advanced reading assignment

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Critical Thinking Reading Comprehension Worksheets

• Take these as online quizzes here!

Short Story Reading Comprehension Worksheets

• Beginning Level
• Answers for this series are included at the end of each worksheet.
• "My Friend" - Low Beginning. 3 answer choices. 7 questions. 74 words.
• "My House" - Low Beginning. 3 answer choices. 7 questions. 92 words.
• "Time to..." - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 11 questions. 89 words.
• "My Family" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 6 questions. 90 words.
• "Rainy Day" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 78 words.
• "A Call to the Pool" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 116 words.
• "The Singing Bird" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 96 words.
• "Seeing Stars" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 8 questions. 92 words.
• "I Fly" - Low Beginning. 4 answer choices. 4 questions. 113 words.
• "The Drive" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 120 words.
• "Zach's Animals" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 104 words.
• "Griffin's Talents" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 9 questions. 112 words.
• "A Happy Visitor" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 170 words.
• "An Adventure" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 177 words.
• "Running" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 5 questions. 148 words.
• "Paul Cooks" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 112 words.
• "Bella Hides" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 8 questions. 135 words.
• "First Prize" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 8 questions. 155 words.
• "What Number?" - Mid Beginning. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 154 words.
• "The Interview" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 9 questions. 205 words.
• "Julian's Work" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 194 words.
• "Talia's Special Day" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 204 words.
• "One Hundred Dollars" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 273 words.
• "New Shoes for Maddy" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 11 questions. 223 words.
• "The 20" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 256 words.
• "Big City Noise" - High Beginning. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 238 words.
• Intermediate Level
• "By the Water" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 9 questions. 225 words.
• "A Cold Day" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 14 questions. 286 words.
• "Vet Emergency!" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 247 words.
• "Late" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 14 questions. 284 words.
• "The Brenners" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 297 words.
• "Bullied" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 197 words.
• "The New School" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 14 questions. 286 words.
• "The Park" - Low Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 11 questions. 297 words.
• "Worth Working For" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 280 words.
• "The Rent Man" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 215 words.
• "Time with Grandpa" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 9 questions. 237 words.
• "The Bus Driver" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 15 questions. 294 words.
• "A Day Like No Other" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 305 words.
• "A Mystery" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 247 words.
• "Just One Touch" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 15 questions. 326 words.
• "Wanga" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 340 words.
• "Ana Finds an Apartment" - Mid Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 408 words.
• "Guermo's Surprise" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 9 questions. 372 words .
• "Canopy of Nature" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 8 questions. 332 words .
• "Blizzard in Birmingham" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 319 words.
• "A Christmas in March" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 385 words.
• "Bail" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 301 words.
• "Clean Water Act" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 632 words.
• "BB" - High Intermediate. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 511 words .
• Advanced Level
• "The Mini Problem" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 291 words .
• "Flower Power" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 368 words.
• "Seeing Clearly" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 284 words .
• "Accused" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 285 words.
• "City Girl" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 13 questions. 429 words.
• "Fried" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 235 words.
• "Tattoo" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 11 questions. 350 words.
• "The Transfers" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 381 words.
• "Wild" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 493 words.
• "Scorpion" - Low Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 333 words
• "Remains of a Marriage" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 11 questions. 345 words.
• "Museum Hours" - Mid Advanced. 4 answer choices. 10 questions. 179 words.
• "Seeing Through" - High Advanced. 5 answer choices. 10 questions. 326 words.
• "Ursula Pugh" - High Advanced. 5 answer choices. 8 questions. 324 words.
• "Dreams" - High Advanced. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 357 words.
• "Tracks" - High Advanced. 5 answer choices. 11 questions. 531 words.
• "Love Train" - High Advanced. 5 answer choices. 12 questions. 646 words.
• "The Storm" - High Advanced. 4 answer choices. 12 questions. 407 words.

Informational Passages Reading Comprehension Worksheets

In these reading comprehension worksheets, students are asked questions about information they have read about a specific topic. each passage reads similar to a newspaper of journal article, and provides interesting information about some aspect of history, nature, mechanics, science, art, and more. questions involve critical thinking with a focus on logic and inference..

