouraging this kind of cooperation is highly desirable. It is important to be supportive when organising feedback after a listening if we are to counter any negative expectations students might have, and if we wish to sustain their motivation.
• Prompter: when students have listened to a recording for comprehension purposes, we can prompt them to listen to it again in order to notice a variety of language and spoken features. Sometimes we can offer them script dictations (where some words in a transcript are blanked out) to provoke their awareness of certain language items.
Film and video
So far we have talked about recorded material as audio material only. But of course, we can also have students listen while they watch film clips on video, DVD or online. There are many good reasons for encouraging students to watch while they listen. In the first place, they get to see ‘language in use’. This allows them to see a whole lot of paralinguistic behaviour. For example, they can see how intonation matches facial expression and what gestures accompany certain phrases (e.g. shrugged shoulders when someone says I don’t know), and they can pick up a range of cross-cultural clues. Film allows students entry into a whole range of other communication worlds: they see how different people stand when they talk to each other (how close they are, for example) or what sort of food people eat. Unspoken rules of behaviour in social and business situations are easier to see on film than to describe in a book or hear on an audio track. Just like audio material, filmed extracts can be used as a main focus of a lesson sequence or as parts of other longer sequences. Sometimes we might get students to watch a whole programme, but at other times they will only watch a short two- or three-minute sequence. Because students are used to watching film at home – and may therefore associate it with relaxation – we need to be sure that we provide them with good viewing and listening tasks so that they give their full attention to what they are hearing and seeing.

Finally, it is worth remembering that students can watch a huge range of film clips on the Internet at sites such as You Tube (www.youtube.com) where people of all ages and interests can post film clips in which they talk or show something. Everything students might want is out there in cyberspace, so they can do extensive or intensive watching and then come and tell the class about what they have seen. Just as with extensive listening, the more they do this, the better.
Viewing techniques
All of the following viewing techniques are designed to awaken the students’ curiosity through prediction so that when they finally watch the film sequence in its entirety, they will have some expectations about it.

• Fast forward: the teacher presses the play button and then fast forwards the DVD or video so that the sequence shoots past silently and at great speed, taking only a few seconds. When it is over, the teacher can ask students what the extract was all about and whether they can guess what the characters were saying.
• Silent viewing (for language): the teacher plays the film extract at normal speed but without the sound. Students have to guess what the characters are saying. When they have done this, the teacher plays it with sound so that they can check to see if they guessed correctly.
• Silent viewing (for music): the same technique can be used with music. Teachers show a sequence without sound and ask students to say what kind of music they would put behind it and why. When the sequence is then shown again, with sound, students can judge whether they chose music conveying the same mood as that chosen by the film director.
• Freeze frame: at any stage during a video sequence we can freeze the picture, stopping the participants dead in their tracks. This is extremely useful for asking the students what they think will happen next or what a character will say next.
• Partial viewing: one way of provoking the students’ curiosity is to allow them only a partial view of the pictures on the screen. We can use pieces of card to cover most of the screen, only leaving the edges on view. Alternatively, we can put little squares of paper all over the screen and remove them one by one so that what is happening is only gradually revealed. A variation of partial viewing occurs when the teacher uses a large ‘divider’, placed at right angles to the screen so that half the class can only see one half of the screen, while the rest of the class can only see the other half. They then have to say what they think the people on the other side saw.

Listening (and mixed) techniques
Listening routines, based on the same principles as those for viewing, are similarly designed to provoke engagement and expectations.
• Pictureless listening (language): the teacher covers the screen, turns the monitor away from the students or turns the brightness control right down. The students then listen to a dialogue and have to guess such things as where it is taking place and who the speakers are. Can they guess their age, for example? What do they think the speakers actually look like?
• Pictureless listening (music): where an excerpt has a prominent music track students can listen to it and then say – based on the mood it appears to convey – what kind of scene they think it accompanies and where it is taking place.
• Pictureless listening (sound effects): in a scene without dialogue students can listen to the sound effects to guess what is happening. For example, they might hear the lighting of a gas stove, eggs being broken and fried, coffee being poured and the milk and sugar stirred in. They then tell the story they think they have just heard.
• Picture or speech: we can divide the class in two so that half of the class faces the screen and half faces away. The students who can see the screen have to describe what is happening to the students who cannot. This forces them into immediate fluency while the non-watching students struggle to understand what is going on, and is an effective way of mixing reception and production in spoken English. Halfway through an excerpt, the students can change round.
• Subtitles: there are many ways we can use subtitled films. John Field (2000a: 194) suggests that one way to enable students to listen to authentic material is to allow them to have subtitles to help them. Alternatively, students can watch a film extract with subtitles but with the sound turned down. Every time a subtitle appears, we can stop the film and the students have to say what they think the characters are saying in English. With DVDs which have the option to turn off the subtitles, we can ask students to say what they would write for subtitles and then they can compare theirs with what actually appears. Subtitles are only really useful, of course, when students all share the same L1. But if they do, the connections they make between English and their language can be extremely useful.
Listening lesson sequences
No skill exists in isolation (which is why skills are integrated in most learning sequences). Listening can thus occur at a number of points in a teaching sequence. Sometimes it forms the jumping-off point for the activities which follow. Sometimes it may be the first stage of a ‘listening and acting out’ sequence where students role-play the situation they have heard on the recording. Sometimes live listening may be a prelude to a piece of writing which is the main focus of a lesson. Other lessons, however, have listening training as their central focus. However much we have planned a lesson, we need to be flexible in what we do. Nowhere is this more acute than in the provision of live listening, where we may, on the spur of the moment, feel the need to tell a story or act out some role. Sometimes this will be for content reasons – because a topic comes up – and sometimes it may be a way of re-focusing our students’ attention. Most listening sequences start with a Type 1 task before moving on to more specific Type 2 explorations of the text. In general, we should aim to use listening material for as many purposes as possible – both for practising a variety of skills and as source material for other activities – before students finally become tired of it.

