reading | TeachingEnglish | British Council

Revisiting texts

Submitted by TE Editor on 29 May, 2012 - 12:15

We often encourage our students to infer words from the context as they read and, as a result, they fail to notice useful lexis in the texts we use.

This is especially true in case of chunks consisting of the words students already know. For example, students may be familiar with run and risk but not know the collocation run a risk.

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Using texts constructively: what are texts for?

Submitted by Michael Swan on 1 February, 2012 - 10:24

Text use may seem a dull topic after all the exciting matters that other guest writers have dealt with recently.

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Reading out loud

Submitted by TE Editor on 9 November, 2011 - 16:43

As a teacher I had always perceived 'reading aloud' as a 'taboo' in the EFL classroom since it focuses specifically on a 'bottom-up' approach where learners can fall into traps of worrying about 100% comprehension or simply read aloud without understanding the text.

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Teaching the tale: language and memory

Submitted by David Heathfield on 5 July, 2011 - 09:01

A feature that is common both to language teaching and to traditional folk and fairy tales is the repetition of phrases or ‘language chunks’.

Using texts constructively 2: intensive input-output work

Submitted by Michael Swan on 1 February, 2011 - 18:10

This is the second of Michael Swan's articles for TeachingEnglish, in which he looks at the role of texts in the learning process.

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Using news articles

Submitted by TE Editor on 8 January, 2010 - 15:16

Topical news stories are a great source of teaching material. This article presents different ways to exploit news reports in the classroom and focuses on raising the level of involvement and participation that the students have in the lesson.

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Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us.

Submitted by Alan Maley on 8 December, 2009 - 14:41

In this, the first of two articles for TeachingEnglish, Alan Maley considers the benefits extensive reading can bring to English language learners and teachers.

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Producing your own grammar activities

Submitted by TE Editor on 9 December, 2008 - 10:23

There are many ways of revising and consolidating grammar, but I've found it's often useful to give students short passages containing grammar mistakes which are characteristic of the student's level, nationality, and what the teacher may have identified as areas of particular strength or weakness.

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How useful are comprehension questions?

Submitted by Mario Rinvolucri on 2 November, 2008 - 22:03

You may well ask me “How useful is the question in this title?” After all to check what a student has understood after listening to or reading an L2 text seems plain common sense. If it were not felt to be a sensible procedure why would course book writers supply comprehension questions in large quantities?

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Techniques for form focus after reading

Submitted by Dave Willis on 30 April, 2008 - 16:46

In my earlier articles Reading for information, Form focus and recycling, and Techniques for Priming and recycling, I set out a four stage cycle for teaching reading:

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