• Answer Key - This answer key is available but still under development.
• "The Sun" - Low Beginning. 3 questions. Under 50 words.
• "Gas" - Low Beginning. 3 questions. Under 50 words.
• "Music" - Low Beginning. 4 questions. Under 50 words.
• "Birds" - Low Beginning. 4 questions. Under 50 words.
• "The Heart" - Low Beginning. 4 questions. Under 50 words.
• "The Butterfly" - Low Beginning. 5 questions. Under 50 words.
• "Pigs" - Low Beginning. 3 questions. Under 50 words.
• "The Brain" - Low Beginning. 3 questions. Under 50 words.
• "The Ocean" - Low Beginning. 7 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Trees" - Low Beginning. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Alligators" - Low Beginning. 6 questions. Under 100 words.
• "The Blow-Dryer" - Low Beginning. 5 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Green Grass" - Low Beginning. 6 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Taste" - Low Beginning. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Bees" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Frogs" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Beds" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Humans" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Fish" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Houses" - Mid Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Soda Pop" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Tea" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Ice Fishing" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Bears" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Flags" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Leonardo Da Vinci" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words..
• "Tennis" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Dogs" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Money" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Abraham Lincoln" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Corn" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Umbrellas" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Ben Franklin" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Cars" - High Beginning. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• Answer Key - This is the answer key for to the intermediate level informational passages.
• "Helicopters" - Low Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Yellowstone National Park" - Low Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Empress of the Blues" - Low Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "The Cactus" - Low Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Space Exploration Voyagers 1 and 2" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Television" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Hibernation and Estivation" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Marco Polo" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Movie Ratings" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Birdsongs" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Counting" - Mid Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Easter Island" - High Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Mosquitoes" - High Intermediate. 12 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Fingerprints" - High Intermediate. 11 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Mother's Day" - High Intermediate. 10 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Europe" - High Intermediate. 12 questions. Under 700 words.
• Answer Key - This is the answer key for to the advanced level informational passages.
• "Chocolate" - Low Advanced. 10 questions. Under 600 words.
• "Houses Around the World" - Low Advanced. 10 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Cells" - Low Advanced. 10 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Soccer" - Low Advanced. 12 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Bathtubs" - Low Advanced. 12 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Pollution" - Low Advanced. 12 questions. Under 700 words.
• "Interstate Highways" - Low Advanced. 10 questions. Under 800 words.
• "The U.S. Census" - Low Advanced. 10 questions. Under 800 words.
• "Sleep" - Low Advanced. 11 questions. Under 800 words.
• "The U.S. Postal Service" - Mid Advanced. 11 questions. Under 800 words.
• "Chemical Elements" - Mid Advanced. 11 questions. Under 800 words.
• "Africa" - Mid Advanced. 11 questions. Under 1000 words.

Technical Reading Comprehension Worksheets

In these reading comprehension worksheets, students are asked questions about the meaning, significance, intention, structure, inference, and vocabulary used in each passage. each passage reads like an encyclopedic or technical journal article. answers for worksheets in this section can be found at the end of each individual worksheet..

• "Water" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 300 words.
• "Paper" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 300 words.
• "The Flu" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "Nuts" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "The Sun" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "The White House" - Beginning level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "Soap" - Intermediate level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "Clocks" - Intermediate level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "The Robin" - Intermediate level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "Hybrid Vehicles" - Intermediate level. 4 questions with answers included. Under 500 words.
• "Photography" - Intermediate level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 500 words.
• "Biomimetics" - Intermediate level. 4 questions with answers included. Under 700 words.
• "The Great Debates" - Intermediate level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 400 words.
• "Salt" - Advanced level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 700 words.
• "Colony Collapse" - Advanced level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 600 words.
• "Columbian Exchange" - Advanced level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 700 words.
• "Ethanol" - Advanced level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 600 words.
• "Generations" - Advanced level. 3 questions with answers included. Under 600 words.
• "The Hubble Telescope" - Advanced level. 7 questions with answers included. Under 1000 words.
• "Intellegence Augmentation" - Advanced level. 5 questions with answers included. Under 1000 words.

Role Play Reading Comprehension Worksheets

In these reading comprehension worksheets, students can increase their understanding of colloquial and idiomatic expressions and get a feel for conversational english. they also allow several students to participate at the same time - which makes them really fun great for use in school or at home..

• Answer Key - This is the answer key to the role play worksheets.
• "What Time Is It?" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "How Are You?" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Tie Your Shoes!" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Where Are My Glasses?" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "A Cookie" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "Where Are My Keys?" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 100 words.
• "City Life, Country Life" - Beginning Level. 10 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Flu Shot" - Intermediate Level. 5 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Vinegar" - Intermediate Level. 4 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Wait for Me!" - Intermediate Level. 8 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Glasses" - Intermediate Level. 8 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Hungry" - Advanced Level. 8 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Want to Know a Secret?" - Advanced Level. 8 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Milk and Aesthetics" - Advanced Level. 8 questions. Under 500 words.

Dual Version Reading Comprehension Worksheets

In each of these reading comprehension worksheets, the same story is told, but with two versions: one that is basic, and one that is more advanced. this allows students to make direct comparisons between the advanced version to the more basic one, and makes for a powerful learning experience..

