Problem with true/false reading comprehension tasks

I was teaching a group of Upper-Intermediate (B2) teenagers earlier this week. As a lead-in to the reading tasks, my students discussed whether video games serve any educational purpose or they are just pure entertainment. The 'gist' task was naturally one in which my students compared their ideas to those of the writer.

Then came the true/false reading comprehension task. I was feeling uninspired by it, so I decided to change this second reading task on the spot. Rather than use the coursebook, I asked my students to map the writer's arguments for and against, as well as the supporting examples, in the form of a skeleton plan. After that, they worked together to make their plans more concise by focussing only on the key arguments, akin to writing the index page of an extended academic essay.

After the task, my students reflected on their level of comprehension of the text. We agreed that a true/false comprehension task focuses their attention on various individual sentences, but it never challenges them to dig deeper into the writer's ideas and develop a holistic understanding of the text.

Exploiting reading texts for communication

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 ...)

Exam strategies: happy student, happy teacher

I was preparing a student for his CAE (C1 Advanced) in a fortnight.

In Reading (Part 7), candidates are given an article and have to complete gapped paragraphs.

This particular student was struggling a bit in the last lesson, so I came up with two different strategies which he subsequently applied to his homework. EUREKA! When we checked homework earlier today, he got all answers correct. What's more - he had done it under exam conditions!

I'd like to share my two strategies here:

• developing an overall structure of the text - thinking about the main idea of each paragraph (with the aid of topic sentences)
  
  N.B. There's a logical progression of such 'main ideas' in the text, so that candidates can deduce what goes in each gap.
  
  
• lexical references - using them to verify answers, focusing on the cohesion between the previous and the subsequent paragraphs