Examples of listening sequences
In the following examples, the listening activity is specified, the skills which are involved are detailed and the way that the listening text can be used within a lesson is explained.
Where possible, teachers can bring strangers into the class to talk to the students or be interviewed by them. Although students will be especially interested in them if they are native speakers of the language, there is no reason why they should not include any competent English speakers. The teacher briefs the visitor about the students’ language level, pointing out that they should be sensitive about the level of language they use, but not speak to the students in a very unnatural way. They should probably not go off into lengthy explanations, and they may want to consider speaking especially clearly.

The teacher takes the visitor into the classroom without telling the students who or what the visitor is. In pairs or groups, they try to guess as much as they can about the visitor. Based on their guesses, they write questions that they wish to ask.

The visitor is now interviewed with the questions the students have written. As the interview proceeds, the teacher encourages them to seek clarification where things are said that they do not understand. The teacher will also prompt the students to ask follow-up questions; if a student asks Where are you from? and the visitor says that he comes from Scotland, he can then be asked Where in Scotland? or What’s Scotland like?

During the interview the students make notes. When the interviewee has gone, these notes form the basis of a written follow-up. The students can write a short biographical piece about the person – for example, as a profile page from a magazine. They can discuss the interview with their teacher, asking for help with any points they are still unclear about. They can also role-play similar interviews among themselves.

We can make pre-recorded interviews in coursebooks more interactive by giving students the interviewer’s questions first so that they can predict what the interviewee will say.
A popular technique for having students understand the gist of a story – but which also incorporates prediction and the creation of expectations – involves the students in listening in order to put pictures in the sequence in which they hear them. In this example, students look at the following four pictures:

They are given a chance, in pairs or groups, to say what they think is happening in each picture. The teacher will not confirm or deny their predictions. Students are then told that they are going to listen to a recording and that they should put the pictures in the correct chronological order (which is not the same as the order of what they hear). This is what is on the tape:

ANNA: Morning Stuart. What time do you call this?
STUART: Er, well, yes, I know, umm. Sorry. Sorry I’m Late.
ANNA: Me, too. Well?
STUART: I woke up Late.
ANNA: You woke up Late.
STUART: ‘Fraid so. I didn’t hear the alarm.
ANNA: Oh, so you were out last night?
STUART: Yes. Yes. ‘Fraid so. No, I mean, yes, I went out last night, so what?
ANNA: So what happened?
STUART: Well, when I saw the time I jumped out of bed, had a quick shower,
obviously, and ran out of the house. But when I got to the car …
ANNA: Yes? When you got to the car?
STUART: Well, this is really stupid, but I realised I’d forgotten my keys.
ANNA: Yes, that is really stupid.
STUART: And the door to my house was shut.
ANNA: Of course it was! So what did you do? How did you get out of that one?
STUART: I ran round to the garden at the back and climbed in through the window.
ANNA: Quite a morning!
STUART: Yeah, and someone saw me and called the police.
ANNA: This just gets worse and worse! So what happened?
STUART: Well, I told them it was my house and at first they wouldn’t believe me.
It took a long time!
ANNA: I can imagine.
STUART: And you see, that’s why I’m late!
The students check their answers with each other and then, if necessary, listen again to ensure that they have the sequence correct (C, A, D, B). The teacher can now get the students to listen again or look at the tapescript, noting phrases of interest, such as those that Stuart uses to express regret and apology (Sorry I’m late, I woke up late, ‘Fraid so), Anna’s insistent questioning (What time do you call this? Well? So what happened? So what did you do? How did you get out of that one?) and her use of repetition both to be judgmental and to get Stuart to keep going with an explanation she obviously finds ridiculous (You woke up late, Yes, that is really stupid, Quite a morning! I can imagine). The class can then go on to role-play similar scenes in which they have to come up with stories and excuses for being late for school or work.

Adapted from The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman.

TASK FOR SUBMISSION TO YOUR TUTOR

TASK 2

You are going to prepare a listening exercise which will firstly train listening for gist, then move on to develop listening for detail.

Because we have already mentioned the importance of using authentic materials, your task is this:

1. Record the news from: (a) the radio OR (b) as a podcast from a website. Ideally you need a 2-3 minute bulletin with at least 8 different news items. Make a written transcript of the broadcast.

2. Set a pre-question for your students, to prepare them for the listening session.

3. Make a list of at least 12 general topic areas, such as ‘politics’,
‘sport’, ‘famous personalities’ etc.

4. Formulate a task for the first listening. At this stage, your students will have to identify which of the12 topics are mentioned and which are not. It is therefore important to have some distractors in your list. To make it more challenging, ask students to number them in the order in which they are mentioned.

5. For the second listening, you could use a range of question types to
focus students on one or two sections of the news to help develop
the skills of listening for detail.

6. Decide on ONE topic in the news recording that you think is
interesting and make a few suggestions on how you might develop it
with a class.

So TASK 2 is:

– record the news and transcribe it
– set a pre-question to arouse interest in the recording
– make a list of 12 general topics and set a task to practice listening for
gist.
– write 2 different types of exercise to practise listening for detail
on one or two sections of the text avoiding very short exercises and
questions that require difficult names or simple numbers as answers.
– suggest one way that you could extend or develop one topic in the
broadcast

NB DO NOT send your recording. You must include a transcript of the news and your exercises, but NOT THE RECORDING.
Part 2. Reading skills
What happens when we read in a foreign language?

It does not necessarily follow that because students can read in their own language they will be efficient readers in English. Training in the skills involved in reading must be given, as reading is not an inbuilt skill. It is also not a passive process, contrary to traditional belief. Reading is an active process in which practice in all the sub-skills is vital as no improvement can be effected without guided practice.

