Page 169 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Some ideas for summarising are to have students read separate related texts, which they then explain to each other. Give your students a table to fill in with key points or ask them to give a one-minute presentation in front of the class.
Bring in a handful of film reviews. Divide students into groups, with a member for each review and have each student read a different review. Hand out a table such as the one in Table 10-2. As each student tells the group about her review, the others can listen and complete the table with all the films.
Table 10-2
Name of film
Vampire Attack
Love In London
Genre
Horror
Romance
Reviewing Films
Plot Star Rating
Vampires invade London looking for more victims.
Two tourists from different worlds meet and fall in love in Trafalgar Square.
Brad Cruise *****
Denzel Snipes and *** Jennifer Streep
Handling Vocabulary
You can handle new words in a reading exercise in a few ways:
✓ Get the vocabulary out of the way from the outset by teaching it in the pre-reading stage.
✓ Let the students read first and work on the meaning of individual words afterwards.
✓ Don’t deal with vocabulary at all so that students learn to find their own coping strategies.
In the first two cases beware of wasting time on words that can just as well be ignored. Even native speakers encounter words they’re unfamiliar with and may not look up them up if they’re still able to understand what they’re reading.
The next sections explore each option in turn.