Exploiting a Text
Written by David Mann for Teflnet November 2013
This article summarises a range of ways of exploiting a written text from
basic comprehension tasks to more creative ways of getting the most out of
it.
Exploiting a Text
Given a written text of some kind, what can we do with it, assuming it is at
least within the grasp of our students and not just a dense forest of
unfamiliar words?
Pre-reading tasks
Vocabulary
We can pre-teach vocabulary in a number of ways:
1. List the key words and tell them what they mean. (We don’t always
have to be fancy)
2. By a process of guided discovery, have students talk about
themselves with questions and prompts skilfully crafted to lead them
to need to use the target words and phrases. As the lexical items
come up in this guided conversation, list them on the board,
preferably in the order they’re going to appear in the text, checking
understanding as you go. (Sometimes it’s nice to get fancy)
3. Choose the lexical items that you don’t expect the students to know
and create a matching exercise. Students match the new words and
phrases with the definitions. (Students are sometimes their own best
teacher)
4. If you have been focusing on affixation, pick out a collection of words
that exemplify various suffixes and prefixes. Give students the root of
the word families these items belong to and have them scan the text
for the word that is based on this root. (Students who grasp this well
can effectively double or triple their passive vocabulary at a stroke)
5. If the text has a clear relationship with a visual of some kind, students
can attempt to label the visual with some of the key items. This could
be a picture with words describing the objects in the picture, but
could also be a process with labels for the steps, a diagram where
the words reveal the connections and relationships between things
and so on.
6. You could provide a list of the opposites of the target words and have
students scan the text for the related word.
7. Have students brainstorm the topic area covered by the text to come
up with words related to the topic. If this goes smoothly, wait for the
appropriate lag in the brainstorm to add a few more of the target
words before moving on the text itself.
Other pre-reading tasks
1. Speed reading: make sure the text is formatted in relatively narrow
columns like a newspaper and ensure it’s not too challenging for the
students’ level. Have the students glide their index finger down the
centre of the columns at a steady pace and avoid reading anything in
detail. If necessary, set a very strict time limit of mere
seconds. Students turn over the text, or close the book and write a
short list of any words they can remember catching a glimpse of –
don’t worry about spelling. Have the students generate questions
about the words they think they saw. They then read the text to find
the answer to their own questions. I have seen students gasp in
amazement at this exercise. They sometimes find they had no idea
they could grasp the key points of a text so quickly. You can then
easily follow up with more traditional comprehension exercises etc.
2. Ask students to talk to each other about the topic area covered in the
text. Another twist is to give them the topic and where the text was
published and ask them to guess what the text might say.
Exercises while reading
1. Have students read the text and answer some comprehension
questions. These can be multiple-choice, true/false, open-ended,
prompts for reaction or discussion and so on.
2. Transfer the information in the text to a visual of some kind that
represents the information in a diagram, chart, table etc.
 Works well with a text about someone talking about their week.
3. The classic gap-fill exercise has a number of variants: we can
provide a box of lexical items which the students use to fill the gaps –
the process of elimination eases the burden. We can simply leave
gaps and see if students can come up with suitable words or
phrases. If they can figure out the general meaning of the missing
words, it might make it easier to absorb the new, specific lexical
items that you’re trying to teach. It can be done in two stages: first
ask students to identify the part of speech of the word in the gap,
then have them supply a word.
4. Scanning can be fun. Just to ring the changes and encourage
students to exploit a text rather than be overwhelmed by it, have the
students scan a suitable text for specific pieces of information. We all
have memories of irrelevant dense texts with pointless
comprehension questions that we did at school. It can be refreshing
for students to approach a text with a more focused, goal-oriented
attitude. And it doesn’t need to just be find-the-opening-time-of-themuseum type exercises. It could be pressing questions such as “Is it
true Angelina Jolie prefers Scottish men?” (I’m a Glaswegian).
Scanning a longish text just to get the answer to such a question can
be very satisfying for students and gives them that sense of
empowerment which can help build their confidence. (If you can find
a text that actually answers that pressing question, let me know)
5. Arrange the text into two or more versions to create an information
gap where different texts have different information missing. Students
work in pairs or groups to share the information and complete their
texts.
6. Present the text as a jigsaw. This depends on the length and
complexity. For instance, if it’s a set of instructions, have students put
the jumbled instructions in the order that matches a set of visuals. If
you’re focusing on cohesive devices at the paragraph level, have
students put paragraphs in a sensible order and link them with the
cohesive devices supplied.
 Be reading attentively – task related to it (there has to be
contextual clues)
7. Present the text with the ends of some sentences missing where
students have a good chance of guessing the overall point the writer
is about to make. Students attempt to complete the sentences based
on the context. They then compare the professional writer’s original
version with their own attempt. This may reveal, in a memorable way,
the complexities of relative clauses, verb patterns, non-finite clauses
or other ways of linking ideas.
