Reading tasks in communicative text books are basically focused on practicing reading skills like scanning and skimming reading plus reading for detailed information. As we mainly work with educated adults, I find that my students have these skills well-formed in their L1 and have no difficulty in applying them in English.

Another thing is that authentic course books are created for international audience and only have one means of checking understanding through comprehension questions. Those who work in the field of EFL with monolingual classes can check comprehension by translation, which is faster and more effective. However, I use comprehension questions with Beginner and elementary groups. Such questions help to practice reproduction of good language samples in small chunks.

Generally I treat a text as:

·         A source for new words

·         A topic for discussion

·         Material for presentation.

So, I ask my students:

·         to select all new words and add them to the word list;

·         to scan the text for useful phrases and expressions

I’m never tired to repeat that useful doesn’t mean new. I tell my students to ask themselves: ‘If started translating from Russian into English, would I say the same way?’ If not, you’d better have more practice of this language.

Whenever a text has some potential to grow into a discussion, I ask problem questions, personalize, try to develop the topic and build up connections with other hot issues.

Sometimes a text for reading consists of separate parts. For example, three people express their opinion on one topic. In this case I give each student a different part creating information gap. Then the students work in small groups and exchange information. As a variation it is possible to bring a selection of several texts on one topic, split a class into small groups of 2-3 students and ask them to present their texts to each other.

Some texts contain a lot of factual information. Draw up a table with core issues and give a task to fill in the table. Next step could be to make a presentation using information from the table. In this case the table serves as a summary to support speaking. The students are focused on how to say and not what to say. They don’t need to memorize unnecessary facts and figures.