More reading suggestions

Jigsaw reading: students read a short text which sets up a problem and then, in three groups, they read three different texts, all of which are about the same thing (different aspects of behaviour such as anger, or different reports on a problem, or different parts of a story or strange event). When they have read their texts, they come together in groups where each student has read a different text, and they try to work out the whole story, or describe the whole situation. JoAnn Miller's UFO webquest employs jigsaw reading on a large scale, but it is still a highly motivating technique, despite - or perhaps because of - the time it takes. Above all, this kind of jigsaw technique gives students a reason for reading - and then sharing what they have found out.

Reading puzzles: apart from jigsaw reading, there are many other kinds of puzzle which involve students in motivating reading tasks. For example, we can give them texts which have been chopped up so that each paragraph is on a different piece of paper. Students have to reassemble the text (see poetry below).

We can give students a series of emails between two people which are out of sequence. The students have to work out the order of the emails. We can mix up two stories and students have to prise them apart.

Using newspapers: there is almost no limit to the kinds of activity which can be done with newspapers (or their online equivalents). We can do all kinds of matching exercises, such as ones where students have to match articles with their headlines or with relevant pictures. At higher levels, we can have students read three accounts of the same incident and ask them to find the differences between them. We can use newspaper articles as a stimulus for speaking or writing (students can write letters in reply to what they read).

We can ask students to read small ads (advertisements) for holidays, partners, things for sale, etc, in order to make a choice about which holiday, person or thing they would choose. Later, they can use their choices to role-play descriptions, contact the service providers or say what happened when they made their choice.

We can get students to read the letters page from a newspaper and try to imagine what the writers look like, and what kinds of lives they have. They can reply to the letters.

Following instructions: students read instructions for a simple operation (using a public phonebox, etc) and have to put the instructions in the correct order. They might also match instructions about, for example, unpacking a printer or inserting a new ink cartridge with the little pictures that normally accompany such instructions in manuals. We can also get students to read instructions in order to follow them.

Recipes are a particular kind of instruction genre, but can be used in much the same way as the examples above - e.g. students read a recipe and match the instructions with pictures. We can then get them to cook the food!

Poetry: in groups, students are each given a line from a poem. They can't show the line to the other members of the group, though they can read it out loud. They have to reassemble the poem by putting the lines in order. A poem I have used like this with some success - at upper-intermediate levels - is 'Fire and Ice' by Robert Frost:

We can get students to read different poems and then, without actually showing their poem to anyone else, they have to go round the class finding similarities and differences between their poem and other people's.

Another way of using poems with the whole class is to show the students a poem line by line (on an overhead projector or a computer screen) with words blanked out. The first time they see these blanks, they have to make a wild guess at what the words could be. When they see the lines for the second time, the first letter is included. When they see the poem for the third time, the first two letters are included, and so on. This is a great activity for getting students to really search in their minds for contextualised lexis.

Play extracts: students read an extract from a play or film and, after ensuring that they understand it and analysing its construction, they have to work on acting it out. This means thinking about how lines are said, concentrating on stress, intonation, speed, etc.

We can use many different text genres for this kind of activity since reading aloud - a speaking skill - is only successful when students have really studied a text, worked out what it means, and thought about how to make sense of it when it is spoken.

Predicting from words and pictures: students are given a number of words from a text. Working in groups, they have to predict what kind of a text they are going to read - or what story the text tells. They then read the text to see if their original predictions were correct. We don't have to give them individual words, of course. We can give them whole phrases and get them to try to make a story using them. For example, the phrases 'knock on the door', 'Go away!', 'They find a man the next morning', 'He is dead', 'James is in the lighthouse' will help students to predict (perhaps wrongly, of course!) some kind of story about a lighthouse keeper, some sort of threat and a dead person. (They then read a ghost story with these phrases in it.)

We can also give students pictures to predict from, or slightly bigger fragments from the text.

Different responses: there are many things students can do with a reading text apart from answering comprehension questions with sentences, saying whether something is true or false or finding particular words in the text. For example, when a text is full of facts and figures, we can get students to put the information into graphs, tables or diagrams. We can also ask them to describe the people in the text (where no physical description is given). This will encourage them to visualise what they are reading. We can let students read stories, but leave off the ending for them to guess. Alternatively, they can read stories in stages, stopping every now and then to predict what will happen next.

At higher levels, we can get students to infer the writer's attitude from a text. We can also get the students involved in genre analysis - where they look at the construction of a number of different examples of, say, magazine advertisements in order to work out how they are typically constructed.

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