• Answer Key - Coming Soon!
• "An Overcast Day" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 200 words.
• "Who Knows My Name?" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 200 words.
• "A Call to the Pool" - Beginning Level. 6 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Oh No!" - Beginning Level. 8 questions. Under 300 words.
• "An Adventure" - Beginning Level. 6 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Happy Birthday" - Beginning Level. 4 questions. Under 400 words.
• "My Family" - Beginning Level. 8 questions. Under 300 words.
• "My Family" - Beginning Level. 5 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Driving Directions" - Beginning Level. 6 questions. Under 400 words.
• "A Happy Visitor" - Beginning Level. 7 questions. Under 300 words.
• "The Singing Bird" - Intermediate Level. 10 questions. Under 300 words.
• "Violet Makes a Cake" - Intermediate Level. 8 questions. Under 400 words.
• "A Visit to the Doctor" - Intermediate Level. 7 questions. Under 400 words.
• "Making Dinner" - Intermediate Level. 8 questions. Under 400 words.
• "The Market" - Intermediate Level. 10 questions. Under 500 words.
• "Maria Gets Her License" - Intermediate Level. 8 questions. Under 500 words.
• "A Paper for School" - Advanced Level. 7 questions. Under 300 words.
• "A Birthday Surprise" - Advanced Level. 7 questions. Under 600 words.
• "Getting a New Job" - Advanced Level. 8 questions. Under 600 words.
• "The Dinner Party" - Advanced Level. 9 questions. Under 600 words.

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Advanced English reading

From linguapress ~   levels b2 - c1 - c2.

• English grammar
• Advanced reading
• Intermediate reading
• Language games and puzzles

• NEW ►  Article with  audio podcast .  ► A short guide to phonetics - the sounds of British English
• For lots of ideas for using reading resources in the classroom see Reading Comprehension
• To select articles by classroom activity,  see ► Thematic exercise and classroom activity index .

1. Reading comprehension - articles on life and issues in  North America

Life in  america .

• NEW     ►   The US Presidential elections '24  - with  audio  
• NEW     ► The decline of WASP America - from Kennedy to Trump . The USA has changed massively since the time of Kennedy
• ► Los Angeles - city on the brink -   with audio
•  (UK / USA)   From Magna Carta to American democracy  President Biden says that US democracy is at risk; this text looks at the historic origins of the Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition
• (Technical)   audio   The electric car revolution, realistic or optimistic?  With interactive worksheet. Can the world really convert to electric vehicles by the middle of the century?
• Mark Twain and the frogs of Calaveras County . With audio  and interactive worksheet. A California festival is a tribute to Twain's famous short story.
• The American way of eating . With audio  and interactive worksheet. A short look at the origins of fast food.
• Steaming on the Mississippi . With audio  and interactive worksheet.  The Mississippi's famous paddleboats.
• Aeroponics . Agriculture for tomorrow's world. (Technical English)
• Nevada and its Extraterrestrials . Have aliens from another planet really been seen near the township of Rachel ?
• Log cabins and the White House . Now with audio   Many US presidents have come from humble roots.
• Gettysburg - the terrible battle . A dark page in US history - with four exercises and activities
• Awaiting the Big One . Another massive earthquake could hit California very soon
• The story of Ellis Island , With  audio  - The gateway to America through which millions once passed.
• Skyscrapers  Now found in cities worldwide, skyscrapers were once symbols of America.
• Wall Street Culture - One could call it America's most popular street culture.
• Thanksgiving  With  audio  - a very American festival.
• Mardi gras in New Orleans - the most colorful festival in the USA, by John Robillard
• College sport USA - With audio   Sport is part of US campus life, but at what cost?
• Rodeo - the sport of the American West  .
• The Yukon Quest - The 1000 mile race that is the toughest race in the world..
• And among  new texts available only in the Linguapress paperback or hadcover collection  ► A Background to America
• Harriet Tubman and the Underground railroad -  the lady whose face will soon be on the new $20 bill - With  audio
• The settling of the Cherokee Strip - how the West was opened - With  audio
• American and Chinese - the story of Chinese America  - With  audio

America : people and society

• NEW   Taylor Swift - the sensation of a generation   With audio
• NEW    The Rosenberg affair  and the legacy of McCarthyism in the USA
• Thinking it over with baby . With   audio  and interactive worksheet.  Being a teenager and a mom at the same time is usually not a good idea.
• The Man who changed America . With  audio  Henry Ford did more than anyone else to shape 20th century life.
• Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad
• Hillary Clinton - the early years  . by Nicole Bernheim.
• Citizen Welles - a short biography of Orson Welles, the greatest unsuccessful Holywood director.
• Who killed Martin Luther King? With  audio  Mystery still surrounds the assassination of America's greatest civil rights leader.
• Rosa Parks -  With audio   the young lady whose defiance helped start the Civil rights movement
• So just who is Angelyne ? - the Hollywood celebrity who's famous just for being famous
• America's Amish; model society?  A look at some Americans with an unusual lifestyle
• America's teen courts - Where teenage offenders are judged by other teens..
• Crime-time Basketball - Midnight basketball aims to keep young people off the streets..
• America's Drive-in Movie theaters - how much longer will they last?
• Americans fat and thin - A third of Americans are seriously overweight.
• The Mormons, a curiously American phenomenon .  One of America's biggest fringe religions. 

