This is a little video I prepared for my students, but it is relevant to anyone interested in structuring academic paragraphs.

Each summarizing workshop is about one hour. See below for details of each session.

Download PowerPoint and handouts here.

Session 1: Reading Strategies for Summarizing
In this workshop, participants will explore various approaches to reading which enhance students’ skills in summarizing. The workshop will focus on basic pre- during- and post-reading strategies that improve overall reading comprehension and enable students to identify the following: 1) organizational patterns, 2) main ideas and 3) the most important details in a text, all of which are invaluable for paraphrasing and constructing summaries. We will also look at the value of extended reading and student-selected texts in enhancing students’ global reading skills.

Session 2: Writing Strategies for Summarizing
In part two of this workshop series, teachers will look at approaches to writing in the English language classroom which promote the development of summarizing skills. We will discuss the currently popular process/genre model of teaching writing and how it applies to paraphrasing and summarizing. Teachers will discuss the value of modeling and scaffolding the skills of effective writing as a means of increasing a student’s overall independence as a learner and his fluency in constructing identity through academic writing. We will also look at the role digital writing plays in the writing classroom and how teachers can take advantage of their students’ already high level of electronic fluency.

Session 3: Building Summarizing Lessons and Tasks
In this final workshop, teachers will use the concepts explored in the previous two sessions to decide how best to put together tasks and lessons which will help improve students’ skills and promote their autonomy. The focus will be on task-based instruction combined with pair and group work to foster a community of learners in the classroom. This community, through the integration of skills, constructs its own meaning and relies on each other and themselves for their continued development and emergence as independent learners. We will look at such summarizing-specific aspects as selecting texts, building and sequencing tasks and developing scoring rubrics for assessment.

In this activity, students are divided into small groups and told that they are members of the governing legislature in a hypothetical American state. They want to reduce their population of prisoners while also not adding to the state’s budget. Students must work together to devise a plan using the information provided below.

To generate students’ background knowledge, students may also read the article, “Behind Bars,” an editorial from the March 2008 issue of Arkansas Business, attached below.

Download worksheet and pre-reading article.

The Activity

Your state has one of the largest populations of prisoners per capita in the United States. You spend 10% of your $3 billion yearly budget just to maintain your growing prison system. One prisoner costs you $30,000 per year to keep. Your task is to devise ways to reduce the prison population while doing each of the following:

1)      Not endangering the public by releasing prisoners who should stay locked up

2)      Not adding to your overall budget

3)      Keeping the public happy

How will you do it? Remember that you are elected officials. Much of what you do will be judged on the next election day (two years from now). Prepare a plan of action and share it with the class.

Here is a list of alternative programs and their cost. You may choose from this list.

1. Allowing early parole for non-violent offenders. This means releasing people from prison early for good behavior, but continuing to monitor them and restrict their travel. This can save the state up to $20 million, but it is unpopular and has shown that recidivism amongst these inmates in much higher than the average population (75% vs. 50%).
2. Investing more in schools which are located in poor areas where much of the state’s violent crime is committed. This includes hiring new teachers, building new schools and creating new after-school programs for at-risk youths. It will add about 12% to your budget, but has the potential for much greater (but unknown) future benefit.
3. Investing in more rehabilitation programs in the prisons. This includes educational opportunities, psychological counseling and job skills development for current inmates. This will add 3% to your budget, but will not show any decrease in the prison population for several years (after the next election).
4. Creating work release programs. Such a program utilizes prisoners as manual labor for government construction projects. It will add less that 1% to the budget and could save up to 5%. Labor unions in the state are opposed to this idea, however, and they will have to be convinced it is a good idea.
5. Legalizing marijuana. This will drastically reduce the number of prisoners (by up to 10%) and can also add to the state budget at least $20 million in taxes. But this is very unpopular with voters. A recent poll showed that only 15% of the population would support such a measure.
6. Building new rehabilitation facilities exclusively for non-violent offenders. Places like this are more boarding schools than prisons and isolates prisoners so that violent prisoners cannot influence non-violent ones. This will add 5% to your budget, but can show a decrease of up to 10% within 10 years.
7. Eliminating the death penalty. This will save the state up to 2% of its budget because it is vastly more expensive to keep inmates on death row than it is to incarcerate them for life. However, a recent poll showed that such a measure has the support of only 40% of the population. Young voters, however, support the measure by a factor of 85% to 15%.
8. Providing tax breaks to businesses which hire ex-cons. This would make it more attractive for state businesses to hire former prisoners. Such a measure could potentially reduce recidivism by up to 20%, but would also result in the loss of several million dollars in taxes. The long-term benefits are greater, though, as fewer and fewer ex-cons go back to prison. The tax breaks would mean that other services would have to be cut, however. Most vulnerable would be medical services for the poor and new road construction.

