Daily bread 07/31/2018

• Eight narrow reading techniques that will enhance your students’ vocabulary and reading skills | The Language Gym

  "Eight effective Narrow reading techniques The eight techniques described below, are Narrow reading tasks that I carry out in my lessons, day in day out and my students enjoy. Obviously, they are contextualised in the topic-at-hand. 1.Spot the differences – This is a narrow reading activity which typically involves 3 to 6 texts (the more the better) of around 100 words that are completely identical apart from a few key details. The task is for the students to spot such details in each text which are different from all the other five texts. So if text A  in line 3 reads ‘she is tall’ all the other texts will read at the same line ‘she is short’ or ‘she is average height’. Obviously, you can make it into a competition under time constraints with the right group. The rationale for the activity is to trick the students into reading the same texts three to six times over (thereby recycling the same lexis, patterns and grammar) whilst giving them a task which requires them to pay attention to the slightest detail in order to find the differences. As a follow-up you can do a ‘Spot the differences’ Listening task in which you will re-use the same texts (changing the target details of course) and will read out to them. Since the focus will be on modelling you will be reading the text at modelling, not near-native speed. Same rationale: getting them to listen to the same text and patterns over and over again. Figure 2 – ‘Spot the differences’ (French example) 2.Bad translation -‘Bad translation’ is another very effective Narrow Reading technique I use a lot. It consists of a set of very similar texts (typical 3 or 4) and their respective translations. The task is for the students to spot four or five mistakes the teacher deliberately made in the translation to lay emphasis on certain vocabulary or structures. This forces the students to really process the Target language texts in great detail and learn vocabulary incidentally as they do so. By doing this task, you are again tricking the students in re-reading the same sort of text, patterns and vocabulary several times over but with the added benefits of the L1 translation,which may result in some learning of new vocabulary in the process. The same texts can be recycled as follow-up by placing gaps in the Target Language text or in the translations. The same technique can also be turned into a Listening activity in which the students are provided with the translation and listen to the teacher as he reads the Target Language text. 3.Summaries – In this activity, the students are once again given 3 to 6 texts on the same topic, not identical but very similar in structure and language content. You summarise each text in 40-50 words  in the L1 or L2 , depending on the students’ level. The task is for the students to find which summary matches which text. To make the task more challenging, you may want to add an extra summary or two, as distractors. 4.Picture – select an image from the internet or the textbook in use, which refers to the topic-at-hand or to specific grammar structures or patterns you want to recycle. Then create three or more narrow reading texts which describe the picture in detail. Make sure, though, that only one text and one text only is a 100% accurate description of the picture, whilst the others have one or two details in excess which do not match the picture. The task is for the students to identify the only text that matches the picture in every single detail. This task kills two birds with one stone in that not only it does enhance the students’ vocabulary and reading skills but can also be used to prepare MFL GCSE students for the oral photocard task by modelling useful language and approaches to that task. 5.Questions –  This narrow reading technique requires a bit more work. I created it in order to focus my students not only on the content of the target texts, but also on understanding L2 questions. After creating 3 to 6  texts that are very similar in content and structure, write a set of ten or more questions in the target language, making sure that each text contains the answer to all of the questions you created but one. The students’ task is to find the one question that does not apply to each specific text (i.e. there is no answer to that question in the text) 6.Overgeneralizations – This is kind of reminiscent of ‘Spot the differences’. After creating the texts you will write ten or more statements in the target language about them which are true of all the texts except for one (e.g. ‘All the people in the texts play a sport). The students’ task is to find for each of the statements the one text it does not apply to. The statement could be in English or in the L2. 7.List – Create as many narrow reading texts as you can on the same topic. Then display a long list of details in the L1 or L2 taken from the various texts and display it on the board. The task is for the students to match the information on the list to the text it comes from. 8.The most / The least – After creating the text, you will write a number of  gapped sentences such as: the most positive person is…; the sportiest person is … the biggest house is…, the person who visited most places is…  . Students are tasked with filling the gaps. This technique has the added benefit of drilling in superlatives, a structure that KS3 students of French find quite difficult to acquire."

  tags: reading

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