In Part 1, we mentioned the difficulties that one has to face when trying to understand spoken language. The main difficulty associated with reading, as compared with listening, is that we cannot use such clues as the intonation, body language and facial expressions of the speaker. When we read, however – and that means if we read well – we also use clues. We look at the layout and pictures. We go quickly through the text to see how long it is and what it is about. We use the words we know to help us decide the meaning of the words we don’t know. We do this from the time we first begin to read in our own language.

But when we start to read in a foreign language, it often happens that we try to read word by word and we reach for the dictionary all the time. We get stuck on trying to read details instead of trying to find out the overall meaning. In short, we do not use the whole range of reading skills that we possess in our mother tongue.
The writer and reader

The writer is someone who has something to say through written text to the reader. However, it is important to remember that the writer and reader are not identical and the message intended by the writer may not be the message the reader extracts from the text. Readers bring both knowledge and opinion to what they read. For example, a text may include the following sentence:

He lived his life like a typical bank manager.

Now answer the following questions:

1. How do bank managers travel to work?

2. What do they wear to work?
3. What do they do in the bank?

4. What time do they finish every day?
None of the answers to those questions were in that sentence.
We interpret the writer’s message in our own way. Since different people have a different concept of a bank manager’s life, there will be different interpretations of the sentence. We may or may not know much about bank managers and we may or may not share the writer’s view of bank managers as, say, bywords for respectability and regularity. If we think bank managers are crooks who take bribes as a matter of course and have henchmen to kill their enemies then the sentence will mean something very different to us and our answers to questions based on the sentence will be very different.
Using context to guess and predict

Don’t let students use the dictionary every time they see an unfamiliar word. Make them guess meanings of words from context. Only after they have attempted a guess can they look up the word if they want to check themselves. Give them time limits for reading and an easy task so that they do not have time to find every word on the page. Make it clear to them that understanding a text does not necessarily mean understanding every word in it.

Teach prediction skills by using texts with pictures and headlines. If students see an article headed: RABBIT SAVES FAMILY IN HOUSE FIRE they should be encouraged to predict / guess the story and the vocabulary that may be used in it. Alternatively, you can give students a list of key vocabulary from the story and they can guess what the story is about. When students read to check their predictions, their motivation and concentration are always higher than if they are simply asked to read a new text and find out what it is about.
SELF-CHECK 3:2 3

Read the following paragraph and think about the answers to the questions. Do not use a dictionary.

You are very unlikely to nulp a grizza, because they fozzle at night and not with other grizzas. If you want to see one fozzling for gawls among the loobs, you have to spult nabbly for many hours without making a gank.

1. What do you think a grizza is?

2. What kinds of facts about grizzas do we learn from the text?

3. What do you think ‘fozzle’ means? And ‘loobs’? And ‘gank?’
You will find answers later in the module.
Sub-skills of reading

A student needs to master different ways of reading a text.

Think back to the listening section. As with listening, students need to be encouraged to read extensively, ie read a variety of texts on their own, such as fiction, magazine articles, or Wikipedia. When they encounter the same structures and vocabulary multiple times, their ability to understand written English improves and they are able to deal with more and more difficult texts.

The two types, or sub-skills, of intensive reading in the classroom, are reading is for gist (also called ‘skimming’) and reading for detail (also called ‘scanning’).

Skimming involves running your eyes over a piece of text in order to understand its overall idea. For example, you may want to ascertain if it is relevant to your needs and whether it’s worth being read more carefully. You may want to establish if any exciting events are described in the text or it is just an opinion piece. You may need to find out whether the text is negative or positive in tone. Or, if the author comments on a conflict, you may want to find out which side he/she is on or whether he/she tries to remain neutral.

Scanning involves looking for specific information in the text. For example, you want to find out the score of a game between Real Madrid and Barcelona and you want to know whether Christiano Ronaldo has scored. You will then read through the match report looking for numbers and identifying which of them refer to the final score and you will also look for any mention of Christiano’s name in the text and, when you locate it, you’ll read around that to find out whether he scored a goal.
In another, broader classification there are four sub-skills of reading.

The first sub-skill involves ‘superficial understanding’ and is used in reading a newspaper or detective story, for example, in order to pick out the main points of the story, look for clues etc. The main concerns here could be ‘what is going on?’ ‘why are they doing what they are doing?’ or ‘how will it all end?’ This is quite similar to extensive reading, where you read large amounts of text for pleasure.
The following techniques are more intensive.

The second sub-skill is described as ‘imaginative understanding’ and is used in the study of literature. A task requiring imaginative understanding could be, for example:
Where Seamus Heaney says: ‘I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing’ – what is he trying to tell us about his attitude to poetry?

The third sub-skill is referred to as ‘precise understanding’ and it involves thorough comprehension of a text with focus on the exact meaning of every word and sentence. (Unfortunately, sometimes this turns out to be the only sub-skill practised by students in some classes).

The final sub-skill involves ‘practical understanding’, and this is when we read in order to act upon what we read. This is something we do with packets and instructions – which button to press to make the TV work or how many pills to take and how often.

Before setting reading tasks for your students, you need to decide what your aim is. For instance:

Do you want to train your students to answer questions precisely?
Do you want to increase vocabulary?
Do you want your students to decide if the text is relevant to their needs?
Are you looking at the grammar of certain types of texts?
Do you want the students to act on the information?

Much of this will depend on the nature of the class – are they general English students, University students or Business English students? Where are they now? In their own country or in an English-speaking environment?

