Learners need convincing that they can very often understand texts containing several unfamiliar words. It is therefore important for teachers to demonstrate that redundancy in texts is common and nothing to feel uneasy about, by themselves ignoring words during intensive reading classes. There are a number of possible approaches here:

• A useful exercise for training learners to ignore inessential words is described by Nuttall (1996: 64:6). It involves presenting learners with a cloze-type exercise in which a number of words are deleted from carefully selected, easy-to-read paragraphs; this shows students that they do not need to analyse every word on the page, and helps to mitigate the intimidating effect unknown lexis has on many L2 readers.
• A variation on this is to use complete texts with difficult words that students do not need to understand in order to get at the gist.
• Alternatively, students might be given a text, with questions relating to items of difficult lexis featured in the text, and asked to answer as many questions as they can without using a dictionary.
• To vary this, one could limit dictionary use to a certain number of words and tell students they must isolate (for example) the ten words they feel they need to look up in order to answer the questions on the text.