The attached lesson is designed for intermediate to high level learners at least 14 years of age. In a group of at least 10, it should take about 90 minutes.

The focus of the lesson is a short holiday story about a young man and woman who have an argument about a Christmas gift. But the lesson integrates all four skills and encourages creative language use throughout. It includes pre- in- and post-reading activities and offers a suggestion for a homework assignment.

Download lesson plan PDF

Attached below is a copy of all the materials I have used when teaching a six-week course on teaching reading in the EFL/ESL classroom. Included are outlines of workshops, handouts, worksheets and relevant articles from English Teaching Forum magazine.

Download materials here.

On Oct. 21, 2009, Senior English Language Fellow John Mark King gave a workshop entitled, “Judging a Book by Its Cover: The First Step in Becoming an Effective Reader” to a group of 29 current teachers at the Academy of Pedagogical Mastery in St. Petersburg, Russia. Most of the teachers work at secondary schools and often teach reading. However, they admitted to rarely using authentic materials, primarily because they are too difficult for their students. In addition, they admitted to relying almost entirely on simple translation and text analysis. The Fellow suggested that materials written for native speakers can be used creatively in all classes, the only difference being that lower-level students will be asked to read less of the material than higher-level students.

To demonstrate this, the Fellow divided the teachers into groups and gave each of them a different book. The material included historical and suspense fiction, travel writing and historical non-fiction, all written for native speakers of English. The Fellow asked teachers to learn as much as they could from each book without looking inside. The teachers were then asked to evaluate each and share with their classmates whether or not (and why) their book is one they would choose to read themselves.

This, the teachers learned, is one of the qualities of an effective reader. All too often, learners select material to read and find later that it is either too difficult or uninteresting. The result is a loss of confidence and interest in reading as a whole. Practicing such skills not only generates interest in reading and allows low-level students to participate in reading activities with authentic materials, but it also helps students to develop the necessary skills of an effective reader.

This workshop is part of a series of bi-weekly events the Fellow is hosting in addition to his regular work at the Academy of Pedagogical Mastery. The goal is to provide a wide variety of teachers from all districts in St. Petersburg with innovative and creative approaches to English language education.

Reading an American newspaper is a unique skill, and your mastery of the genre can help you a great deal in your studies.

Most notable when discussing newspaper literacy is your ability to locate useful and/or interesting information. This means you have an understanding of the organizational structure of the American newspaper. Just as native speakers know that the table of contents for a book in English is located on the first few pages (and not at the end as in, for example, books written in Russian), they also know what to expect when they pick up a newspaper. For example:

Contents/Organization of a Newspaper
1) A newspaper is divided into sections that may or may not include national, international, local, entertainment, business, features and sports news.
2) A newspaper can have more than one edition, each of which may contain different articles or different versions of the same article.
3) Articles on the front pages of sections typically contain a jump at which the reader is directed to turn to a different page in the same section in order to finish the story.
4) Other sections of the newspaper may include: classifieds, comics, car pages, real estate articles, book reviews, film/television reviews, TV listings, obituaries, shopping guides, real estate listings, letters to the editor, editorials, corrections, contact information, stock prices, weather or advice columns.
5) Newspapers contain an index on page 1 or 2 with page numbers of different sections.
6) Articles on the upper fold of the front page are considered more important than those on the lower fold.
7) Opinion pieces can only be found in one section and are always grouped together.
8) The front page can contain stories on any topic, while the inside of the first section typically only contains national and international news.
9) Opinion pieces and editorials can be found together, but editorials are never signed and are considered the opinion of the entire newspaper.

Contents of Articles
1) Headlines and sub-heads are mini-summaries of articles and are always written in present tense.
2) Different types of articles have different structures.
3) Articles tend to use quotes more than paraphrases.
4) All information that is not considered general knowledge is attributed. For example, shared knowledge of history or daily events do not need to cited. In general, if you don’t need to look it up, you probably don’t need to cite it.
5) Reporters typically try to include more than one point of view on a topic when possible.
6) Articles have a dateline that informs the reader as to where the events in the article take place.
7) The name typed above the article is the person who researched and wrote the article.
8) The most important information in a news article is usually at the very beginning and almost always before the jump.
9) Sources are named using their first and last names upon first mention, and then with only their last names on all subsequent mentions.
10) Journalists tend to use quotes more often than paraphrases, but usually paraphrase when they want to shorten a long quote or combine more than one.