SELF-CHECK 3:2 4

Look at these three descriptions. Why are these not good ‘reading lessons’?
a. In a reading lesson I first ask learners to identify all the unknown words in the text. I then give them explanations for all the words. I finally ask them to do the reading at home and answer the comprehension questions set in the course book.

b. I believe it is important for learners to be able to read aloud. So I ask each of the students to read a paragraph of the text aloud in the class. While they do this I correct their pronunciation errors. They repeat after each correction. Then I give them a few minutes to answer the comprehension questions. After that, I get the correct answers and we go on to another activity.

c. Well, in a reading lesson I basically start by teaching all the unknown vocabulary. The learners then answer the comprehension questions. Then we check the answers. Finally we do some grammar exercises on an area of grammar that has featured in the written text. I think that texts are a useful way to introduce new language and vocabulary.
COMMENT

a. In this lesson, the teacher is developing the learners’ vocabulary. That is of course if s/he is using good vocabulary techniques that make the new words memorable. However, it doesn’t seem that the teacher encourages students to work out meanings from context. The first reading is for identifying unknown words, whereas it’s more natural to allow students to read for gist first.

b. This lesson is one on pronunciation and perhaps stress. Asking learners to read aloud in this manner can be called ‘barking.’ For example, read the following words aloud: ‘Dak kelp’. You pronunciation may be perfect but do you understand what you have just read? In reading, being able to say the words is not an essential requirement and it does not imply understanding the text. That is why in a reading lesson students should not read aloud unless it’s an extra activity at the end whose aim is to improve pronunciation.

c. This teacher considers a reading lesson to be an opportunity to teach vocabulary and grammar. The comprehension questions seem to be secondary to language exercises. There is no practice of reading sub-skills.

All three of the teachers have failed to consider:
1. the features of the text (what makes an advert different from a
newspaper article for example),

2. the form of the text (its paragraphs, how each part links to the next)

3. the fact that people read texts with a particular objective in mind, whether it be to identify its topic or important details; none of these three teachers
have considered setting questions before reading or including prediction
tasks.
SELF-CHECK 3:2 5

Here is an article from a newspaper.
There follow three lesson transcripts showing teachers using it with a teenage class. Answer the questions in bold that follow each lesson.
ARTICLE SMOKEY SAVES 10 IN FIRE
A pet rabbit called Smokey saved ten people from a terrible house fire yesterday and is fit and well at the local fire station.
The seven-week-old baby bunny began pounding his feet on the door of his rabbit hutch when he smelt the smoke that was coming from the kitchen of the house at about 4am yesterday.
His owner, Tanya Birch was woken by the noise and was able to escape with her two year old daughter, Heather, picking up the rabbit on the way out of the door. They all got out safely.
Tanya then screamed a warning to other people on the second and third floors. One mother jumped from a second floor window with her son. Firemen were able to rescue a family of five who were trapped on the third floor.
Tanya said: ‘We owe our lives to Smokey. If he hadn’t woken me up, we would have been trapped by the smoke. I’m going to buy him some extra special carrots this week.’
It is thought that the fire, in the village of Watermeet near Cambridge, was caused by an electrical problem with a heater that was left on overnight in the kitchen. Firemen are investigating.
Lesson 1

Teacher:
OK, class. Thank you for telling me about your pets and your favourite animals. You have some very clever pets.
Now we’re going to read about a very special pet that was in the newspaper because it saved some people’s lives.
On the board I’m going to put some words from the article.
In pairs, I want you to discuss what you think the story is about and how the animal helped the people.

smoke banging family 10 3rd floor

jumped rabbit

Q: What could happen next in the lesson and why?

Lesson 2

Teacher: Today class we are going to find out about someone called Smokey.
He is very famous because he did something special.
Here is the title of the newspaper article:

SMOKEY SAVES 10 IN FIRE

When we write a newspaper article we need to tell the reader:

where what

(why)?

when
who

What happened.
Where it happened.
When it happened.
Who it happened to.

And maybe:
Why it happened

Read through the article quickly – you have about two minutes.
See if you can find out WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHO and WHY
Q: What skills will the students practise in this lesson?

Lesson 3
Teacher:
OK, class. We have heard interesting stories about brave animals on the recording. Now we are going to read about an animal that saved some people. Let’s think about what happens if there is a fire in a house.
Noriko: Gets hot a lot of sm…sm….
Keiko: Smoke.
Teacher: Good. What about the people in the house?
Jun: can’t go out Keiko: Jump out window Noriko: Escape

Teacher: Yes. In this story some people escaped and some people jumped. Some people couldn’t get out – they were trapped
But also somebody screamed, somebody smelt something, somebody pounded (imitates pounding) and somebody picked up something. (Writes all words in bold on board and mimes some of them.)
Write these verbs down in your book. Then read through the article to find out who did each of these things. Write the name of the person next to the verb.
Q: How is this introduction different from the other two lessons?
How is it the same?

COMMENT
Lesson 1

Q: What could happen next in the lesson and why?
This teacher has been encouraging the students to predict what is in the article. The most natural thing for them to do next is to read the article and find out to what extent their predictions are correct. This would be a useful gist-reading exercise as they will use the words that they recognise to work out the overall meaning of the article.
Lesson 2

Q: What skills will the students practise in this lesson?
This teacher is encouraging the students to read quickly through a text and pick out the most important points – so they will be reading for specific information, ie scanning the text. However, if they begin by identifying ‘what’ happened, they may initially skim the text.
She also introduces them to the idea that texts have a form – ‘newspaper articles usually tell us’……. They are also helping each other and sharing information – important when you are reading.
Lesson 3

Q: How is this introduction different from the other two lessons?
How is it the same?
This lesson is different because it concentrates straight away on language in the article and especially on verbs. It is important that the vocabulary is being presented in context.
It is the same because it encourages the class to think about the topic before they read.

Also, in each of the three lessons the teacher reveals some pieces of information from the text prior to reading but leaves it up to the students to find out most of the information, thus building anticipation and making the students want to read.

All these three exercises are useful. The teacher could do a further exercise with students giving reasons for the actions.
Why did he pound on the door? Why were they trapped?

