Reading can be fun, we all know that! But how can we make sure it’s always engaging and varied when teaching in the classroom? In this month’s back to basics blog we will be looking at how to make the most of developing your students reading skills with some creative ideas…

Create conversation 

Interactivity and communication are key to keeping things interesting. Remember to invite your students to discuss, compare and analyse the things they are reading. This will often bring up opportunities to discover or reinforce new vocabulary. Choose your reading material wisely to make sure it is a topic of interest to the group you are teaching. There are plenty of great opinion based texts already created for an ELT audience, you can even include news in your classroom using resources such as Breaking News English which is regularly updated with relevant news stories to suit different reading levels. 

Try reading in a new way

99% of the time we spend reading, we don’t even realise we are doing it. Reading can act as a means to an end. Finding directions, understanding instructions or a recipe, trying to learn something new. Turn reading into a task based exercise and soon enough your students will barely notice they’re reading. You can design a treasure hunt with written clues, a recipe they need to follow, or a research task to find out about a certain celebrity or event in history, you can even design races and competitions around who can find the information fastest. Reading to access information will help students develop their gist understanding skills, and keep things fun! 

Keep it Engaging! 

One of the biggest challenges when teaching reading is keeping students focused. It is very easy to drift off into your mind when sat in a room full of silent students reading alone. But there are tonnes of creative ways to keep students focused on the task at hand. Remember, variety is the spice of life! Try some creative and varied reading tasks, such as these five brilliant tips on how to make reading more engaging from YouTuber ELT Experiences: 

Keep it suitable for different learning styles

We know there are many different styles of learning such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic. It’s important to make sure all your students’ needs are met, to help the language stick in their minds. Try adapting reading tasks to each style. Here are some ideas: 

Visual: For texts that describe a scene or event, ask students to read the text once quickly, and give them one minute to sketch the scene as they saw it in their mind. Let them read again, for more time in order to absorb more of the details, and give them longer to draw what they imagined. The class can then score and rate what they deem to be the most accurate drawing. 

Auditory: After reading the text once or twice, ask students to each choose a sentence and change just one word to something strange. For example, if the text says: ‘It took Sarah and her team 6 months to climb Mount Everest’, a student might change this to ‘It took Sarah and her guinea pig 6 months to climb Mount Everest’. Test the students attention to detail by asking them what the sentence should have said. 

Kinesthetic: After the students have read the text once, ask them to throw a ball around the room and whoever catches it must say a key word from the text, or related to the text. For example, in a text about a famous mountain climber, they may list ‘hike’, ‘climb’, ‘trek’, ‘tired’, ‘cold’ etc. You can change this to listing key emotions, scenery, actions etc. Any student who hesitates for too long is out of the game! If you want to take it further, allow the students to read the text again, and see if they can think of more words than the first time.

If you’re looking for more useful advice to improve your teaching, why not consider one of our short courses? Our huge range of courses runs both online and face-to-face, and covers a variety of topics to help you wherever you are on your teaching journey. Find out more on our website.