How can students gain a global understanding of the text?
Instead of an introduction, or maybe in addition to it, students could be helped to place a text in a clear framework through some type of sequencing activity, in which they gain an overall impression of the text's structure that will help in subsequent work on linguistic detail.
Activities here might involve:
- providing a heading for either a text or a number of short texts (see Text 15 where three headings have to be linked to the relevant texts);
- rearranging the paragraphs in a jumbled text into the correct order (see section 8.4.3 below on jigsaw reading);
- rearranging, into chronological order, summary sentences provided by the teacher on each paragraph or section of the text;
- saying what they think a paragraph the teacher has removed from the text is likely to be about.
If the text is very long and these tasks would be too difficult or too time-consuming, the same approach could be adopted with each section in turn, maybe varying the activity in each case.
With certain types of text, especially ones containing a lot of description, students might be asked to work on some visual organizer, such as a plan, a map or a diagram.
ACTIVITY 8
|
Read Text 2, 'The Architecture of Consumption', about the psychology of how supermarkets position certain goods in key locations. Devise some visual way of organizing the information contained in the text. Click on 'Commentary' for one possible approach. |
If the text features a lot of figures, the task might be to produce a bar chart or graph (see Text 15, 'Mehr Freizeit für alle!', Exercise 3). With a discursive or argumentative text, on the other hand (eg Text 5, 'It's unthinkable'), students might have to provide a list of arguments for or against something.
 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
