Newspaper/Magazine/Internet Article: Reading

As their reading skills become more developed, students will be able to handle more independent and challenging exercises. In this example, students are to read a text such as a newspaper or magazine article. Once again, all pre-reading activities should be conducted by the teacher, including:

  • the discussion and definition of any new vocabulary
  • discussion of titles and pictures to gain clues on what the article is about
  • engaging the students’ interest by having them make predictions about the reading

Have students go through the post-reading questions first, before reading the article. The questions should be designed for a higher level of comprehension and should therefore include more open-ended responses, such as:

  1. What is the main idea of this article?
  2. What is the problem and how is it being solved?

This allows students to be conscious of what details to look for while reading the text.

After modeling and discussing how the questions should be answered, students read the article and respond to the questions in writing. The teacher monitors students’ responses by walking around the room and assisting those who need help. Once everyone has completed the questions, the students can complete a separate vocabulary exercise (with words from the text) in which they fill in the blanks with each new word in the appropriate context, or match the word with the correct meaning:

Matching-

  1. preventa) to understand something clearly
  2. realizeb) to keep something from happening
  3. creepc) to move slowly and carefully

Fill in the blank-

preventrealizecreep

  1. The boy was trying to ______the cat from running outside by shutting the door.
  2. It is difficult to ______how the story ended because of the confusing twist.
  3. The robber had to ______through the house to not wake the owners.

Once they successfully complete the vocabulary exercise, students are told to carefully read the text again and pay attention to how vocabulary from the activity is used in context.

Finally, break students into pairs and have them choose ten difficult words from the text and use them to create a dialogue. Each student will utilize five of the sentences within their dialogues. At the end, groups trade their dialogues with other groups, and presents the dialogues to the class.

This sequence provides students with the opportunity to learn new vocabulary through strategic reading, understanding them in context, activating them in their writing in another context, and then practicing using them in dialogue in front of the class. This is a good example to show students how practicing one skill (reading) can play a strong role in practicing all other skills of language (speaking, writing, vocabulary).