Sunday 26 January 2014

intensive reading: less is more

The ETprofessional magazine provides up-to date and very practical stuff for the English teacher:
Jay Doubleyou: etprofessional - the magazine for english teacher development

Here's a piece by Robert Buckmaster on the benefits of reading a short piece intensively:
Less is more | ETp
Robert Buckmaster Consulting

From the piece:

But first, why should texts be short?
● They should be short so learners don’t get bored with them.
● They should be short so that the whole text and all its parts can be dealt with completely.
● They should be short so that not a lot of time is spent on reading, but a lot of time is spent on learning.
Texts should be many and various, of different genres, woven in connected strands throughout the course and of intrinsic interest to learners. They should be dealt with intensively so that at the end of the lesson, as Scott Thornbury has suggested, the learners are in a ‘state of grace’ vis à vis the text: that is, they understand it completely – all the grammar, all the lexis and all the collocations and colligations.

And his steps with a short piece are:
> predicting
> listening
> reaction
> reconstruction - jigsaw
> reconstruction - gap fill
> reconstruction - key phrases with words mixed up
> summary
> speaking

parax-ac.ir/FTPHost/0/EditorFiles/Documents/less is more.PDF

For an overview of the benefits of extensive reading:
Jay Doubleyou: extensive reading
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