Types of texts

Teachers need to consider the types of texts to introduce as there are many different types of texts you can use for reading. Textbooks are improving their selection of interesting and relevant materials but you can always add your own. These days it is easy to get texts from the internet on any topic, so choose something your students are interested in. An interview with a celebrity? A review of a new computer game? Ask your students to look themselves for interesting articles and bring them in. Tell them to find English on packets in the kitchen and signs in the street. Even if they are not living in an English-speaking country they will still be able to find examples of English. Bringing into lessons material that they have found will encourage them to read outside class.

Once you have chosen a text, think about your exercises. Cut up a catalogue or web page and ask students to match the product picture with the description – to practise skimming and scanning. Cut up a long text such as a story and ask students to put the sections in the right order – to focus on the organisation of a text. Ask students to read part of a story in groups and then finish the story in a logical way – to work on prediction and style.

You can also choose a few short texts on the same theme and ask students to write True/False questions for their classmates to answer – reading for detail.

SELF-CHECK 3:2 6

Here are 5 texts and 5 activities. Match an activity to each text.

Advertisement
Health leaflet
Murder story
Problem letter
Guide book

• Cut this half way through and ask them to guess the end.
• Each group should read and write a reply
• Find the adjectives that make the car sound attractive.
• Read and mark places on a map
• Give each group a different topic and ask them to design a diagram or picture.
Exploiting texts

Planning how to use a text involves thinking about two things:

• the focus of the reading exercises

• how the text will fit into a lesson or series of lessons you are doing and link with other skills work.

The type of activity you do with a text should be a natural one. ‘Read through this six page report on global warming and pick out the adjectives’ is a rather pointless activity, but finding adjectives in a car advertisement helps to highlight how adverts persuade us.

There are three main focus areas to think about:

 the information in the text
 the structure and style of the text
 the vocabulary and grammar used in the text.

It is very important that you as a teacher devise exercises that are clearly focused and that will both be informed by pre-reading activities and lead to post-reading activities.
SELF-CHECK 3:2 7

Here is an example of a teacher’s set of reading comprehension questions.

1. What is the problem with the questions that need to be answered in full sentences?

2. What is the problem with the true and false questions?

3. What is the problem with the ‘focus on language’ task?

4. How could the questions be improved?
TEXT

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and the seventh deepest lake in the world. It has a depth of 1,943 feet. The lake partly fills a deep caldera that was formed when a volcano called Mount Mazama collapsed around 7,700 years ago. A caldera means a basin or deep place formed by the explosion or collapse of a volcano. The waters of this lake are especially blue and free of pollutants because the lake has no inlets. The water is replenished by rainfall and snow.

A secchi disk is used to determine how clear water is. This is a disk that is like a CD. It is dropped into the water while connected by a rope. Scientists measure the depth of clarity by seeing how far the disk can be dropped while a person is still able to see its reflection. At Crater Lake, readings are in the high 20 to mid 30 meter range. This is very clear for any natural lake. These bright blue waters greatly enhance Crater Lake National Park, which has beautiful surrounding woodlands.
TEACHER’S QUESTIONS
1. Answer in full sentences

What happened to the volcano mentioned in the text?
What is a caldera?
What is a secchi compared to?
What are the clarity figures for Crater Lake?
How is a secchi disk lowered into water?

2. True or False?

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States
The waters of this lake are especially green.
A secchi disk is used to determine how clear water is
3. Focus on language
Write out all the plural nouns from the text.

COMMENT

1. These questions focus on non-essential information in the text. Answering these questions doesn’t mean having a clear idea of what the text is about or a having obtained a useful set of information. They check understanding of professional jargon, which your students are unlikely to need in real life. It is extremely hard to devise a way to lead from these questions to any meaningful post-reading activities. They are unlikely to be an extension of any pre-reading discussion, either.
2. These questions can be answered even by someone who doesn’t know English, so they are completely meaningless. Two of them are exact photocopies of sentences in the text, so all you need is match them visually and say ‘yes’. One is also a photocopy but ‘green’ is used instead of ‘blue’, which is obviously not the same. Such questions do not check reading comprehension.
3. This is a pointless activity as plural forms are not a noteworthy language feature of the text. There aren’t even any irregular plurals.
4. Asking questions to establish the fact that the lake is very clean and that people take care of preserving its ecological purity would be more useful. That would allow students to understand the main idea and most salient details of the text and would easily lead to a discussion on ways to preserve nature. It could, in turn, lead from a pre-reading discussion on beautiful, pristine places the students have visited.
SELF-CHECK 3:2 8

Here are two texts and examples of a range of more focused exercises that could be used with texts to improve students’ reading skills.
Study them carefully and make notes on:

• who each text is suitable for.
• what sub-skill is being taught in each exercise: skimming or scanning.
• where students are required to predict.
• what areas of language the exercises are focusing on.

Then suggest a way in which the lesson could continue from these texts into a speaking, listening or writing exercise.
TEXT 1

(The student would have a diagram to go with this text)

Exercise 1

Read through the text quickly and say whether it

 describes what a typical English house looks like
 describes how a typical English house has changed in the recent decades
 describes the writer’s attitude to a typical English house
THE TYPICAL ENGLISH HOUSE

A detached house stands on its own. A semi-detached house is joined to the house next door along the central wall. The ‘semi’ is the most typical kind of English house. It has front and back gardens and often a garage at the side.