 The bits you have taken out, are the bits that you want your ss
to be sensitive too.
 Can be missing phrases (e.g., phrasal verbs)
8. Provide a set of texts that can be categorised in some way. For
instance, as a prelude to teaching students how to write paragraphs
following certain organisation patterns, provide short paragraphs
which exemplify these patterns and have students identify which
pattern the paragraph exemplifies.
9. Reference exercises can be very revealing. Typically, you would do
general comprehension exercises to ensure students have
understood a text before attempting reference exercises, but it is
sometimes interesting to use reference exercises as a starting point
to get students exploring a text. So, create a set of questions like
“What does it refer to on line 10?” and have students do them as they
read. Encourage them not to read sequentially, but to simply figure
out the references following the order of the questions. If you pick out
the right pronouns and put the questions in the right order, you can
create an exciting slow-reveal effect that students may appreciate.
10.
Perhaps not much more than a grammar exercise to practise
non-defining relative clauses, but it can be fun to give students a very
plain story and a list of sentences with extra information. Students
then attempt to spice up the story by interpolating these sentences
into the text at the right places. This could be exploited for a range of
grammatical or lexical items, such as adding adjectives in the most
suitable places, inserting adverbials, adding non-defining relative
clauses or non-finite clauses etc.
11.
Arrange for the comprehension questions to lead to a
discussion. If the answers to your questions naturally build a grid of
related information, students can discuss their reaction, or speculate
about the causes etc. A text about the famous Bhutanese notion of
Gross National Happiness might include a definition of the concept
then some information about the comparative GNH of various
countries, one of which is the students’. The comprehension
questions could simply be a pretext to have students fill in a
comparative grid which could lead to quite fruitful discussions about,
for example, the high GNH of some poor countries and the high level
of dissatisfaction in some rich countries.
Post-reading exercises
1. Key lexical items can be highlighted (bold type or underlined) and
students can match the items to their definitions. Sometimes students
can cope with a text at a superficial level, answering comprehension
questions successfully, but an exercise like this may give students a
little quiet time for reflection to absorb new lexical items in a deeper
way.
2. Summarise the text with some kind of challenge: write a headline for
the text; write a topic sentence for a given paragraph; summarise the
text in one sentence; summarise the text in a fixed number of words
(or within a maximum number of words); with a time limit.
3. The text may act as a model for the kind of writing you want your
students to do. Having worked through comprehension and analysis
of the grammar, cohesive devices or other language features that are
crucial to the text type, then have students write a text using the
same pattern, from their own knowledge and experience or from
prompts. For instance, your engineering students may need to
analyse the cause of a particular technical problem. Provide a text
with a range of examples of cause and effect language and then
have students write a text using these features to explain the causes
of something they’re working on.
4. The text may lay out the facts of a case and you could have students
speculate about what might have happened, what might have caused
it or, indeed, who might have done it. Obviously detective stories
spring to mind, or lateral thinking puzzles. Level matters here and
you should only attempt this with higher level students who have a
good grasp of modal auxiliary verbs.
Grammar
1. Often a text exemplifies an area of grammar. A dramatic story may
reveal the use of the past perfect to give the readers a flashback. A
leaflet on safety may provide good examples of the use of modal
auxiliary verbs to express obligation and permission. Crafting a text
which exemplifies all the options that you are aiming to teach can
provide excellent support for a grid of these options which the
students create for themselves based on the examples in the text.
For instance, you may want to help the students grasp the
differences between must, mustn’t, have to and don’t have to.
2. References (both anaphoric and cataphoric) in a text can obscure
meaning and confuse students. I sometimes think the hardest word in
the English language is it. Students also have difficulty handling
references, mixing up it and one or making mistakes of agreement
where, for instance, the referent is a plural noun but they choose a
singular pronoun to refer to it. After thorough coverage of a text for
comprehension, vocabulary and the rest, it can be very helpful for
students to go back over a text and analyse more closely the
references within the text that help to maintain coherence.
 Collective nouns = words that seem plural but are singular
Discourse and coherence
It can be useful to raise students’ awareness of discourse to a slightly more
abstract level. Have students analyse a text for given and new information.
Sometimes this doesn’t need to go much further than helping them to see
the connection between the indefinite article for new information (countable
nouns at least) and the definite article for given information, but can go
deeper for higher level students. One feature of coherence is a wellmaintained balance between given and new information. If you imagine a
text which is a constant stream of new information, you will immediately
see that it is essentially incoherent because nothing connects with anything
else.
Conclusion
I hope this has given you a broader perspective on exploiting texts in the
classroom. We can’t be creative all the time, and a list of exercise types like
this might help spark ideas for you and help you to ring the changes with
your own materials.