by Stephen Tarbuck
It’s the start of class and as part of your lesson aims you have announced that today we're doing a reading lesson! You can probably imagine your students' response to that announcement.
Now I’d like you to think more about that response and finish the quote below from the student’s viewpoint, with a single word.
All reading and no play makes class a ………… place.
If your answer was: dull, boring or uninteresting then congratulations, you guessed the most common responses. Now, I doubt we can ever change this automatic response, but I'd like to show you how to make a reading lesson at least a little more enjoyable for your students - as well as being easier for you to plan.
We’ll do this by exploring five activities I use for reading lessons and thinking about how to fit them into the stages of a reading lesson plan.
Stages of a reading lesson plan
Below I have adapted a framework for the stages of a reading lesson from TeachingEnglish, which I hope that at this point we can agree offers sufficient structure for a basic lesson plan.
- Pre-teach vocabulary
- Detailed reading
- Response to the text
- Gist reading
- Focus on the topic
I’m sure you noticed immediately that these five stages are in the wrong order. You did, didn’t you? After all, how can you expect your students to read for gist when they’ve already read for detail? As an aside, we have all been guilty of this at some point, either because we forgot what we were doing, or we forgot what we learnt in our initial teacher training. No judgment - this can happen to anyone; but it’s worth following a sensible plan of engagement when you’re dealing with language input in the form of reading or listening material.
Before you continue reading, I’d like you to stop and think about how to correct the sequence and then compare your idea to the corrected sequence below.
- Focus on the topic
- Pre-teach vocabulary
- Gist reading
- Detailed reading
- Response to the text
Does this staging sequence make sense to you? Because I’d like you to keep this sequence in mind, as it will be used to help you reflect on the upcoming activities.
Activities
I wonder if you have noticed that you have already done two activities? You completed an unfinished quote, and you did an organisation task.
Now stop, go back to the corrected staging sequence we just looked at and think which stages of a reading lesson those two activities might fit into.
What did you think?
In my opinion, the finish a quote activity fits nicely in the Focus on the Topic stage, because when you were thinking about how to finish that quote, you were engaged with the topic of the text to come. The organisation task could essentially be the pre-teaching vocabulary stage - after all, you were thinking about the vocabulary that you were going to need to understand the upcoming activities. Some might say that this doesn’t count as pre-teaching vocabulary but rather as activating schemata - the point would make for a good discussion in a teacher development session!
Now let’s take a look at some other activities and you can consider how they fit into the stages.
First is one of my favourite activities, which is adapted from Connections in “Dictation, New Methods, New Possibilities” by Davies and Rinvolucri.
As you read what follows, consider which stage each part fits into.
The instructions are as follows: select some words from the text that are key to the text’s overall message, between 4 to 8 words being sufficient. Then, dictate the words to the class, who write them down.
Next, the students work together to make predictions about potential connections between the words. They can read the text quickly to check if their predictions appear in the text.
What stages did you decide this belongs to? Perhaps you saw it the way I use it? For Pre-teaching vocabulary and for gist reading.
Why these stages? The words you choose from the text will be representative of the text, and it’s possible not all of these words will be familiar. That’s fine, because as the students start to look for them, they will, consciously or not, be processing the language around the words they’re hunting for. This might trigger their latent understanding of the lexis, but if it doesn’t, it’ll still be easier to teach because they have linked it all to the context of the reading text itself. The task makes for a good gist read, because the students will be thinking about the text in a holistic way for the simple reason that you chose your words with care. Or to put it another way, don’t send your students off looking for definite articles or relative pronouns at this stage, because hunting for these will neither help them understand the text nor lead well into the tasks that follow.
The next activity is from a National Geography Learning workshop I attended by Ola Marchwian. I’ve called the activity: Word/Phrase/Sentence and again I’d like you to read the instructions below and think which stages it covers.
Draw your students’ attention to the text’s title and ask them to spend two or three minutes, depending on the text length, reading and identifying the word, phrase, and sentence that best represent the message of the text’s title.
Which stages does this cover for you?
I’ve been using it as gist reading, but as it’s a new activity I think it will be used for other stages in the future. How about you?
I said I would give you five activities, so one more is due. I call this activity Answers.
After your students have read the text and done a detailed reading task (most likely, but not always, a reading comprehension task), put them into pairs or groups and assign a paragraph or similar self-contained part of the text (for instance, if you’ve taken something from one of the Cambridge exams, and you happen to be looking at the final part of the Reading and Use of English paper, the text will be divided into four or five sections, though not necessarily four or five paragraphs).
From this part of the text, students should create some questions. I usually ask for true or false or multiple choice questions, which are based on the information in front of them. They should also ensure that they have an answer key of sorts, although the questions they have might be somewhat subjective, such as “Why do you think the writer offered this opinion?” or “Do you believe the writer, or do you think they might hold a completely different opinion in private?”
After this, the students swap their questions and try to answer another group’s. Then, they return the papers to their creators, who check the answers.
In larger classes, I might alter the arrangement a touch and post the sets of questions up around the room so that everyone can see - and respond to - everyone else’s questions.
Take a moment and think what stages this could be used for.
I’ve found this to be a very creative activity, and one of the best response to the text kinds of activity. Generally, I don’t like the questions you find in course books that offer students an opportunity to respond to the text. Why? Because these questions generally ask for a response to the topic, not the text - they are often so generic that you could answer them without ever having read the text. For instance, I remember a long and interesting reading about a mountain climber, and the first response question was, “Have you ever been mountain climbing?”
Of course, which stage this counts as really depends on what your students generate, and you can rarely predict that. You might see this as being another detailed reading task rather than a response task - which is completely fine!
Putting it together
So far you have agreed on a reading lesson plan structure, seen five activities and considered their staging. You’ve been very patient, but, just one more time I’d like you to be ready to consider these activities and staging.
I’d like you to take a look below at the summary of the stages and activities, and think how you might combine the activities and stages to structure a very basic reading lesson.
For example, you could use the finish a quote activity for focus on the topic, then an organising task for the pre-teach stage and so on.
Structure a reading lesson
| Stages | Activities |
| Focus on the topic | Finish the quote |
| Pre-Teach Vocabulary | Organisational Task |
| Gist Reading | Word, Phrase, Sentence |
| Detailed Reading | Connections |
| Response to the Text | Answers |
I hope you were able to get some ideas on constructing a lesson plan, because a key idea I wanted to give is that sometimes all you need is a text and a few activities to produce the foundations of a good reading lesson.
I also hope that after all that reflection you can see that a reading lesson can be fun and relatively simple to plan, if you treat the stages of a reading lesson plan as a place to mix in various fun activities that balance out the actual reading aspect that students loathe so much.
Bibliography
Davies, P. and Rinvolucri, M., 1988. Dictation: New Methods, New Possibilities, Cambridge University Press.
Hard Times_nothing but facts_worksheet 2, teachingenglish, 2011, https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/Hard%20Times_nothing%20but%20facts_worksheet%202.pdf (Accessed 04/12/24)
Marchwian, O., 2024. Engage, Explore, Communicate: NGL for Teens and Adults, National Geographic Learning.
Author Biography
Stephen Tarbuck is an EFL teacher and teacher trainer at International House Toruń. When he isn’t teaching he writes about his ideas and experiences of the TEFL world, which have been published in The International House Journal, Modern English Teacher, Humanising Language Teaching, EL Gazette and Connections. He also blogs at stephentarbuck.wordpress.com