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Top Tips For Reading Comprehension Skills
By Samantha Lewis
Date : 24/06/2017
Author Information
Uploaded by : Jesse
Uploaded on : 24/06/2017
Subject : English
Depending on the type of text, students will need to use a variety of reading subskills. Here are some activities you can use to develop the different subskills.
A: Scan Reading
When we scan for information our eyes move quickly around a text from side to side or up and down. We don t read all the information on the page but look for specific pieces of information that we need. Such information could be a number, date, time, place, name or price. Working on scan reading skills lends itself to exploiting authentic materials such as leaflets, posters, tickets, timetables, flyers, what s on guides or menus.
1. Noticeboard quiz
Put the authentic materials on a noticeboard and divide the students into teams. One student from each team comes up to the board and the first student to find the answer to a question you ask gets a point. Alternatively you could get students in groups to write a quiz for another group based on the information on the noticeboard.2. Remove a sentence
This activity helps students think about text genre and the likely content of each type of text. Using the same texts as above, remove one sentence from each text. Students look at the removed sentences and predict which text they think they have been removed from. Then they scan the noticeboard and check their predictions.B: Skim Reading
When we skim a text our eyes follow the text from start to finish. One of the aims of skim reading is to encourage students to read a text quickly and comfortably in order to get an overall understanding of it.
1. Time limit
Set a realistic time limit for your students to read the text and give them a general question to answer before they read. A typical task could be to choose the best title for a text. To help choose a realistic time limit, time how long it takes you to read the text comfortably and add a bit more time, depending on the level of the students. You could ask students to raise their hand as soon as they know the answer to the task. This is an unobtrusive way of seeing how quickly each student reads the text and which students need to increase their reading speed.2. Confirm predictions
After a pre-reading prediction task students skim the text and confirm which of their ideas from the pre-reading task are mentioned in the text.C: Intensive Reading (for detail)
1. Student-generated questions
Students work in pairs or groups and write a few comprehension questions based on the text. They must know the answers. This is a great way of reviewing question forms and helping students write questions correctly. Then, they give their questions to another group and answer the other group s questions. Finally, they give their answers to the original group who correct them. Students love correcting each other s answers.2. Student-generated true and false sentences
After reading the text, students work in groups and write two true and two false sentences about the text. They give their sentences to another group who have to decide which are true and which are false, and correct the false ones. Finally, they give their answers to the original group who correct them. Again, they love correcting each other s answers.3. Colour the text
For any intensive reading task, I encourage students to colour or highlight the part of the text that gives them the answer. This trains them to always look for justification in the text to support their answer and helps you see which students are able/not able to find this information in a text. This is a technique they can be encouraged to use in a reading test or exam.4. Read and tweet
Asking students to summarise a text is a useful skill as it helps them to pick out key information and to develop paraphrasing skills. Students highlight the key information in the text with a coloured pen. A short written summary could take the form of a tweet. To summarise a longer text, ask each group of students to summarise a different paragraph from the text as a tweet. Then collect the tweets, put them on the board and the students read them all and decide which order they go in. Rather than spending lots of time counting a maximum of 140 characters, you could give them a maximum number of words e.g. 25 words. The same activity could be done orally.
A: Scan Reading
When we scan for information our eyes move quickly around a text from side to side or up and down. We don t read all the information on the page but look for specific pieces of information that we need. Such information could be a number, date, time, place, name or price. Working on scan reading skills lends itself to exploiting authentic materials such as leaflets, posters, tickets, timetables, flyers, what s on guides or menus.
1. Noticeboard quiz
Put the authentic materials on a noticeboard and divide the students into teams. One student from each team comes up to the board and the first student to find the answer to a question you ask gets a point. Alternatively you could get students in groups to write a quiz for another group based on the information on the noticeboard.2. Remove a sentence
This activity helps students think about text genre and the likely content of each type of text. Using the same texts as above, remove one sentence from each text. Students look at the removed sentences and predict which text they think they have been removed from. Then they scan the noticeboard and check their predictions.B: Skim Reading
When we skim a text our eyes follow the text from start to finish. One of the aims of skim reading is to encourage students to read a text quickly and comfortably in order to get an overall understanding of it.
1. Time limit
Set a realistic time limit for your students to read the text and give them a general question to answer before they read. A typical task could be to choose the best title for a text. To help choose a realistic time limit, time how long it takes you to read the text comfortably and add a bit more time, depending on the level of the students. You could ask students to raise their hand as soon as they know the answer to the task. This is an unobtrusive way of seeing how quickly each student reads the text and which students need to increase their reading speed.2. Confirm predictions
After a pre-reading prediction task students skim the text and confirm which of their ideas from the pre-reading task are mentioned in the text.C: Intensive Reading (for detail)
1. Student-generated questions
Students work in pairs or groups and write a few comprehension questions based on the text. They must know the answers. This is a great way of reviewing question forms and helping students write questions correctly. Then, they give their questions to another group and answer the other group s questions. Finally, they give their answers to the original group who correct them. Students love correcting each other s answers.2. Student-generated true and false sentences
After reading the text, students work in groups and write two true and two false sentences about the text. They give their sentences to another group who have to decide which are true and which are false, and correct the false ones. Finally, they give their answers to the original group who correct them. Again, they love correcting each other s answers.3. Colour the text
For any intensive reading task, I encourage students to colour or highlight the part of the text that gives them the answer. This trains them to always look for justification in the text to support their answer and helps you see which students are able/not able to find this information in a text. This is a technique they can be encouraged to use in a reading test or exam.4. Read and tweet
Asking students to summarise a text is a useful skill as it helps them to pick out key information and to develop paraphrasing skills. Students highlight the key information in the text with a coloured pen. A short written summary could take the form of a tweet. To summarise a longer text, ask each group of students to summarise a different paragraph from the text as a tweet. Then collect the tweets, put them on the board and the students read them all and decide which order they go in. Rather than spending lots of time counting a maximum of 140 characters, you could give them a maximum number of words e.g. 25 words. The same activity could be done orally.
This resource was uploaded by: Jesse