The outline on the next page shows the ground floor of a typical ‘left-hand’ semi. It has a lot of rooms, but if you look at the rooms you will see that they are all quite small. People often ‘live’ in the dining room, keeping the lounge for visitors. This means that they spend most of their time in a room only about 11′ 6″ x 10′ 6″. The dining room in this house is connected to the lounge by a room divider, and the kitchen is connected to the dining room by a hatch in the wall. Both the lounge and the dining room have open fireplaces. The kitchen has a sink unit on the back wall of the house and the back door is on the left. The front door opens into the hall. There is one other way in and out of the house and this is through French windows which open onto the garden to the rear of the dining room. The house from front to back measures 24′ 6″, the lounge being 13′ in length.
Exercise 2

Now read the text more carefully and answer the following questions about the house.

1. Put in the dimensions which you know.

2. Mark with a cross the location of the attached “semi”.

3. [picture] – which room is this?
Exercise 3

Fill in the blanks.

1. Figure 1 marks the position of a ……….

2. Figure 2 marks the position of a ……….

3. Figure 3 marks the position of a ……….
4. The two figure 4’s mark the position of the ……….

5. Figure 5 marks the position of the ……….

6. Figure 6 marks the position of the ……….

7. Figure 7 marks the position of the ……….
TEXT 2
Pre-text question

The following words will be used in the text. What do you think the text will be about? What events will happen in the text? Make notes of your ideas.

careless
criticized
violation
freeway
damage

Exercise 1

Read the following text and answer the question after each paragraph. Then read on and find out if you have guessed correctly. (Note: the text is projected onto a screen. Students are not shown the next part of the text until the teacher has elicited their answer to the question after the previous part).

1 Colleen was in a hurry, which made her driving even more careless than usual. Her boyfriend Simon had already criticized her many times for failing to stop completely at stop signs. That’s what they call a “California, or rolling, stop,” he told her.

5 “If the cops catch you sliding through a stop like that,” he said, wagging a finger at her, “they’ll give you a ticket for running a stop sign. That’s a moving violation. That means at least a $100 ticket, plus eight hours of driving school for another $30.”

What do you think Colleen said in reply?

9 “I know, I know,” she replied. “But I never do it when they’re around, so how can they catch me?” Simon was about to tell her that cops have a habit of suddenly appearing out of nowhere, but Colleen told him to stop thinking so negatively. “You are bad luck,” she said. “When you talk like that, you make bad things happen.” He told her that life doesn’t work that way.

Why do you think Colleen was in a hurry on that particular day?

15 Colleen was in a hurry because she needed to drop off a package at the post office. It had to get to New York by Wednesday. She exited the freeway and pulled up at the stop sign. No cars were coming. It was safe to pull out. She hit the gas pedal.

What do you think happened next?

19 Bang! The car in front of her was still sitting there. The driver was a young woman, who got out of her car, walked back to look at the damage to her new car, and started yelling at Colleen.

“What were you waiting for?” Colleen demanded.

From http://www.eslfast.com/eslread/ss/s052.htm

Now read the notes you made before you read the text. Were your initial guesses about the text correct?

Exercise 2

Make notes of the expressions and structures used in the text to
a) warn somebody
b) reply to a warning

Exercise 3

Are the following statements true or false?
1. It was the first time that Simon criticised Colleen for her driving style.
2. Colleen believed that if she couldn’t see any cops when going through a stop sign, she wouldn’t be caught.

3. Colleen was in a hurry to get to New York.

4. The young woman reacted calmly to the incident.

5. The young woman’s car was damaged.

Exercise 4

Explain what is meant by the following words ie what the author is referring to.

1. that – line 3
2. it – line 9
3. they – line 9
4. it – line 16
5. there – line 19

ENDNOTE

What about the ‘grizzas’ earlier in the module?

To remind you, here was the exercise:

You are very unlikely to nulp a grizza, because they fozzle at night and not with other grizzas. If you want to see one fozzling for gawls among the loobs, you have to spult nabbly for many hours without making a gank.

1. What do you think a grizza is?

2. What kinds of facts about grizzas do we learn from the text?

3. What do you think ‘fozzle’ means? And ‘loobs’? And ‘gank?’

Well, as you may have guessed, there is no such thing as a grizza. (If anyone ever discovers a ‘grizza’, please contact INTESOL immediately and we will rewrite the module).

Any deductions you made were based on your understanding of text structure, other words in the text and the grammatical structures in it.

You expected the text to have meaning and structure. You had schemata in your head for how informational texts were organised. That is why, despite not knowing what a grizza was or what some other words in the text meant, you were probably able to deduce that
 a grizza is a kind of animal
 the text is about the animal’s behaviour
 a grizza engages in a certain activity on its own at night
 the text indicates what actions are required from you if you want to see a grizza
 ‘fozzle’ probably means ‘look (for)’, ‘search’ or ‘hunt’
 ‘loobs’ is either some kind of vegetation or rocks/stones
 ‘gank’ is probably ‘noise’, ‘sound’ or ‘movement’.

If you were able to work out so much from the text without knowing many words in it, it proves that a lot of information is available to the reader through contextual clues and that it is not always necessary to know the precise meaning of each word in a text.

To sum up, remember that good readers

• Enjoy reading
• Guess from context
• Practise extensive reading at home
• Are able to get the whole meaning of a text, not only specific details
• Read anything (signs, adverts, packets) trying to expand the range of texts they can read and understand
Now consider the following extract:
Extensive and intensive reading
To get maximum benefit from their reading, students need to be involved in both extensive and intensive reading. Whereas with the former, a teacher encourages students to choose for themselves what they read and to do so for pleasure and general language improvement, the latter is often (but not exclusively) teacher-chosen and directed. It is designed to enable students to develop specific receptive skills such as reading for gist (or general understanding – often called skimming), reading for specific information (often called scanning), reading for detailed comprehension or reading for inference (what is ‘behind’ the words) and attitude.

