Adapting a Reading Exercise

Today I writing for an assignment in week 2, Unit 2 of the TESL Teaching In Practice - Reading and Vocabulary course through U of Manitoba Extended Education. Here I will discuss how I would adapt a reading exercise published by the British Council on their Learn English Teens website. The exercise is called Reading Skills Practice: Foreign Exchange Emails. The exercise can be done interactively on the website or downloaded as a PDF worksheet. I will work with the downloaded worksheet.

The British Council material is copyrighted, so I must be careful to adhere to the instructors' Fair Use guidelines published by the University. If I was going to use the exercise as-is, I could share the above link with my students and have them complete the exercise online. However, since I need to adapt the exercise and make some changes to the PDF copy, the guidelines allow me to do that because this single exercise is part of a larger set (less than 10%) on the British Council website. Even after making changes, I would  give credit to the original source by including their web address and the copyright notice.


For a group of mature LINC level 4 students, which corresponds to a CLB 5 or 6 (pp 86-91), I would make a few changes to both the preparation and post-reading exercises. Since students at this level should be able to guess meaning from context and use both bilingual and unilingual ESL dictionaries, I would want to make the exercise challenging enough for them. Thus for the preparation exercise, I would give them only the vocabulary words, without the matching definitions, and instead have them work in pairs to supply their own definitions, encouraging them to use both experience and dictionary resources. Each pair would then share at least one definition with the class, so that I could correct any misunderstandings.

Since this reading is published in Britain, there are a few expressions that differ from typical Canadian usage. I would underline or point these out in the text and supply Canadian equivalents that they might be more likely to hear (eg. "How are you getting on?" = "How're you doing?") (I also notices that this phrase has be changed to "How's it going?" in the post reading vocabulary exercise. Instead of correcting this, I would leave it and allow the students to discover this for themselves.)

I would not change the post reading exercises, but since these are mature adults who have moved to Canada, I would change the discussion questions to better reflect their situation:

1. Have you ever studied in another country other than your origin country before moving to Canada?
2. Since there are no ancient castles in Manitoba, where in downtown Winnipeg would be a good place for a field trip that would be worth writing or sending pictures to your family or friends?
3. How do you keep in touch with friends and family who are far away?

Picture from Canadian Museum for Human Rights, https://humanrights.ca/

For an EAP class, I would also want to make the exercises more challenging. From the preparation exercise, I would remove the vocabulary words and supply only the definitions. I would then have the students identify the words by finding them in the text as they read. (Since "foreign exchange student" isn't used in the text I would remove that definition and possibly substitute definitions for "annoying" and "magician".) I would change the True/False exercise to open-ended questions (e.g. "Where is Fran living now?" The post reading vocabulary exercise and the discussion would not be changed.

For my imaginary LINC 3 class, CLB 4, I don;t believe this text is too difficult. I would not change the post reading exercises, but I would add some more vocabulary to the preparation exercise, such as "nationalities", "annoying", "musician", "magician", and "expensive".
I would also edit the text of the email to add in parentheses alternative Canadian expressions to the above mentioned British expressions.

To add some practical learning to this lesson, I would partner with another ESL class to have the students share their experiences in Canada through and exchange of emails. In order to keep the topics interesting but appropriate, I would first have the students suggest topics in class and then ask them to choose from that list after we have discussed the suitability of the topics.