Text book Work- Reading skills

We need to see where we are going today.

The course is now 5 weeks old.

So what have you learnt during those 5 weeks?
How much has your English improved?

Before we get into the content of today's lesson we need to look at how you can really improve your language...



Today we are going to look at the skill of reading. 
It is an essential part of language learning.

Often students forget to apply the skills they use as native speakers when reading in a foreign language. They stop to look up every word and find reading very difficult compared to listening.

Here are some strategies to improve your reading:

• Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection
• Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content
• Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
• Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
• Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text.

Today we are going to read two texts from the text book. 

I want you to read the texts and apply some of the strategies 

given above.

After reading I want you to make up a pre-reading activity that a student could have done before reading the text in order to help someone get more out of his/her reading.

Why do you think just this text is in the textbook? How could we apply it to our situation today?

Make up a new title for the text so that a reader more esaily can understand beforehand what it is about.

Here are the two texts:

Falling Leaves  page 19

Dust of life   p. 39

Finally, compare the two texts.

What similarities are there between them and what differences are there?

How about doing your first word list of the year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you have time over you can read either

It's all beer and no books p.26    or

Heroes in the rubble p.45.

These are not extracts from a literary work but are self-contained articles with a specific purpose.

What do you think the purpose is and does the writer achieve what he/she set out to do in your opinion?