Unit 5: Planning a reading
comprehension lesson using the
standard procedure
Reviewed
✦ Planning how to pre − teach the selected vocabulary
It is very easy to find pictures to illustrate some vocabulary items. Often it is
helpful to begin with something that is definitely familiar, e.g., you could elicit
'holiday' by showing this picture and asking 'What is this girl doing? Where is
she going?‘
✦ Planning the rest of the lesson
Stage Aim (s)
The topic of the reading is introduced before
students read the text to engage students' interest
1 Introduce topic
and help them make predictions about what they
are going to read.
2 Pre-teach Reading a text with a large amount of unfamiliar
vocabulary vocabulary is extremely difficult. Students usually
focus so much on the new words and phrases that
they lose sense of the meaning of the whole
passage. When planning the lesson, the teacher
should identify which vocabulary items students
might not know and select those that are key to
understanding the passage. These are taught in
advance of reading so that students recognise
Unit 5: Planning a reading comprehension lesson using the standard procedure 1
, them when they read. You could ask students to
predict what the text is going to be about at this
stage, and put their ideas on the board.
Set a skim/scan reading task and get students to
read through the text quickly to find answers. A
quick read-through reinforces what has been
done in stages 1 and 2 - it gives students a
general idea of the content of the text and means
Read through
3 they see the new vocabulary in context. It
text quickly
encourages them to read quickly for general
meaning, rather than getting stuck as soon as they
see something unfamiliar. Giving the students a
task before they read means they have a reason
for reading.
✦ F irst reading − skimming
Skim reading, or skimming, is when we look through a text quickly just to get
the gist - a general idea of what is being said.
Skimming
In the classroom, skimming is useful for a first reading task in order to gain a
general understanding of what the reading text is about, and for encouraging
students to continuously read a text rather than stopping every time they don‘t
understand a word.
Gist (skimming) questions are essentially What is this text about? questions,
though this wording is too open to direct students sufficiently, so the
questions are made more specific to the text, e.g.
What does the writer tell us about his brother's experience?
Is the writer happy or sad about the situation he describes?
Unit 5: Planning a reading comprehension lesson using the standard procedure 2
comprehension lesson using the
standard procedure
Reviewed
✦ Planning how to pre − teach the selected vocabulary
It is very easy to find pictures to illustrate some vocabulary items. Often it is
helpful to begin with something that is definitely familiar, e.g., you could elicit
'holiday' by showing this picture and asking 'What is this girl doing? Where is
she going?‘
✦ Planning the rest of the lesson
Stage Aim (s)
The topic of the reading is introduced before
students read the text to engage students' interest
1 Introduce topic
and help them make predictions about what they
are going to read.
2 Pre-teach Reading a text with a large amount of unfamiliar
vocabulary vocabulary is extremely difficult. Students usually
focus so much on the new words and phrases that
they lose sense of the meaning of the whole
passage. When planning the lesson, the teacher
should identify which vocabulary items students
might not know and select those that are key to
understanding the passage. These are taught in
advance of reading so that students recognise
Unit 5: Planning a reading comprehension lesson using the standard procedure 1
, them when they read. You could ask students to
predict what the text is going to be about at this
stage, and put their ideas on the board.
Set a skim/scan reading task and get students to
read through the text quickly to find answers. A
quick read-through reinforces what has been
done in stages 1 and 2 - it gives students a
general idea of the content of the text and means
Read through
3 they see the new vocabulary in context. It
text quickly
encourages them to read quickly for general
meaning, rather than getting stuck as soon as they
see something unfamiliar. Giving the students a
task before they read means they have a reason
for reading.
✦ F irst reading − skimming
Skim reading, or skimming, is when we look through a text quickly just to get
the gist - a general idea of what is being said.
Skimming
In the classroom, skimming is useful for a first reading task in order to gain a
general understanding of what the reading text is about, and for encouraging
students to continuously read a text rather than stopping every time they don‘t
understand a word.
Gist (skimming) questions are essentially What is this text about? questions,
though this wording is too open to direct students sufficiently, so the
questions are made more specific to the text, e.g.
What does the writer tell us about his brother's experience?
Is the writer happy or sad about the situation he describes?
Unit 5: Planning a reading comprehension lesson using the standard procedure 2
