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Developing General Reading and Writing Skills
Reading
In the exam, candidates will be asked to read and demonstrate understanding
of signs, notices, simplified newspaper and magazine articles and
factual texts from encyclopaedias. They will also have to read dictionary
definitions and dialogues.
Building Confidence
Confidence can be a problem at this level. Students often feel overwhelmed
and out of their depth and this can have a negative effect on their
performance. Here are some ideas on building confidence.
- Ask students to predict the content of a text before they read
it. Show them a picture or tell them the names of the people in
the text. Encourage them to read the title and look at any illustrations
carefully.
- Make sure texts are read in context. Ask students to say where
the text is from. Sources at this level include simple encyclopaedia
entries, adapted newspaper and magazine articles. Is it mainly
factual or mainly narrative? Make sure it is clear who wrote the
text and why, and who is supposed to read it.
- Pre-teach difficult vocabulary. This helps with predicting the
context of the text and helps students read more fluently once
they have begun.
- Ask easy comprehension questions first and guide them through
to more difficult ones.
- Make sure authentic texts are adapted for length and level.
This means finding material on a topic that will interest your
students and then rewriting it with their level of English in
mind. Sentences need to be short and clear, and most unknown words
need to be re-phrased or explained in the text. Several paragraphs
are better than one long piece of text. The grammar will need
to be simplified as well, so that you are only using the limited
range of tenses and structures that your students are familiar
with.
- Choose factual, straightforward topics that will be of interest
to the students.
Ideas for Classroom Activities
- Bring in authentic material if possible, such as tourist brochures,
instructions, notices and recipes. Ask students to pick out information
such as prices, opening times and days of the week. Is there anything
they can guess simply by looking at the pictures or using their
world knowledge? This will help students to see that understanding
a text does not only rely on language ability but on the contextual
clues that surround it.
- Build up a class library of simplified readers.
- Develop students' ability to guess unfamiliar words (look at
Guessing Unknown Words)
- Get students to collect signs/notices/labels etc. in their own
language and to translate them.
- Get students to read each other's written work, not only to
look for mistakes but also for valuable exposure to someone else's
knowledge.
Writing
Students at this level are expected to be able to write simple messages
to their friends, colleagues or teacher. They are expected to show
control of basic sentence structure, spelling and punctuation.
Building Confidence
Students at this level need support and guidance with their writing.
Use controlled activities while students develop their skills.
- Begin at word level with gap filling exercises, so that most
of the text is already there for them.
- Form-filling is an activity that is achievable early on and
will give students confidence.
- Move on from single words to phrases and then single sentences
before asking students to produce a cohesive linked text.
- Give students lots of models to base their work on. Encourage
them to read each other's work as they can learn a lot from one
another.
- Always make sure instructions are clear and provide enough input
for students to complete the task.
- Make it clear to students that mistakes are a fact of life at
this (and any other!) level and that they should learn from them
but not be disheartened by them.
Ideas for Classroom Activities
- Ask students to write messages to each other and then answer
them. Teacher has to act as postman.
- Give one half of the class a finished Part 9 task and ask them
to write the rubric. Give the other half the rubric and ask them
to write the task. Get students into pairs to see if the new tasks
and rubrics match.
- If possible set up a pen-friend scheme.
- Practise spelling by giving regular spelling tests.
- Make posters for the classroom walls to remind students about
difficult spellings and/or grammar points (e.g. 3rd person 's').
- Have spelling competitions and games. For example, split the
class into two teams. Each team takes it in turn to spell a word
and gets a point for a correct spelling. Add a basketball element
for more fun - if a team gets the right answer (or if you want
to help the losing team) allow them an extra point if they can
throw a ball into a basket.
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