American music

• NEW ►   Taylor Swift - the sensation of a generation   With audio
• Woodie Guthrie . The Dustbowl baladeer.
• The Story of the Blues - with   audio  -  by Robert Springer
• Interview with Leonard Cohen . A Linguapress exclusive.
• Jewel, the voice from Alaska - the singing sensation from America's far north.
• Mississippi music - - with   audio  Jazz, blues, soul, rock 'n' roll, and Elvis - they all originated in the Mississippi valley.
• John Lennon - Remembering the death in New York of the Beatle who changed the world..

USA : places and environment

• NEW     ► Los Angeles - city on the brink -   with audio
• Highway 66 revisited -- with   audio - A trip down America's legendary "Route 66"
• Mighty Mississippi - With  audio    the river that links and divides the USA
• Bodie - where the West was once wildest - Visiting a ghost town in the mountains of California.
• America's bald eagles - a story of success . How the emblematic bird of the USA has been saved from extinction.
• Save the Everglades - Florida's unique wetlands are in serious danger.
• California's Water Wars - Larry Wood reports on a critical issue facing Californians.
• Deserts of America - with   audio - A large part of the western USA is covered by desert, and it is getting larger.
• A town called Sturgis - Mecca for Harley Davidson riders.

International themes,  language

• NEW   The electric car revolution, realistic or optimistic?  With interactive worksheet. (technical English)
• NEW   A rose by any other name . - with  audio  - Words, meaning and political correctness
• Accents and dialects . - with  audio  - An introduction to varieties of spoken English
•  Globalization? What globalization?  It's here to stay, but changes are needed

2. Reading comprehension - articles on life and issues in the UK and Ireland

• NEW   King Charles, the Monarchy and their future Is there a future for the British monarchy?. with  audio
• NEW   Guy Fawkes and bonfire night The nearest thing that Britain has to a National day celebration.
• The Oxford and Cambridge boat race This great amateur sporting event is almost 200 years old.
• Just who are the English ? Trying to define Englishness is not a very easy task.
• Britain - at any cost ? Human traffickers are waiting to exploit people who want to come to the UK.
• English pub signs  What lies behind the  sometimes strange names of English pubs ?
• From smugglers to people trafficking: old activity, new phase - Smuggling has long been an illicit activity on England's south coast
• Tea and the British - with  audio  - Tea has been Britain's favourite drink for more than two centuries
• Life in Umbridge - Finding a place to live in rural Britain can be hard for ordinary folk.
• London's Notting Hill Carnival - Europe's biggest street carnival
• Britain's Chinese come out on top - they are the most successful group in modern Britain
• All you need is Love -With audio A true story from Ireland, by Leanne Meyer
• Nature / wildlife: the Bird Man of the Isles - an interview from the Scottish isle of Skye.

Britain : people

• Charles Darwin - a genius remembered with audio and interactive worksheet. A scientific text for general readers.
• Topical    Queen Elizabeth II - 1926 - 2022  The Queen who almost wasn't with audio and interactive worksheet. Queen Elibath II was not born to be Queen...
• Agatha Christie - She died in 1976, but she's still a worldwide bestseller.
• Stephen Hawking - the world's greatest scientist - who died in 2018
• J.R.R. Tolkien - the Oxford professor who wrote the Lord of the Rings
• Shakespeare's enduring heritage  With audio and interactive worksheet. Shakespeare died over 400 years ago, so why is he still so important ?
• Drugs: Days in the death of Francis X - interview with a heroin addict
• More resources coming

3. Technical English, short stories and word games

Technical english.

• NEW    The electric car revolution, realistic or optimistic?  With interactive worksheet. Can the world really convert to electric vehicles by the middle of the century?
• NEW   Aeroponics . Agriculture for tomorrow's world. 
• Fox Talbot and the origins of photography  , The first photo was taken in... 1835 !
•   GM crops: Frankenstein food?  Are genetically modified crops a huge risk, or the future of agriculture?
• Skiing in the wind  How science and technology help skiers go faster
•   The story of the jet plane  With audio
• Charles Babbage, the father of the computer   (short text).
• Meet Robodog  (hard): 

Advanced English short stories and games

• NEW   A suitable job - by Lindsay Townsend. A short story from Britain
• A few good reasons - by Sue Quinn. A short story from the USA   with audio
• For Elise - by Pamela Garza. A short story from the USA  with audio
• Short story: The Car  - by Andrew Rossiter. A short story in advanced level English  with audio
• Short story: Blue Gum Tree - by Pat Boyle. A short story from New Zealand  with audio
• Short Story: Lucky Jim - by Walda Cameron. A short story from the USA.  with  NEW   audio
• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain (Appendix to Mark Twain and the frogs of Calaveras County )
• Quiz: Famous Americans

4. The English language (information texts)

• Accents and dialects  -   with  audio   different varieties of English
• Word stress in English   with  audio how to know how to stress words correctly
• A rose by any other name . - with  audio  - Words, meaning and political correctness
• A short history of the English language  from the Middle Ages to today

English for  B2, C1 and C2 levels. Advanced English reading resources 

5.2 Effective Reading Strategies

Questions to Consider:

• What methods can you incorporate into your routine to allow adequate time for reading?
• What are the benefits and approaches to active reading?
• Do your courses or major have specific reading requirements?

