It is important for teachers to develop their students’ awareness of tasks. Teachers have to make sure that learners know it is worth practicing reading in class; students do not need to practice reading just for the sake of reading; they should practice reading first of all for the reading exams. Learners have to be familiarized with the reading exam; they have to be aware that the exam consists of a number of sections and that each section is associated with certain tasks.
Coursebooks and exam workbooks generally offer to students from the very beginning a general presentation of the reading exam; if these books do not offer to learners this presentation, teachers should make their own presentation.
The general presentation has to contain information about: the period of time over which the exam takes place, the number of parts included in the exam, the time needed to de these parts, the tasks associated with these parts, the way in which students have to answer questions (they may have to make a choice between variants), the length of the texts included in the parts of the exam and the total number of words learners need to read.
As most reading exams imply introducing answers in a sheet of paper which will be interpreted by a teacher or computer, it is vital for teachers to teach students how to fill in the exam sheets. The information about the tasks and the types of items can be gradually presented throughout the course. The exam parts need to be dealt with more than once. The reading practice for the exam should trigger every skill required by the reading task.
It is advisable for teachers to inform students about the type of reading each task tests; teachers should present the procedures students need to know in order to approach the tasks. Every task involves certain strategies which have to be put into practice. Teachers should provide enough examples of tasks so that learners know how to follow the procedures and how to choose the strategies.
If the exam course is not a short one, if students have enough time to prepare themselves, it is advisable for teachers to make use of those materials which are graded. Teachers and students need to concentrate on the exam itself and less on the general reading.
The tasks, the reading texts, and the reading conditions in the exam class have to resemble an authentic exam; this fact motivates students because they can see that they provide right answers from the very beginning of the exam course.The preparation for the reading exam needs to be graded, by making tasks simple, by making the reading texts simple and by making students be accustomed to the exam conditions. It is very important for students to work with simplified tasks.
Task types offer to teachers the methods which can be used in order to simplify the task itself. The methods used for simplifying tasks are the following: reducing the number of questions, reducing the number of distractors, showing why answers are correct or incorrect and mentioning the parts of the text in which the answers may be detected.
Teachers may reduce the number of questions. They should introduce the very questions measuring a certain skill. For example, if students have to identify the tone of the author, the questions about the tone should be associated. Teachers also need to reduce the number of distractors; this means fewer variants in multiple choice items, no additional sentence in gapped texts, and only incorrect lines in proofreading texts.
The task must avoid that type of ambiguity which distracts students’ attention; this means that there should not be headings which seem to correspond to more than one paragraph. The heading needs to summarize the paragraph, more specifically the topic sentences of that paragraph. This does not mean that distractors have to be excluded.
There are distractors which give students the chance to put into practice a certain exam strategy; for instance, the variants of a multiple-choice item may indicate something which is correct but which is not stated in the reading text.
Another way to simplify a task is to give answers and to show why these answers are correct or incorrect. Another simplifying technique is to mention those parts of the text in which the answers may be detected. To simplify the tasks of a reading text is not so difficult. Tests from exam books or past papers contain material which can be adapted to the requirements of a reading exam.
If they want to gradually develop their students’ reading skills, teachers also need to simplify the texts students have to read. When we want to select and simplify a text for an exam class, we should first of all take into consideration the length of the text. Many articles taken from newspapers and magazines and many stories are too long to be used in the classroom as reading material.
If we want to simplify texts, we need to take into view the number of words which are unknown. We as teachers have the ability to identify those difficult words students do not know; we can adapt the text in such a way that there will not be so many difficult words.
Simplifying a text may also mean turning what is implicit in that text (the implicit ideas) into explicit ideas. We can do this by adopting a summary technique. This means that the summary we make expresses what the difficult text implies. Another strategy of simplifying a text is to reduce the background knowledge of that text; this means we reduce information about certain persons or places or about a certain time; simplifying a text may also imply making the structure of that text clearer.
The reading texts and tasks are meant to make us fluent readers. A fluent reader is that reader who knows to make a distinction between words which are essential and words which are not essential. A fluent reader knows how to deduce the meaning of difficult words from the context or from the word form.
Bibliography
Jones, L. 2007. The Student-Centered Classroom. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rodgers, T. 2001. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University.