Extensive reading
We have discussed the importance of extensive reading for the development of our students’ word recognition – and for their improvement as readers overall. But it is not enough to tell students to ‘read a lot'; we need to offer them a programme which includes appropriate materials, guidance, tasks and facilities, such as permanent or portable libraries of books.
Extensive reading materials: one of the fundamental conditions of a successful extensive reading programme is that students should be reading material which they can understand. If they are struggling to understand every word, they can hardly be reading for pleasure – the main goal of this activity. This means that we need to provide books which either by chance, or because they have been specially written, are readily accessible to our students.
Specially written materials for extensive are often referred to as graded readers or simplified readers. They can take the form of original fiction and non-fiction books as well as simplifications of established works of literature. Such books succeed because the writers or adaptors work within specific lists of allowed words and grammar. This means that students at the appropriate level can read them with ease and confidence. At their best, despite the limitations on language, such books can speak to the reader through the creation of atmosphere and/or compelling plot lines.

To encourage students to read this kind of learner literature – or any other texts which may be comprehensible in the same way – we need to act in the following ways:

Setting up a library: in order to set up an extensive reading programme, we need to build up a library of suitable books. Although this may appear costly, it will be money well spent. If necessary, we should persuade our schools and institutions to provide such funds or raise money through other sources. If possible, we should organise static libraries in the classroom or in some other part of the school. If this is not possible, we need to work out some way of carrying the books around with us – in boxes or on trolleys.

The role of the teacher in extensive reading programmes: most students will not do a lot of extensive reading by themselves unless they are encouraged to do so by their teachers. Clearly, then, our role is crucial. We need to promote reading and by our own espousal of reading as a valid occupation, persuade students of its benefits. Perhaps, for example, we can occasionally read aloud from books we like and show, by our manner of reading, how exciting books can be. Having persuaded our students of the benefits of extensive reading, we can organise reading programmes where we indicate to them how many books we expect them to read over a given period. We can explain how they can make their choice of what to read, making it clear that the choice is theirs, but that they can consult other students’ reviews and comments to help them make that choice. We can suggest that they look for books in a genre (be it crime fiction, romantic novels, science fiction, etc.) that they enjoy, and that they make appropriate level choices. We will act throughout as part organiser, part tutor.

Extensive reading tasks: because students should be allowed to choose their own reading texts, following their own likes and interests, they will not all be reading the same texts at once. For this reason – and because we want to prompt students to keep reading – we should encourage them to report back on their reading in a number of ways.
One approach is to set aside a time at various points in a course – say every two weeks – at which students can ask questions and/or tell their classmates about books they have found particularly enjoyable or noticeably awful. However, if this is inappropriate because not all students read at the same speed (or because they often do not have much to say about the book in front of their colleagues), we can ask them each to keep a weekly reading diary, either on its own or as part of any learning journal they may be writing. Students can also write short book reviews for the class noticeboard. At the end of a month, a semester or a year, they can vote on the most popular book in the library. Other teachers have students fill in reading record charts (where they record title, publisher, level, start and end dates, comments about level and a good/fair/poor overall rating), they ask students to keep a reading notebook (where they record facts and opinions about the books they have gone through) or they engage students in oral interviews about what they are reading.

Intensive reading: the roles of the teacher

In order to get students to read enthusiastically in class, we need to work to create interest in the topic and tasks. However, there are further roles we need to adopt when asking students to read intensively:

• Organiser: we need to tell students exactly what their reading purpose is, give them clear instructions about how to achieve it and explain how long they have to do this. Once we have said You have four minutes for this, we should not change that time unless observation suggests that it is necessary.

• Observer: when we ask students to read on their own, we need to give them space to do so. This means restraining ourselves from interrupting that reading, even though the temptation may be to add more information or instructions. While students are reading we can observe their progress since this will give us valuable information about how well they are doing individually and collectively. It will also tell us whether to give them some extra time or, instead, move to organising feedback more quickly than we had anticipated.

• Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we can lead a feedback session to check that they have completed it successfully. We may start by having them compare their answers in pairs and then ask for answers from the class in general or from pairs in particular. Students often appreciate giving paired answers like this since, by sharing their knowledge, they are also sharing their responsibility for the answers. When we ask students to give answers, we should always ask them to say where in the text they found the relevant information. This provokes a detailed study of the text which will help them the next time they come to a similar reading passage. It also tells us exactly what comprehension problems they have if and when they get answers wrong. It is important to be supportive when organising feedback after reading if we are to counter any negative feelings students might have about the process, and if we wish to sustain their motivation.

• Prompter: when students have read a text, we can prompt them to notice language features within it. We may also, as controllers, direct them to certain features of text construction, clarifying ambiguities and making them aware of issues of text structure which they had not come across previously.

Intensive reading: the vocabulary question

A common paradox in reading lessons is that while teachers are encouraging students to read for general understanding, without worrying about the meaning of every single word, the students, on the other hand, are desperate to know what each individual word means! Given half a chance, many of them would rather tackle a reading passage with a dictionary (electronic or otherwise) in one hand and a pen in the other to write translations all over the page! It is easy to be dismissive of such student preferences, yet as Carol Walker points out, ‘It seems contradictory to insist that students “read for meaning” while simultaneously discouraging them from trying to understand the text at a deeper level than merely gist’ (1998: 172). Clearly, we need to find some accommodation between our desire to have students develop particular reading skills (such as the ability to understand the general message without understanding every detail) and their natural urge to understand the meaning of every single word.