Allowing Adequate Time for Reading

You should determine the reading requirements and expectations for every class very early in the semester. You also need to understand why you are reading the particular text you are assigned. Do you need to read closely for minute details that determine cause and effect? Or is your instructor asking you to skim several sources so you become more familiar with the topic? Knowing this reasoning will help you decide your timing, what notes to take, and how best to undertake the reading assignment.

Depending on the makeup of your schedule, you may end up reading both primary sources—such as legal documents, historic letters, or diaries—as well as textbooks, articles, and secondary sources, such as summaries or argumentative essays that use primary sources to stake a claim. You may also need to read current journalistic texts to stay current in local or global affairs. A realistic approach to scheduling your time to allow you to read and review all the reading you have for the semester will help you accomplish what can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task.

When you allow adequate time in your hectic schedule for reading, you are investing in your own success. Reading isn’t a magic pill, but it may seem like it when you consider all the benefits people reap from this ordinary practice. Famous successful people throughout history have been voracious readers. In fact, former U.S. president Harry Truman once said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Writer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, inventor, and also former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson claimed “I cannot live without books” at a time when keeping and reading books was an expensive pastime. Knowing what it meant to be kept from the joys of reading, 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” And finally, George R. R. Martin, the prolific author of the wildly successful Game of Thrones empire, declared, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”

You can make time for reading in a number of ways that include determining your usual reading pace and speed, scheduling active reading sessions, and practicing recursive reading strategies.

Determining Reading Speed and Pacing

To determine your reading speed, select a section of text—passages in a textbook or pages in a novel. Time yourself reading that material for exactly 5 minutes, and note how much reading you accomplished in those 5 minutes. Multiply the amount of reading you accomplished in 5 minutes by 12 to determine your average reading pace (5 times 12 equals the 60 minutes of an hour). Of course, your reading pace will be different and take longer if you are taking notes while you read, but this calculation of reading pace gives you a good way to estimate your reading speed that you can adapt to other forms of reading.

So, for instance, if Marta was able to read 4 pages of a dense novel for her English class in 5 minutes, she should be able to read about 48 pages in one hour. Knowing this, Marta can accurately determine how much time she needs to devote to finishing the novel within a set amount of time, instead of just guessing. If the novel Marta is reading is 497 pages, then Marta would take the total page count (497) and divide that by her hourly reading rate (48 pages/hour) to determine that she needs about 10 to 11 hours overall. To finish the novel spread out over two weeks, Marta needs to read a little under an hour a day to accomplish this goal.

Calculating your reading rate in this manner does not take into account days where you’re too distracted and you have to reread passages or days when you just aren’t in the mood to read. And your reading rate will likely vary depending on how dense the content you’re reading is (e.g., a complex textbook vs. a comic book). Your pace may slow down somewhat if you are not very interested in what the text is about. What this method will help you do is be realistic about your reading time as opposed to waging a guess based on nothing and then becoming worried when you have far more reading to finish than the time available.

Chapter 3 , offers more detail on how best to determine your speed from one type of reading to the next so you are better able to schedule your reading.

Scheduling Set Times for Active Reading

Active reading takes longer than reading through passages without stopping. You may not need to read your latest sci-fi series actively while you’re lounging on the beach, but many other reading situations demand more attention from you. Active reading is particularly important for college courses. You are a scholar actively engaging with the text by posing questions, seeking answers, and clarifying any confusing elements. Plan to spend at least twice as long to read actively than to read passages without taking notes or otherwise marking select elements of the text.

To determine the time you need for active reading, use the same calculations you use to determine your traditional reading speed and double it. Remember that you need to determine your reading pace for all the classes you have in a particular semester and multiply your speed by the number of classes you have that require different types of reading.

Practicing Recursive Reading Strategies

One fact about reading for college courses that may become frustrating is that, in a way, it never ends. For all the reading you do, you end up doing even more rereading. It may be the same content, but you may be reading the passage more than once to detect the emphasis the writer places on one aspect of the topic or how frequently the writer dismisses a significant counterargument. This rereading is called recursive reading.

For most of what you read at the college level, you are trying to make sense of the text for a specific purpose—not just because the topic interests or entertains you. You need your full attention to decipher everything that’s going on in complex reading material—and you even need to be considering what the writer of the piece may not be including and why. This is why reading for comprehension is recursive.

