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Instructions for teachers

As any TEFL theory book will tell you, we need to help the students develop the many different reading skills and strategies such as gist reading, reading to confirm expectations, reading for communicative tasks, etc. This is an example of scan reading or reading to extract specific information. In the real world, you would do this to find a number in a telephone book or find out how deep the swimming pool is in a holiday brochure, what is on at the cinema, etc. This text will hopefully give some practice in this type of reading.

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Suggested Procedure

1. Spend 5 minutes pre-teaching some of the difficult vocabulary. e.g. hen, beak, lay, feathers, bird, egg, yolk, white, shell, fly, etc.

2. Hand out a photocopy of the text to all the students. Let them read it for 3 or 4 minutes or if you really want to develop scan reading don't let them read it at all.

3. It is best to use the cheap trick of having a competition to add some motivation. Divide the class into two teams. You ask questions on the text and the team who answers your questions correctly first gets a point. Ask the questions from various parts of the text: don't start at the top and work down.

Here are some ready-made questions:

1. How many days does it take for a chicken to hatch? (21)
2. How many eggs does a hen lay a year? (300)
3. What is a young female chicken called? (pullet)
4. What is a yolkless egg called? (dwarf, wind or fart egg)
5. How old was the oldest chicken? (16)
6. What much did the heaviest egg weigh? (340g)
7. How old is a Hen when she starts to lay eggs? (4 to 5 months)
8. What is the skin on top of a chicken's head called? (comb)
9. How long do chickens live? (5 to 10 years)
10. How many chickens are there in the world? (24 billion)
11. What is the record number of yolks found in a single egg? (nine)
12. How many yolks did the largest egg have (5)
    

More suggestions:

If this activity was a success there are other ways you can practice reading for specific information.
It is a good idea to find texts that the students might really have to read.

e.g. Photocopy the accommodation flats for rent section from a newspaper and ask questions such as "How much is the bedsit in Acacia Avenue?" Other sources could be :- Job adverts, brochures, TV and entertainment, etc.

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