Information collection & exchange

Figure 5.3 Sample Lesson Plan for Teaching Spelling/Pronunciation Correspondences From 
SL/Literacy for Adult Learners by Wayne Haverson with Judith Haynes. Center for Applied 
ses 
this is to incorporate into your lessons authentic examples from a wide range of print media: 
E
Linguistics and Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood 
Cliffs, New Jersey. 
 
 
 Everyday u
Your students will feel more motivated to read and to practice their developing reading skills on their own if 
you can demonstrate to them that reading is not just a classroom exercise. The most convincing way to do 

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announcements, notices, signs, labels, brochures, instructions, timetables, maps-there are endless 
possibilities. (An added advantage of such everyday materials is that they may often be used for oral 
communication exercises as well as for the teaching of reading.) To make reading activities even more 
otivating, use print materials as the basis for realistic, purposeful tasks, rather than falling into the timeworn 
• Use newspaper advertisements to plan an evening's entertainment, to choose the destination for a 
to teach your students to interpret the writing conventions which are used for each of these 
ifferent types of text: for example, the rows and columns used in timetables and schedules, or the 
d the basic literacy skills in English, and as their reading 
ompetence grows, you will want to encourage them to read on their own in addition to the reading activities 
s popular in its appeal and likely to 
ttract and hold the interest of your students. It will be easier to collect such materials in countries where 
nglish is used as a second language, but not impossible even where English is not so widely used. 
sk friends and relatives back home to send these materials to you. Once your students 
tart using the collection, some of them may want to add materials to it themselves.) Students can browse 
ou can use reading to reinforce the listening and speaking skills of students with any degree of English 
ks, journal articles, technical reports. You will 
ave to teach them the language and the skills needed to give them access to these texts. 
the organization (how the selection is put together). 
m
procedure of simply quizzing your students with comprehension questions. 
Here are some examples of realistic tasks based on authentic reading materials: 
• The students use airline timetables to plan a trip from, for example, Manila to Tokyo to San Francisco. 
Use cities that will have meaning for your students. The trip becomes more interesting as more cities are 
added and changes of planes and layovers must be taken into account. 
vacation, to locate a suitable apartment, to scout job possibilities. 
• Read product labels to compare cost per unit of measure or to check nutritional values of foods. 
• Follow a set of written instructions to set up and fill in a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule of activities. 
As you can see, while most of these suggestions start out as reading activities, they may easily lead into oral 
communication activities with students working in pairs or small groups. Later in this chapter you will find a 
discussion of how to use short texts which the students create themselves as the basis for reading lessons. 
You will have 
d
abbreviations found in product labels and advertisements. You will also teach them how to locate the 
specific information needed to carry out a particular task, disregarding irrelevant information. You will teach 
them how to assess the information which they gather in terms of how factual it is, or how useful. Note that 
the reading materials which are used are quite ordinary; they certainly are not literature. But some of the 
reading microskills which are developed through their use are quite sophisticated. 
As soon as your students have develope
c
scheduled for the whole class. For this purpose, you need to create a lending library of general interest 
reading materials. This does not have to be anything elaborate, just an informal collection of pamphlets, 
brochures, newspapers, magazines, the Sears catalogue-anything that i
a
E
(Perhaps you can a
s
through the collection during a few idle minutes before or after class, pick out something that interests them, 
borrow it to read as little or as much of it as they like, and return it to the collection.