I started off feeling slightly dissatisfied with some traditional reading tasks in the EFL classroom. (Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy with most coursebook tasks!) But what I've started noticing is that not only do my students' reading speeds vary considerably, but most classroom reading tasks also represent mere exercise for their own sake or they are there on the page to present contextualised language. If used at their face value, most tasks would barely reflect our purposes of reading in real life. So, instead of coming up with an extra task for the fast finishers, I've started exploring other ways of using reading texts:
Scanning for information: jigsaw reading for collaborative exchange of information
I was teaching a demo lesson in July 2021 for my school's professional development course - IH Certificate in Teaching Young Learners and Teenagers (CYLT). On this occasion, there were 4 students who were young teens at Pre-Intermediate level.
The course tutor, Kate, gave me two Wikipedia dossiers of Harry Kane and Giorgio Chiellini. (Let's not mention that England lost to Italy on penalty!) The reading task required my students to scan for specific information about the footballers, such as their age and place of birth. While I was preparing this lesson, I thought it would be a good idea to make this task a bit more communicative. We often look up factual information on the Internet in order to relay it to others, don't we? So, I adapted the given dossiers for a jigsaw task, in which my students had to work in pairs and relay information about Harry or Giorgio to each other.
Role play: another route to achieving detailed comprehension(?)
I'm teaching a class of KEY Preparation (A2) this year. We had a lesson on Reading skills two weeks ago, and the coursebook task was based on a short text about a teenage sports coach recounting his experience. Instead of running it as a traditional 'detailed comprehension' task, I asked my students to read the text and think of three questions to ask the teenage coach. After that, one of them in each pair/group would assume the role of the teenage coach. My students interviewed each other and answered questions from their peers using the information from the text. I was glad to see this role play injected a bit of life into the classroom.
Gist: collaborative matching texts to their headings/titles
I tried this one with a pair of Upper-Intermediate (B2) adult learners last week. For this 'gist' reading task, I divided the text into two equal halves. The students had to summarise the texts to each other and work together to match their texts to the respective headings/titles. This collaborative task mirrors our acts of sharing what we've read with others while our conversation partners often capture the 'gist' of it.
An afterthought: are these adapted Reading skills tasks pointing to Widdecombe's idea of 'authenticising' an 'inauthentic' text? (Thinking ...)