Information collection & exchange

Topics
Paragraphs 
Introduction
____1____ 
Carbohydrates _________ 
Fats _________ 
Proteins _________ 
Minerals _________ 
Vitamins _________ 
Conclusion _________ 
[Adapted from Amy L. Sonka. Skillful Reading. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981. Reprinted by permission of 
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.] 
Exercises which guide the reader to discover the author's overall purpose and main ideas may be presented 
before students read the selection or after they have read it. Doing such an exercise as a pre-reading activity 
is particularly helpful when your students are still developing the skill of discovering the discourse map of an 
academic essay. 
Even young children can be asked to tell the main idea of a paragraph after they have read it. You can ask 
them "What do you think this story is about?" or "What would be a good title for this story?" When they 
volunteer their opinions the students can discuss the various possibilities and evaluate why one is better 
than another. 
lder learners and
O
learners with more reading proficiency can do pre-reading exercises to predict the 
uses and effects, and the purpose of the follow-up exercise is to 
nsure that the reader understands this interrelated sequence. 
of development of civilization lie outside the 
ization. One does not therefore need to look for psychological explanations 
or to consider low cultural development as the result of geographical isolation from centers of 
diffusion. The explanation is provided by the series of causes and effects just mentioned. 
author's overall purpose and anticipate the main ideas of a reading selection. For example, a multiple-choice 
question can ask them to predict the content of the passage based on the information they gain from the 
title. Further multiple-choice questions based on key sentences from the passage (mostly topic sentences) 
can alert them to the main ideas. 
When the information in a text has a complex logical structure, it often helps comprehension to visualize the 
relationships among the ideas in terms of a diagram. The following paragraph explains why centers of 
civilization do not develop in tropical rain forests where slash and burn agriculture is practiced. The 
xplanation is presented as a chain of ca
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