Once intensive work on parts of the text is finished, it is important to draw students' attention to the whole once more and to encourage some form of global evaluation or response. Initially, this is likely to involve oral work, but it can and often should lead into some written follow-up task.

It was suggested earlier (section 8.3.4) that global understanding of individual sections of the text might be developed by getting students to come up with a provisional title for each section. At this stage it is a good idea to get students to return to these titles, to revise them if necessary, and to engage in discussion of an appropriate title for the whole text, assuming one has not been provided at the start. In order to stimulate discussion, a range of alternative titles might be offered and small groups could be asked to discuss these in the target language and reach a consensus on one of them.

In this follow-up phase students might return to the initial hypotheses they made about the text in the pre-reading phase and see if they have proved accurate and, if not, amend or reformulate them. They should now also be seeking to link the text to a wider context and responding to it by engaging in such activities as:

• reconstructing the argument/story, etc;
• continuing/developing an argument or producing a counter-argument;
• adapting a narrative/description;
• producing a sequel to a narrative, etc;
• speculating about what had happened before or would happen after the account/story;
• giving a personal response (eg expressing agreement/ disagreement);
• reporting, both formally and informally;
• discussing;
• interviewing;
• improvising a spoken or written commentary;
• comparing facts, ideas, etc, in this text and others;
• evaluating events, ideas, arguments.

One must be careful not to proceed to this post-reading phase prematurely, ie before the text has been properly processed by students and the linguistic ground adequately prepared. For example, to launch into a class debate on nuclear energy in France after reading a single text on the controversy surrounding the setting up of a nuclear reprocessing plant in Le Havre, is unlikely to prove very productive. Unless the text has been exploited in the ways suggested above, especially with regard to the post-reading phase, students are likely to find the task very difficult indeed and the outcome will be disappointing. Preparation is everything!

The types of activities which fall into this category are discussed more fully in Module 6 ('Developing speaking skills') and Module 9 ('Developing writing skills'). The next two sections provide just a short annotated list of possibilities.