General Knowledge about Newspapers
1) Newspapers can be known for having a political slant in one direction or another, despite their statements of objectivity.
2) Newspapers generally publish new stories on their websites before they are printed.
3) Newspaper editors generally have a wide variety of stories from which to choose and must decide every day which articles to include and where to place them.
4) Newspapers make the bulk of their money by selling advertisements, not by selling newspapers.

Newspaper Reading Strategies
1) Choosing an article to read: A great deal of information about an article can be found by simply reading it’s headline, lead and photo caption (cutline) and by also looking at its photo(s). This is a good way to get the main idea of an article and also to decide if you want to read more of it.
2) Evaluating the reliability of information: Journalists are trained to provide only the most reliable information possible and to give an objective view of the topic or event about which they are writing, but this does not always happen. We can evaluate the reliability of information they provide by asking the following questions about it:
a. is the source of the information knowledgeable on the subject matter?
b. is the source of the information trustworthy or might he/she have an ulterior motive (i.e. to sway public opinion in a certain direction or to protect himself)?
c. are there any opposing pieces of information or opinions presented, or does the reporter only give one side to the story?
d. does the article contain any information that presupposes a certain prejudice about a group of people on the part of the reader?
3) Skimming/Scanning articles: When we read newspaper articles, it is rarely necessary to read every word. A skilled reader will skim the first few words of every paragraph to get the main idea and also scan portions of the article for key words or phrases that might be interesting or relevant.
4) Knowing the basic structure of a newspaper article: While there is no steadfast structure for every newspaper article, there are some elements a skilled reader will know to expect:
*News Articles: The lead (first sentence) of every news article contains either the main idea of the article or the most important piece of information in the article. What follows is generally an account of relevant information starting with the most relevant and ending with the least.
*Feature Articles: These articles typically tell the reader a story and tend to have a beginning, middle and end. The lead will generally be written to attract your attention, not provide relevant information.

Download PDF here
Glossary of Newspaper Literacy PDF

Format: Workshop
Time: 60-90 minutes
Title: “Judging a Book by Its Cover: An Unorthodox Reading Lesson”
Target Students: Beginner to advanced, any age group

When teaching reading, teachers need to keep in mind that our goal is to help students develop the skills of an effective reader. But, what are these skills?

Primarily, effective readers are better able to “interact” with their material. In other words, effective readers approach different texts with different assumptions and apply a variety of strategies to what they read depending on the purpose, subject matter and genre.

Included in these skills is the ability to select and evaluate potential reading material. The skilled reader can determine relatively easily by examining a book’s cover whether or not he/she will find that book interesting and relevant. Such skills extend to a variety of materials (newspapers and magazines, for example), but our purpose in this workshop is to look at books.

In a lesson like this, students work together to examine a book’s front and back covers to learn as much as possible about the book without actually reading it. Then, they share their ideas with the rest of the class and explain why they would or would not choose to read such a book themselves.

Practicing such a skill in the classroom is also something that a reader at just about any level can complete, since the amount of reading done in such an activity is relatively small and the necessary vocabulary is predictable.

In this workshop, teachers will explore and practice ways to create just such an activity for their students, an activity that can be safely called a reading lesson without very much actual reading. Despite this, it is also an activity that helps students to become more effective readers by encouraging them to critically examine reading material they choose on their own.

Download Abstract PDF

Attached to this post is a packet of materials I helped create for students at the community college I worked at before I moved to Russia. It is designed primarily as a series of reading lessons with additional activities for summarizing and it utilizes the rhetorical structure of American newspaper articles as its basis for understanding and organizing what is read and summarized.

For each article, students are required to activate background knowledge and complete a series of pre-reading activities. After this, they read the articles, first for the main idea and second for specific details. Then they answer questions about what they read and discuss in groups their opinion of the article’s major themes.

Next students practice, one skill at a time, the steps in creating a brief summary of what they have read. For example, before students are asked to paraphrase the ideas in the article, they must be able to locate the main idea and write a short outline.

The lessons are:

Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Summary
Chapter 2: Finding the Main Idea
Chapter 3: Paraphrasing Part 1
Chapter 4: Writing the Main Idea
Chapter 5: Paraphrasing Part 2
Chapter 6: Outlining
Chapter 7: Working with Verbs
Chapter 8: Planning an In-class Summary

Download materials here.