A final text to interpret

Even though techniques and approaches to reading in English are not exactly new to me as a teacher, something quite new started a bit more than 3 months ago.

Our company was hired for a three-month course to enable 9 participants to read in English. The mixed abilities in this group was the first challenge. Whereas some of the students had some good language backgrounds, others were true beginners.

The texts we interpreted were the next challenge. Normally, we deal with texts that are normally adapted to the students’ levels, and when we use authentic texts, we normally do so with more advanced students. Of course, there are the cases when we use authentic texts with beginners, but we grade the tasks in order to make working on it possible.

However, with these students the goals were quite different. They needed to read and understand texts in English in order to make decisions related to their work.

So we started classes, and bit by bit I saw their confidence growing. A lot of function words we learnt, and a lot of discussion about a text’s main idea, and inferring meaning, and guessing from the context, and using images, and building up a quite large glossary, and learning verbs, and reading for specific information, and using cognates, and being careful with false cognates, and paying attention to suffixes and prefixes, and learning linking words, and using punctuation to better interpret texts, and noticing specific features of different text genres, and 60 hours later, we have come to the end of the course.

Then on the day of the test, first they tell me that the text I had chosen was too difficult, and that the questions were too tricky. Nevertheless, right after, when I started correcting the answers, I noticed with immense pleasure that the results were actually much better than the previous ones. And that’s the best feedback a teacher can get at the end of the course, isn’t it? Because one thing is an easy test with obvious good results. But it’s a different matter when it is appropriately difficult and still the good results come.

So we finished the course, and I’m happy to have had a chance to put a lot of theory into practice. And I’m thrilled to see that in only three months, these students’ abilities to read and interpret texts in English have clearly improved. Many thanks for the highly devoted, participative and clever students from RHP.