One way of reaching a compromise is to strike some kind of a bargain with a class whereby they will do more or less what we ask of them provided that we do more or less what they ask of us. Thus we may encourage students to read for general understanding without understanding every word on a first or second read-through. But then, depending on what else is going to be done, we can give them a chance to ask questions about individual words and/or give them a chance to look them up. That way both parties in the teaching-learning transaction have their needs met. A word of caution needs to be added here. If students ask for the meaning of all the words they do not know – and given some of the problems inherent in the explaining of different word meanings – the majority of a lesson may be taken up in this way. We need, therefore, to limit the amount of time spent on vocabulary checking in the following ways:
• Time limit: we can give a time limit of, say, five minutes for vocabulary enquiry, whether this involves dictionary use, language corpus searches or questions to the teacher.
• Word/phrase limit: we can say that we will only answer questions about five or eight words or phrases.
• Meaning consensus: we can get students to work together to search for and find word meanings. To start the procedure, individual students write down three to five words from the text they most want to know the meaning of. When they have each done this, they share their list with another student and come up with a new joint list of only five words. This means they will probably have to discuss which words to leave out. Two pairs join to make new groups of four and once again they have to pool their lists and end up with only five words. Finally (perhaps after new groups of eight have been formed – it depends on the atmosphere in the class), students can look for meanings of their words in dictionaries and/or we can answer questions about the words which the groups have decided on. This process works for two reasons. In the first place, students may well be able to tell each other about some of the words which individual students did not know. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that by the time we are asked for meanings, the students really do want to know them because the intervening process has encouraged them to invest some time in the meaning search. ‘Understanding every word’ has been changed into a cooperative learning task in its own right.
In responding to a natural hunger for vocabulary meaning, both teachers and students will have to compromise. It’s unrealistic to expect only one-sided change, but there are ways of dealing with the problem which make a virtue out of what seems – to many teachers – a frustrating necessity.

Intensive reading: letting the students in
It is often the case that the comprehension tasks we ask students to do are based on tasks in a coursebook. In other words, the students are responding to what someone else has asked them to find out. But students are far more likely to be engaged in a text if they bring their own feelings and knowledge to the task, rather than only responding to someone else’s ideas of what they should find out. One of the most important questions we can ever get students to answer is Do you like the text? (Kennedy 2000a and b). The question is important because if we only ever ask students technical questions about language, we are denying them any affective response to the content of the text. By letting them give voice (if they wish) to their feelings about what they have read, we are far more likely to provoke the ‘cuddle factor’ than if we just work through a series of exercises.

Another way of letting the students in is to allow them to create their own comprehension task. A popular way of doing this – when the text is about people, events or topics which everyone knows something about – is to discuss the subject of the text with the class before they read. We can encourage them to complete a chart (on the board) with things they know or don’t know (or would like to know) about the text, e.g.
This activity provides a perfect lead-in since students will be engaged, will activate their schemata, and will, finally, end up with a good reason to read which they themselves have brought into being. Now they read the text to check off all the items they have put into the three columns. The text may not give them all the answers, of course, nor may it confirm (or even refute) what they have put in the left-hand column. Nevertheless, the chances are that they will read with considerably more interest than for some more routine task.

Another involving way of reading is to have students read different texts and then share the information they have gathered in order to piece together the whole story. This is called jigsaw reading.
Reading lesson sequences
We use intensive reading sequences in class for a number of reasons. We may want to have students practise specific skills such as skimming/reading for general understanding or ‘gist’ or scanning/reading to extract specific information. We may, on the other hand, get students to read texts for communicative purposes, as part of other activities, as sources of information, or in order to identify specific uses of language.
Most reading sequences involve more than one reading skill. We may start by having students read for gist and then get them to read the text again for detailed comprehension; they may start by identifying the topic of a text before scanning the text quickly to recover specific information; they may read for specific information before going back to the text to identify features of text construction.

Examples of reading sequences
In the following example, the reading activity is specified, the skills which are involved detailed, and the way that the text can be used within a lesson is explained.
In this example, students predict the content of a text not from a picture, but from a few tantalising clues they are given (in the form of phrases from the passage they will read).

The teacher gives each student in the class a letter from A to E. She tells all the students to close their eyes. She then asks all the students with the letter A to open their eyes and shows them the word lion, written large so that they can see it. Then she makes them close their eyes again and this time shows the B students the phrase racial groups. She shows the C students the phrase paper aeroplanes, the D students the word tattoos and the E students the word guard. She now puts the students in groups of five, each composed of students A-E. By discussing their words and phrases, each group has to try to predict what the text is all about. The teacher can go round the groups encouraging them and, perhaps, feeding them with new words like cage, the tensest man or moral authority, etc. Finally, when the groups have made some predictions, the teacher asks them whether they would like to hear the text that all the words came from, as a prelude to reading the following text aloud, investing it with humour and drama, making the reading dramatic and enjoyable.

From Maximum Security by R O’Connor in the literary magazine Granta (no. 54, 1996)

The students now read the text for themselves to answer the following detailed comprehension questions:

Before moving on to work with the content of the text, the teacher may well take advantage of the language in it to study some aspects that are of interest. For example, how is the meaning of would different in the sentences I … wondered what I would do if he refused and a teacher … who … would turn towards the board … ? Can students make sentences using the same construction as He was easily the tensest man I had ever seen (e.g. He/She was easily the (superlative adjective + noun) I had ever (past participle) or I could tell you my real name, but then I’d have to kill you (e.g. I could .., but then I’d have to .. ). The discussion possibilities for this text are endless. How many differences are there between Robert O’Connor’s class and the students’ own class? How many similarities are there? How would they (the students) handle working in a prison? Should prisoners be given classes anyway, and if so, of what kind? What would the students themselves do if they were giving their first English class in a prison or in a more ordinary school environment? Part of this sequence has involved the teacher reading aloud. This can be very powerful if it is not overdone. By mixing the skills of speaking, listening and reading, the students have had a rich language experience, and because they have had a chance to predict content, listen, read and then discuss the text, they are likely to be very involved with the procedure.

Adapted from The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman.
TASK FOR SUBMISSION TO YOUR TUTOR

TASK 3

Find 2 different texts – they can be from any source – newspapers, magazines etc. Write 2 exercises for each text. Please include a copy of the texts and state where they have been taken from.

At the end write a short paragraph suggesting how your text could fit into a lesson.
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