Even if the aim of work on texts in class is to teach learners to increase their text processing speed and to improve their reading for gist through such techniques as skimming and scanning (see Module 7, sections 7.2.1 - 7.2.2), it is better and more productive to start with short sections of a text.

The sub-division of long texts into more manageable chunks has a number of advantages:

• It makes it easier for students to find specific items and means new vocabulary can be dealt with in small amounts.
  
  
• It means less proficient readers are not overwhelmed and can use discussion/explanation of each section to gradually build up their understanding of the text in a building-block approach.
  
  
• Teachers can insert signpost questions (see section 8.4.3) to encourage learners to predict what information may appear or what may happen in the following section.

How long the sections should be will clearly depend on your group and the level of difficulty of the text. If there are no natural breaks in the text, then an appropriate length for sections might be a few lines with low-level learners, and around 15-20 lines or 250-300 words with advanced learners.

Although sub-dividing a text is an essential pedagogical tool, one should not forget that the ultimate aim is for students to gain an understanding of the whole text. For this reason it is essential to return to global work on the text, once detailed analysis of individual sections has concluded. Often there is a time constraint here, which may mean that some parts of a text have to be dealt with less intensively than others. This is preferable to omitting the final, whole-text phase, because otherwise learners may lose sight of one of the main aims of text work, namely to promote understanding of complete passages. (See also section 8.5.)