Specifically, this boils down to seeing reading not as a formula but as a process that is far more circular than linear. You may read a selection from beginning to end, which is an excellent starting point, but for comprehension, you’ll need to go back and reread passages to determine meaning and make connections between the reading and the bigger learning environment that led you to the selection—that may be a single course or a program in your college, or it may be the larger discipline, such as all biologists or the community of scholars studying beach erosion.

People often say writing is rewriting. For college courses, reading is rereading.

Strong readers engage in numerous steps, sometimes combining more than one step simultaneously, but knowing the steps nonetheless. They include, not always in this order:

• bringing any prior knowledge about the topic to the reading session,
• asking yourself pertinent questions, both orally and in writing, about the content you are reading,
• inferring and/or implying information from what you read,
• learning unfamiliar discipline-specific terms,
• evaluating what you are reading, and eventually,
• applying what you’re reading to other learning and life situations you encounter.

Let’s break these steps into manageable chunks, because you are actually doing quite a lot when you read.

Accessing Prior Knowledge

When you read, you naturally think of anything else you may know about the topic, but when you read deliberately and actively, you make yourself more aware of accessing this prior knowledge. Have you ever watched a documentary about this topic? Did you study some aspect of it in another class? Do you have a hobby that is somehow connected to this material? All of this thinking will help you make sense of what you are reading.

Application

Imagining that you were given a chapter to read in your American history class about the Gettysburg Address, write down what you already know about this historic document. How might thinking through this prior knowledge help you better understand the text?

Asking Questions

Humans are naturally curious beings. As you read actively, you should be asking questions about the topic you are reading. Don’t just say the questions in your mind; write them down. You may ask: Why is this topic important? What is the relevance of this topic currently? Was this topic important a long time ago but irrelevant now? Why did my professor assign this reading?

You need a place where you can actually write down these questions; a separate page in your notes is a good place to begin. If you are taking notes on your computer, start a new document and write down the questions. Leave some room to answer the questions when you begin and again after you read.

Inferring and Implying

When you read, you can take the information on the page and infer , or conclude responses to related challenges from evidence or from your own reasoning. A student will likely be able to infer what material the professor will include on an exam by taking good notes throughout the classes leading up to the test.

Writers may imply information without directly stating a fact for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a writer may not want to come out explicitly and state a bias, but may imply or hint at his or her preference for one political party or another. You have to read carefully to find implications because they are indirect, but watching for them will help you comprehend the whole meaning of a passage.

Learning Vocabulary

Vocabulary specific to certain disciplines helps practitioners in that field engage and communicate with each other. Few people beyond undertakers and archeologists likely use the term sarcophagus in everyday communications, but for those disciplines, it is a meaningful distinction. Looking at the example, you can use context clues to figure out the meaning of the term sarcophagus because it is something undertakers and/or archeologists would recognize. At the very least, you can guess that it has something to do with death. As a potential professional in the field you’re studying, you need to know the lingo. You may already have a system in place to learn discipline-specific vocabulary, so use what you know works for you. Two strong strategies are to look up words in a dictionary (online or hard copy) to ensure you have the exact meaning for your discipline and to keep a dedicated list of words you see often in your reading. You can list the words with a short definition so you have a quick reference guide to help you learn the vocabulary.

Intelligent people always question and evaluate. This doesn’t mean they don’t trust others; they just need verification of facts to understand a topic well. It doesn’t make sense to learn incomplete or incorrect information about a subject just because you didn’t take the time to evaluate all the sources at your disposal. When early explorers were afraid to sail the world for fear of falling off the edge, they weren’t stupid; they just didn’t have all the necessary data to evaluate the situation.

When you evaluate a text, you are seeking to understand the presented topic. Depending on how long the text is, you will perform a number of steps and repeat many of these steps to evaluate all the elements the author presents. When you evaluate a text, you need to do the following:

• Scan the title and all headings.
• Read through the entire passage fully.
• Question what main point the author is making.
• Decide who the audience is.
• Identify what evidence/support the author uses.
• Consider if the author presents a balanced perspective on the main point.
• Recognize if the author introduced any biases in the text.

When you go through a text looking for each of these elements, you need to go beyond just answering the surface question; for instance, the audience may be a specific field of scientists, but could anyone else understand the text with some explanation? Why would that be important?

Analysis Question

Think of an article you need to read for a class. Take the steps above on how to evaluate a text, and apply the steps to the article. When you accomplish the task in each step, ask yourself and take notes to answer the question: Why is this important? For example, when you read the title, does that give you any additional information that will help you comprehend the text? If the text were written for a different audience, what might the author need to change to accommodate that group? How does an author’s bias distort an argument? This deep evaluation allows you to fully understand the main ideas and place the text in context with other material on the same subject, with current events, and within the discipline.

