Are you struggling to create interesting reading skills or listening skills lessons because you don’t know how to structure them? Let me help you out, because I’ve come up with a structure to use in my reading and listening skills lessons to make them engaging and active, fun, and very educational. I will be referring to reading for the purpose of keeping the flow, but everything also applies to listening tasks.
Pre-reading
Start by introducing the topic to students and activating their prior knowledge about it. I love using word webs for this. Just get them to tell you anything that comes to mind. Ask them what they expect will be in the text. What do they hope will be in the text? Then direct their attention to anything but the text itself: pictures, colors, titles and heading, source; what do those tell them? Once you’ve grilled them on all this, you can start reading.
While reading
While students read they can do several types of activities.
· You can ask them comprehension questions about the information in the text: true/false-, open-, and multiple-choice questions are all good options to check their understanding of the text.
· Gap-fill exercises are great for language study: take a word out of the text and then ask them what word would fit in this context.
· Questions about the tone of the article, the message the author or speaker is trying to convey, or how two paragraphs relate are great too.
· Vocabulary study is a fun activity. Get them to infer the meaning of certain words from the text, or even later on look them up.
· Ask them the 5W and H questions: who, what, where, when, why and how?
· Getting them to do a drawing of something important from the text is cool too.
You can’t and shouldn’t do them all, so choose the ones that fit your text.
After reading
This is where students should transfer what they’ve learned from the text and show their understanding. They should produce text here, be it spoken or written. They could send a letter to an author or a speaker; they could do a review of a broadcast, or write an extra scene, beginning or end, or character into it; or they could write a diary entry for someone related to the text. It needs to be something that helps them transfer the info that they’ve learned in a text to a real-world reaction in the target language.
Ready to go exercises
I’ve created a set of exercises that are applicable to any spoken text, audio or video, that a student might use to practice their listening skills, either at home or during the lesson. It’s 6 pages of exercises that follow the structure I outlined above. Check them out HERE.
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