Why read this text?
ACTIVITY 11
| Consider five things you have read recently. What was your purpose in reading them? For work? For pleasure? To get information? To check times or arrangements? To learn how to do something? How did the purpose affect the way you read the particular texts? |
In everyday life we often read selectively and read different texts in different ways depending on our reason for reading, on what we hope to gain from the text. For example, we are likely to read an instruction booklet or a recipe much more closely than a newspaper report. In class, it sometimes helps to invent a reason for reading so learners know what to look for in the text, what to pass over quickly or even ignore. Such reading purpose questions encourage flexible reading skills and avoid detailed reading of every section becoming the students' default approach to a text. Detailed reading will be appropriate, indeed essential, with certain documents (eg directions, a contract), but with others it will be more important to adapt reading to a purpose.
For example, with Text 9 ('Les jobs de l'étudiant'), students are asked to find suitable jobs in published listings for five people with differing availability, interests and skills. Alternatively, with a more complex text, students might be required to collect relevant data on one particular city from a wide-ranging article on national traffic problems, for inclusion in a regional report. To develop such flexible reading skills, students need a lot of practice in targeted reading using different text types.
Such an approach does not mean the rest of the text has to be ignored: detailed work on other aspects of the text can follow later. Alternatively, the same text can subsequently be read for a different purpose - another good way to develop flexible reading.
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