Teaching tips

“Be sensitive… to both intensive and extensive reading”

by Gary Anderson

In their future professional and personal lives, your teenage students of today are going to need to be able to read English in a variety of ways:

• text books and articles for their studies;
• reports, manuals, memos and e-mails for their jobs;
• tourist brochures and guides in their free time;
• Internet sites (the majority of which will continue to be in English) for both work and pleasure.

Of course as teachers we know that the challenge of reading can be either a reading problem - most teenagers don't read much that isn't assigned schoolwork - or an educational problem - they don't know how to read properly in their native language let alone in a foreign language where the language is sometimes too difficult or where the necessary vocabulary or background information is often lacking. So we need not only to teach our adolescent students active, productive reading strategies for shorter intensive texts, but also get them interested in extensive, or pleasure, reading because studies show that the best way of becoming a good reader is by reading, i.e. we learn to read by reading a lot.

Below are a few suggestions of ways to be sensitive to both the intensive and extensive reading needs of your teenage students and to help them progress towards becoming better independent readers both in and outside class.

Intensive reading strategies

• Pre-reading prediction activities: Before reading an article in a magazine or newspaper, you usually form some idea of what it is about from the accompanying photo or headline. So to heighten interest before starting to read a text in class with your students, use the picture or title to brainstorm and elicit possible vocabulary (that you can put on the blackboard) or just to discuss what the article is about: Who exactly is the person jumping off that tower on page 40 of English in Mind 2 and what does it have to do with Growing up?
• Reading for gist or 'skimming' for main ideas: Intensive reading texts in English in Mind start with pre-reading tasks or questions to focus students' attention on the main ideas in the text during a first, quick 'diagonal' reading about the topic. Teach your students 'skimmed milk' and relate reading for gist to 'skimming' the best part, the cream off the top of a bottle of milk. Get your students into the habit of reading the questions first and then using a finger to guide their eyes quickly over the texts - and to look up, close their books or raise their hands when they have found the answers.
• Reading for specific information or 'scanning': Intensive reading texts in English in Mind are accompanied by exercises which ask your students to read closely to find (only) the information necessary to answer specific questions. This is also called 'scanning', so use the image of a scanner in a hospital that is looking for a particular point or problem in the body - and doesn't stop to wonder about other parts. Have your students use their eyes and a finger to shift the focus of their 'scanner' from individual questions to the specific point in the text where they can find the answer. They can even place their finger on that part of the text while writing the answer or discussing with a classmate.
• Ask your students to try out the techniques presented in the 'Reading tips' from the 'Skills in Mind' sections of their English in Mind workbook with reading assignments in history or other school subjects - and then to report back on how this 'transfer of skills' and 'cross-curricular' approach worked.
• Remember to be flexible and change the ways you present an intensive reading text. All of the texts which start the units of English in Mind are recorded on the accompanying class cassettes or audio CDs, so you might have weaker classes listen to the recording while following in their books the first time they read a text; or have your stronger class first listen to the recording with their books closed and then read the text. You might also try playing background music while the class is reading: not only can you use the song to time the exercise, but it can also have a calming, focusing effect.
• And why not have your students share some of their own techniques and strategies on how they read? Their classmates might listen more closely to them than to you - and you might learn something to help out students in other classes.

Extensive reading activities

If you're especially interested in extensive reading, an excellent comprehensive book is Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom by Richard Day and Julien Bamford in the Cambridge Language Education series- and look out for their forthcoming Extensive Reading Activities for Language Teaching in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series.

• Build up a class 'library' (at the beginning it might just be a cardboard box in the corner of the classroom) of books in English, such as a set of graded reader titles at the language level of your class from the Cambridge English Readers series, and have every student choose a title on their own that they want to read for pleasure and fun in their free time.
• Have your students tell each other (probably first in small groups and later in front of the whole class) why they chose a particular title: because of the cover picture, the summary blurb on the back, or just because it's the type, or 'genre', of book they like - romance, science fiction, horror, mystery thriller.
• Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes of class time occasionally for silent reading in class. Have your students take out the book in English that they are reading and, well, just read - perhaps with some background music (soft jazz works nicely). And to set the example, don't forget your own novel!
• Studies show that to become a good reader, the best thing to do after reading one book is . . . to read another book! But in your teaching situation you might also want to ask your students to do post-reading activities:
  • Design a poster or bookmark to advertise the book to the rest of the class.
  • Share their views about their favourite characters or read favourite parts aloud in a small group of classmates.
  • If it's a title in the Cambridge English Readers series, send feedback on their favourite title to www.cambridge.org/elt/readers - and perhaps see it posted and published on the Web.
• Have your students talk about their individual strategies when they come across a word or expression that they don't know: Do they try to guess the meaning from context? Do they use a bilingual or monolingual learner's dictionary? Or do they just go on reading because they're interested in the story? Whatever their personal strategy, ask your students to copy interesting and memorable words and expressions into their vocabulary notebooks - so they can help out a classmate who chooses to read the same book.
• To exploit the interesting topics in English in Mind, invite the whole class, or assign individual students who you know were interested in the subject, to look on the Internet for background on, for example, Culture in Mind topics and then to report back on sites and follow-up information they found while 'surfing' - and reading in English - on the Web.

Read Teaching Teenagers by Gary Anderson