One common activity is to recast the text in a different form:

• Rewrite a report for a different audience - eg for one's superior, for shareholders, for a newspaper article.
• Devise a dialogue based on the text's subject matter between characters mentioned in the text or ones you invent - eg with a text about a council's plans to raise taxes, imagine a discussion on the pros and cons between a councillor and the representative of a local pressure group.
• Provide a general summary of the text: full summaries are very challenging and best reserved for advanced learners as they demand high-level skills, such as separating key arguments from illustrative material and the ability to bring together disparate elements from different parts of the text; lower-level learners might be asked to correct a factually inaccurate summary or to complete a gapped summary.
• Summary for a specific purpose: a summary provided according to a brief (often a real work-place scenario) can also be more suitable for lower levels as it might involve presenting information in schematic or diagrammatic forms, or as lists, tables or basic notes. For example, with a text discussing the public consultation process over plans for a new wind farm, students might have to summarise in tabular form the arguments presented for and against, and the government's response to them. With a text concerned with pupil misbehaviour, learners might draw up a list of school rules for consideration by a School Council.
• A variation on the jigsaw reading mentioned in section 8.4.4 above is to distribute parts of a longer article to individual students who have to work collectively to bring together facts and arguments and to re-build the global situation from their disparate bits of information, with the aim of re-writing the text - an exercise which could be orchestrated by the teacher on the board. This also provides an excellent opportunity to work with a group on the planning of a written text.
• Read alternative versions of a process/event/person's character, etc, and make a note of where the differences lie, prior to writing one's own version which explains the real situation and why the discrepancies occurred. This is another high-level task but could be adapted for lower levels (see the comparing pictures idea below).

Alternatively, students might be asked to adopt a particular point of view or present the written text from a new perspective. For example:

• provide some form of personal response to points made in the text by writing a letter, message or e-mail, eg a reader's letter to a newspaper;
• retell the story from a particular character's perspective;
• renarrate an incident from someone else's point of view, eg an eyewitness to an accident;
• with a descriptive text, devise a prospectus, guide or tourist brochure based on the place/event/phenomenon described.