View Content #2003
| Contentid | 2003 |
|---|---|
| Content Type | 1 |
| Title | Activity for improving reading skills |
| Body | Reading comprehension activities can often be boring for both the students and the teacher. One idea to jazz it up a bit is to turn the reading exercise into a race. For this you'll need a text and 8-10 comprehension questions, each written on different slips of paper and numbered. Make sure you have as many sets of the questions as you have pairs of students in the class. Divide the class into pairs and designate one person in each pair to be the 'runner' and the other to be the 'writer'. The runners must then come to the front of the class where you give them slips of paper with the first question written on it. They return to their partner and together they skim through the text as fast as possible to find the answer. As soon as they have written the answer down (and you must stress that they have to FINISH writing before getting the next question), the runner comes and gets the next question from you. Keep going until at least one of the pairs has answered all of the questions and then you can either check the answers as a class or combine the pairs into groups of four and get them to check their answers that way. Students have responded very well to this activity as it's lively and makes a nice change from more stationary reading activities! It develops the skills of skimming, scanning and encourages students to not get bogged down by unfamiliar vocabulary. It encourages communication because the students look for the answers in the text together and discuss them before writing them down. It's important to stress at the beginning that they need to collaborate to ensure the answers are correct because otherwise you might get one student (the writer) doing all the work. The only drawback with this activity is that it would be difficult to do it with a very large class. I would say that 20 students (10 pairs) would be the maximum because it takes some organisation on your part to make sure that you're handing out the right questions. Lightfoot, A. Reading comprehension activities. Teachers of English to speakers of other languages electronic list. TESL-L@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (21 Aug. 2004). |
| Source | TESL-L |
| Inputdate | 2004-09-03 00:19:00 |
| Lastmodifieddate | 2004-09-03 00:19:00 |
| Expdate | Not set |
| Publishdate | Not set |
| Displaydate | Not set |
| Active | 1 |
| Emailed | 1 |
| Isarchived | 1 |