When you learn something new, it always connects to other knowledge you already have. One challenge we have is applying new information. It may be interesting to know the distance to the moon, but how do we apply it to something we need to do? If your biology instructor asked you to list several challenges of colonizing Mars and you do not know much about that planet’s exploration, you may be able to use your knowledge of how far Earth is from the moon to apply it to the new task. You may have to read several other texts in addition to reading graphs and charts to find this information.

That was the challenge the early space explorers faced along with myriad unknowns before space travel was a more regular occurrence. They had to take what they already knew and could study and read about and apply it to an unknown situation. These explorers wrote down their challenges, failures, and successes, and now scientists read those texts as a part of the ever-growing body of text about space travel. Application is a sophisticated level of thinking that helps turn theory into practice and challenges into successes.

Preparing to Read for Specific Disciplines in College

Different disciplines in college may have specific expectations, but you can depend on all subjects asking you to read to some degree. In this college reading requirement, you can succeed by learning to read actively, researching the topic and author, and recognizing how your own preconceived notions affect your reading. Reading for college isn’t the same as reading for pleasure or even just reading to learn something on your own because you are casually interested.

In college courses, your instructor may ask you to read articles, chapters, books, or primary sources (those original documents about which we write and study, such as letters between historic figures or the Declaration of Independence). Your instructor may want you to have a general background on a topic before you dive into that subject in class, so that you know the history of a topic, can start thinking about it, and can engage in a class discussion with more than a passing knowledge of the issue.

If you are about to participate in an in-depth six-week consideration of the U.S. Constitution but have never read it or anything written about it, you will have a hard time looking at anything in detail or understanding how and why it is significant. As you can imagine, a great deal has been written about the Constitution by scholars and citizens since the late 1700s when it was first put to paper (that’s how they did it then). While the actual document isn’t that long (about 12–15 pages depending on how it is presented), learning the details on how it came about, who was involved, and why it was and still is a significant document would take a considerable amount of time to read and digest. So, how do you do it all? Especially when you may have an instructor who drops hints that you may also love to read a historic novel covering the same time period . . . in your spare time , not required, of course! It can be daunting, especially if you are taking more than one course that has time-consuming reading lists. With a few strategic techniques, you can manage it all, but know that you must have a plan and schedule your required reading so you are also able to pick up that recommended historic novel—it may give you an entirely new perspective on the issue.

Strategies for Reading in College Disciplines

No universal law exists for how much reading instructors and institutions expect college students to undertake for various disciplines. Suffice it to say, it’s a LOT.

For most students, it is the volume of reading that catches them most off guard when they begin their college careers. A full course load might require 10–15 hours of reading per week, some of that covering content that will be more difficult than the reading for other courses.

You cannot possibly read word-for-word every single document you need to read for all your classes. That doesn’t mean you give up or decide to only read for your favorite classes or concoct a scheme to read 17 percent for each class and see how that works for you. You need to learn to skim, annotate, and take notes. All of these techniques will help you comprehend more of what you read, which is why we read in the first place. We’ll talk more later about annotating and note-taking, but for now consider what you know about skimming as opposed to active reading.

Skimming is not just glancing over the words on a page (or screen) to see if any of it sticks. Effective skimming allows you to take in the major points of a passage without the need for a time-consuming reading session that involves your active use of notations and annotations. Often you will need to engage in that painstaking level of active reading, but skimming is the first step—not an alternative to deep reading. The fact remains that neither do you need to read everything nor could you possibly accomplish that given your limited time. So learn this valuable skill of skimming as an accompaniment to your overall study tool kit, and with practice and experience, you will fully understand how valuable it is.

When you skim, look for guides to your understanding: headings, definitions, pull quotes, tables, and context clues. Textbooks are often helpful for skimming—they may already have made some of these skimming guides in bold or a different color, and chapters often follow a predictable outline. Some even provide an overview and summary for sections or chapters. Use whatever you can get, but don’t stop there. In textbooks that have some reading guides, or especially in text that does not, look for introductory words such as First or The purpose of this article  . . . or summary words such as In conclusion  . . . or Finally . These guides will help you read only those sentences or paragraphs that will give you the overall meaning or gist of a passage or book.

Now move to the meat of the passage. You want to take in the reading as a whole. For a book, look at the titles of each chapter if available. Read each chapter’s introductory paragraph and determine why the writer chose this particular order. Depending on what you’re reading, the chapters may be only informational, but often you’re looking for a specific argument. What position is the writer claiming? What support, counterarguments, and conclusions is the writer presenting?

Don’t think of skimming as a way to buzz through a boring reading assignment. It is a skill you should master so you can engage, at various levels, with all the reading you need to accomplish in college. End your skimming session with a few notes—terms to look up, questions you still have, and an overall summary. And recognize that you likely will return to that book or article for a more thorough reading if the material is useful.

Active Reading Strategies

Active reading differs significantly from skimming or reading for pleasure. You can think of active reading as a sort of conversation between you and the text (maybe between you and the author, but you don’t want to get the author’s personality too involved in this metaphor because that may skew your engagement with the text).

