NATE2017 | Lindsay Warwick: Hitting the Books: Preparing learners for Academic Reading | Talk summary

Lindsay Warwick gave a great talk on activities that encourage learners to engage more with reading texts and make them more active and critical readers. Here are my notes. 

Abstract Academic reading requires a while new set of skills that even learners with excellent English need help with. Not only do they need to understand the ideas in a text, they also need to be able to question those ideas and critique them. In this talk, I will suggest practical ways to help learners develop these skills in order to make them more active and critical readers.

Lindsay Warwick shared some ideas for before reading, while reading and post-reading activities that encourage the learners to engage with the text more. These ideas are summarized on this slide:

Pre-reading

Lindsay encourages her learners to predict the content of the article, based on headings, subheadings, the visuals and so on. She also sometimes gives them a reason for predicting, e.g. Imagine that you need to write an essay on this topic. Will this article be useful/relevant? 

She also uses Padlet to get the learners to share their prediction – one of the benefits is that the quieter students share their ideas with the whole class.

Questions

According to research, teachers ask on average 300 questions a day. But how many questions do students ask? Lindsay Warwick encourages the learners to ask questions, based on the predictions they made, and also gives them a table that encourages them to continue with this as they read:

Highlighting

Another way to engage deeper with the text is to highlight key ideas.

Lindsay recommends Scrible – a tool that allows you to annotate any article online.

Post-reading activities

Drawing connections:

Lindsay also gets her students to put on the skeptic hat and respond to texts with ‘yeah, but’. She scaffolds them with giving them questions to consider:

Reading critically

Lindsay uses the Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site to introduce the idea that not all sources can be trusted. This particular site is more ‘tricky’ than most ‘fake news sites’ because it’s very difficult to spot that it’s fake.

Another activity she does is ask the learners which of these ideas they believe:

If they believe some of them, she gets them to go and prove them. This activity encourages them to critically assess sources of information.

===============

I can remember several occasions when my learners were able to answer every single question on a reading passage but the first one, because the answer to the first question was in the title of the article, which they had skipped. I find the skills that Lindsay were talking about quite difficult to teach, and I really liked the practical ideas that she shared and in particular the way she scaffolds her learners, providing them with a table or questions to structure their thinking. Regarding the tools she recommended, I haven’t tried Padlet with my learners but I’ve tried Scrible and it was a very satisfying experience – I wrote a post about it some time ago. I also loved the myth busting activity – I tried working with similar myths with my teenage students and it was a lot of fun, and I’d love to get the chance to use this particular activity. 

To sum up, although I haven’t taught reading for a while, much of what Lindsay said reminded me of some of the struggles that I’ve faced, and I really liked the activities that Lindsay suggested and I hope to get the chance to try them.