Reading Authentic Texts

 Last year I started regularly using newspaper articles with Year 11. Many of them the more bizarre sort of story that AQA like to use. Here's an example of a nice story that fits with the GCSE topic of social conscience. It's from La Voz de Michoacan, which was my local paper when I lived in Mexico. It tells the story of a young boy who won some money playing bingo at his gran's. Then on the way home he gave it to a man who was trying to sell lollipops to customers in a taco place.

Link to story here. This is how I taught it:

The main thing I did was to spread it out over several lessons. Lessons in which I did other things for most of the lesson.

In the first lesson, pupils just listened to me read through the text. They had the text in front of them. And then I asked them for what they understood. Some picked out single words, others had some short ideas, others thought they knew what was going on. Then we left it and got on with something else.

Next time, I gave them questions in English which fed them much of the answer.

Article from La Voz de Michoacán

What is the name of the mother who has posted this on Facebook?

How old is her son?

How long did it take to go viral?

Whose house had they come from?

These questions guide them through the text and make it accessible. It also brought up some cultural references - place names, foods, media outlets - which we examined. And then we left it and got on with the rest of the lesson.

The next time they had the same text. And I am sure they remembered some details and had forgotten others. I gave them a list of words in English to find in the text: sweet seller, had won, they were having dinner... The words are in order, which helps locate them. They are words that they can identify from the rest of the sentence or from knowledge of Spanish word forms. And they will typically be words that were "given" by the questions in the previous lesson.

Each lesson they are more confident with the text, matching what they remember to a closer reading of the text. What I did next was test them on some vocabulary (including the words in the list from last lesson) and then as a class we rewrote the story in our own words in Spanish on the board. This made us work on tenses - what had happened, what was happening, what happened.

And then I continued to come back to the text in future lessons. Listening to me read it aloud with the text in front of them. Listening to me read it, without them following the written text.

I would say that coming back repeatedly to a text is even more important with Listening. If you want pupils to get better at processing what they hear, why would you use new material each time and not go back over listenings you have worked on?

I know AQA pick these off-beat stories so that pupils can't use their reading skills of prediction or working out new words from context. But reading isn't just a test of vocabulary and grammar. Reading is about meaning and understanding.