How to Teach 'READING INTENSIVELY FOR COMPREHENSION' for Form Three

How to Teach 'READING INTENSIVELY FOR COMPREHENSION' for Form Three

Welcome to UNIT 4:3!

Review: Previously in Unit 4:2, we discussed about how to interactively teach the sub topic, ‘Talking about elections’ in Form Two. In that sub topic, we discussed how the students can narrate what happened in elections they witnessed. We also guided them how to participate in elections.
In this Unit 4:3, we will learn how to teach the sub topic, Reading intensively for comprehension’ in Form Three. In this sub topic, we will practically focus on how to guide students to read various texts and answer the comprehension questions given.


(Also: For Literature in English Subject, Check out my Literature in English Blog. Also check out My Diary for Diary Writing Inspiration and More! )
                                                                    
THE FOLLOWING ARE THE COMPREHENSIVE TEACHING GUIDES ON THE SUB TOPIC:

A: INFORMATION OF THE TOPIC:
1. Topic: READING FOR INFORMATION FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES
2. Sub Topic: Reading intensively for comprehension.
3. Periods per sub topic: 30
4: Class: Form Three.
B: HOW TO TEACH THE TOPIC:

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The core aim of this sub topic is to make sure students are able to respond to the specific questions on a text read and give main ideas on what is read in a summary form.
Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks. It can be compared with extensive reading, which involves learners reading texts for enjoyment and to develop general reading skills.
But INTENSIVE READING activities include skimming a text for specific information in order to answer the questions like;
  •   True or false statements,
  •   Filling gaps.
  •   Summarizing,
  •   To discover mistakes and inconsistencies of syntax,
  •   Scanning a text to match headings to paragraphs, and
  •   Scanning jumbled paragraphs and then reading them carefully to put them into the correct order.
The aim of this reading skill is to develop intensive reading skills and vocabulary improvements skills.

ACTIVITIES & GAMES TO FACILITATE A LESSON:

Activity 1: BRAINSTORMING AND INTRODUCING STUDENTS TO INTENSIVE READING SKILLS.
Intensive Reading
Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks. You need to have your aims clear in mind when undertaking intensive reading. Remember this is going to be far more time consuming than scanning or skimming.
Teaching Procedures.
The language focus of intensive reading is reading for comprehension. Here a teacher may choose a short story, a narrative or any text.
The students in this lesson will be equipped with basic reading skills such as literal comprehension, reorganisation of the things or ideas, referential comprehension, evaluation, and appreciation when reading the assigned text.
Another important thing for students, they should have already read or known skimming and scanning skills.
Procedures.
Pre-reading.
  •   As a teacher decide some minutes to be used at this stage.
  •   Start a lesson with a brainstorming of some important concepts if there are any.
  •   Distribute the questions to the students.
  •   Introduce to the students some vocabularies in the text.
  •   Ask the students to predict what topic they are going to read. Their predictions here stimulate their interactions with the topic and the content of the text they will read.
While- reading.
  •   Here, the teacher should now distribute the reading texts.
  •   Allow the students to read the text carefully and silently by observing the reading time a teacher has allocated earlier.
  •   After reading, allow the students to discuss the reading questions in pairs of in groups.
  •   Finally, conduct the whole class discussion.
Post-reading.
  •   Allocate a time to make sure the lesson is finalised well.
  •   Emphasize or sum up a lesson by highlighting the important points and areas you are interested in.
  •   Explain assignments or what is in next class period.
  •   Close the lesson.
Examples & Uses:
  • It needs clear and settled mind when it is applied.
  • It involves filling in gaps, true or false question, completion questions, and multiple choice questions.
  • If you need to list the chronology of events in a long passage, you will need to read it intensively.
Advantages:
  • This type of reading has indeed beneficial to language learners.
  • It helps students to understand vocabulary by deducing the meaning of words in context.
  • It also helps with retention of information for long periods of time and knowledge resulting from intensive reading persists in your long term memory.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
  • It is time consuming reading method.
  • For students, reading huge amounts of information just before an exam does not help. This is because when they do this they do not concentrate on any type of reading process effectively. In the process, they neglect intensive reading. They may remember the answers in an exam but will likely forget everything soon afterwards.
EXERCISE:
Give students the text to read. Provide the comprehension questions about the text. When they answer the set questions well this means they intensively read the text to understand the meaning of the text.

Activity 2: GUIDE STUDENTS TO ENGAGE IN MORE TASKS ON INTENSIVE READING.

TASK 1: Provide students with copies of a text and group students into groups. Set the questions, and tell students to start reading a text.

Encourage students to read the text silently and answer the questions you have formulated that rest in the following areas of intensive reading:
  •         True or false statements,
  •         Filling gaps in a summary,
  •         Scanning a text to match headings to paragraphs, and
  •         Scanning jumbled paragraphs and then reading them carefully to put them into the correct order.
THE TEXT.
In Tanzania, there are many famous people. The most famous people are celebrities. Celebrities are famous people who have excelled in certain aspects of life such as movies, music, and other aspects. It is not easy to meet every celebrity. Most of them are rarely seen. They are only seen at particular events like TV shows, movies, and various live performances. For example, the musicians travel a lot. They need to travel and perform in various places within the country and outside the country. It is a tough job especially when the particular musician releases the new song or album and he/she needs to travel in order to publicise and sell it. Even if his/her songs are played in Radio stations and TV stations, he/she still needs to perform various live performances to sell his songs and promote his or her album and songs.

QUESTIONS:
(i)                Do we have famous people in Tanzania?
(ii)             Is it easy to meet celebrity? (Yes/No).
(iii)           Where can celebrities be seen?
(iv)           Where songs are played?

TASK 2:  IDENTIFYING MISTAKEN SENTENCES
  •   Prepare the sentences that have errors.
  •   Allow students to read and correct the wrong sentences.
  •   Read one sentence at a time and find the inappropriate vocabulary mistake or contradiction.
TASK 3: PUTTING A TEXT IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.
  •   The students read a jumbled short text and put events from it into chronological order.
  •   Ask students to read one sentence of the stories at a time and decide what is wrong with the sentences in terms of vocabulary (contradictions).
  •   This exercise focuses on intensive reading. 
Activity 3: DISCUSSION OF ANSWERS IN PAIRS OR GROUPS AND CONCLUSION OF A DISCUSSION.

6: CONNECTION: Beyond the Sub Topic. This sub topic produces a lot of sub skills. It helps the students to know how:
To outline.
To summarise main points.
To identify errors in sentences.
To answer objective questions from the text.
To judge the text read.
To read appropriately and accurately.

7: NOTE: This sub topic focuses on reading intensively, in other words, understanding every word. Generally, teachers tend to ask students to read quickly for a general understanding. This method of reading is called "extensive reading” and is very helpful in getting students to deal with large chunks of information. However, at times students do need to understand details and this is when "intensive reading" is appropriate.

After this sub topic, students are expected to improve their reading skills and habits of reading various books and materials. But all these materials may go unobserved if there are no more tasks on reading so as to make students be more engaged. As it is suggested by many teachers and linguists, there should be more activities if these activities are meant to be outcome-oriented to students.

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Check out how to Study & Teach other Form Three Sub Topics in this Blog!
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Emmanuel Kachele

Emmanuel Kachele is a founder and Blogger of KACHELE ONLINE Blog, an educational blog where 'O' Level English - 'OLE', 'A' Level English (ALE) and other related teaching and life skills are shared extensively. This is an online center for all Tanzanian Secondary School English Language students and teachers (Forms I-VI) and all interested English Language learners and teachers worldwide.

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