The understanding of the written word is often overlooked. ESL students are taught the basics of reading, pronunciation, grammar and spelling, but little focus is given to the meaning of the text or whether they received the information they required. An ESL student may be able to read the words fluently but he must still understand the meaning of the entire text.
One exercise to help improve reading and understanding is article analysis. Students can be given an article (see Resources) and asked to read it silently or aloud. The students must then answer simple questions regarding the article to test their understanding of the article's content and word meanings and improve analytical ability.
Although culture is an important aspect for learning English, ESL students may benefit from English news stories relating to their own culture. These do not necessarily have to be controversial stories; they can be as simple as the "Extraordinary People" series, often shown on United Kingdom television Channel 4 but also available online (see Resources).
ESL students can read stories of people from their own culture written in English. By relating to their own culture or home country, students may feel more enthusiastic and interested in understanding the story, which will encourage them to learn higher-level reading skills. Students can be given a story relevant to them to read in class and may tell the class about their story and any other interesting information they want to add, to promote reading, verbal communication and cultural understanding.
This exercise encourages ESL students to learn the basic processes of reading information and deriving meanings from texts, such as themes and similarities with other texts. Students should be given various texts or articles (simple texts for beginning ESL students) and split into four groups. The texts are mixed between students, but four themes should apply to various texts (for example, sports, weather, money and traffic updates).
Each team is allocated a theme or area of the newsletter. They must read their texts to each other, decide which texts fall into which categories, and pass these texts to the team responsible for that category. Advanced students can gather images for their stories (once categorized) and put the stories in the order they would like them to appear in a newsletter. Students can also be taught how to create a basic newsletter with their stories and images included.
ESL students should be able to read easily and still understand the meanings of words in context. The word replacement exercise involves handing an article or text to students with missing words throughout and providing them with possible words to use in the gaps. Students must read the article fully and decide what words can fill in the blanks. This can be done in groups to encourage verbal communication skills and teamwork.