When you sit down to determine what your different classes expect you to read and you create a reading schedule to ensure you complete all the reading, think about when you should read the material strategically, not just how to get it all done . You should read textbook chapters and other reading assignments before you go into a lecture about that information. Don’t wait to see how the lecture goes before you read the material, or you may not understand the information in the lecture. Reading before class helps you put ideas together between your reading and the information you hear and discuss in class.

Different disciplines naturally have different types of texts, and you need to take this into account when you schedule your time for reading class material. For example, you may look at a poem for your world literature class and assume that it will not take you long to read because it is relatively short compared to the dense textbook you have for your economics class. But reading and understanding a poem can take a considerable amount of time when you realize you may need to stop numerous times to review the separate word meanings and how the words form images and connections throughout the poem.

The SQ3R Reading Strategy

You may have heard of the SQ3R method for active reading in your early education. This valuable technique is perfect for college reading. The title stands for S urvey, Q uestion, R ead, R ecite, R eview, and you can use the steps on virtually any assigned passage. Designed by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1961 book Effective Study, the active reading strategy gives readers a systematic way to work through any reading material.

Survey is similar to skimming. You look for clues to meaning by reading the titles, headings, introductions, summary, captions for graphics, and keywords. You can survey almost anything connected to the reading selection, including the copyright information, the date of the journal article, or the names and qualifications of the author(s). In this step, you decide what the general meaning is for the reading selection.

Question is your creation of questions to seek the main ideas, support, examples, and conclusions of the reading selection. Ask yourself these questions separately. Try to create valid questions about what you are about to read that have come into your mind as you engaged in the Survey step. Try turning the headings of the sections in the chapter into questions. Next, how does what you’re reading relate to you, your school, your community, and the world?

Read is when you actually read the passage. Try to find the answers to questions you developed in the previous step. Decide how much you are reading in chunks, either by paragraph for more complex readings or by section or even by an entire chapter. When you finish reading the selection, stop to make notes. Answer the questions by writing a note in the margin or other white space of the text.

You may also carefully underline or highlight text in addition to your notes. Use caution here that you don’t try to rush this step by haphazardly circling terms or the other extreme of underlining huge chunks of text. Don’t over-mark. You aren’t likely to remember what these cryptic marks mean later when you come back to use this active reading session to study. The text is the source of information—your marks and notes are just a way to organize and make sense of that information.

Recite means to speak out loud. By reciting, you are engaging other senses to remember the material—you read it (visual) and you said it (auditory). Stop reading momentarily in the step to answer your questions or clarify confusing sentences or paragraphs. You can recite a summary of what the text means to you. If you are not in a place where you can verbalize, such as a library or classroom, you can accomplish this step adequately by  saying  it in your head; however, to get the biggest bang for your buck, try to find a place where you can speak aloud. You may even want to try explaining the content to a friend.

Review is a recap. Go back over what you read and add more notes, ensuring you have captured the main points of the passage, identified the supporting evidence and examples, and understood the overall meaning. You may need to repeat some or all of the SQR3 steps during your review depending on the length and complexity of the material. Before you end your active reading session, write a short (no more than one page is optimal) summary of the text you read.

Reading Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary sources are original documents we study and from which we glean information; primary sources include letters, first editions of books, legal documents, and a variety of other texts. When scholars look at these documents to understand a period in history or a scientific challenge and then write about their findings, the scholar’s article is considered a secondary source. Readers have to keep several factors in mind when reading both primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources may contain dated material we now know is inaccurate. It may contain personal beliefs and biases the original writer didn’t intent to be openly published, and it may even present fanciful or creative ideas that do not support current knowledge. Readers can still gain great insight from primary sources, but readers need to understand the context from which the writer of the primary source wrote the text.

Likewise, secondary sources are inevitably another person’s perspective on the primary source, so a reader of secondary sources must also be aware of potential biases or preferences the secondary source writer inserts in the writing that may persuade an incautious reader to interpret the primary source in a particular manner.

For example, if you were to read a secondary source that is examining the U.S. Declaration of Independence (the primary source), you would have a much clearer idea of how the secondary source scholar presented the information from the primary source if you also read the Declaration for yourself instead of trusting the other writer’s interpretation. Most scholars are honest in writing secondary sources, but you as a reader of the source are trusting the writer to present a balanced perspective of the primary source. When possible, you should attempt to read a primary source in conjunction with the secondary source. The Internet helps immensely with this practice.

What Students Say

• How engaging the material is or how much I enjoy reading it.
• Whether or not the course is part of my major.
• Whether or not the instructor assesses knowledge from the reading (through quizzes, for example), or requires assignments based on the reading.
• Whether or not knowledge or information from the reading is required to participate in lecture.
• I read all of the assigned material.
• I read most of the assigned material.
• I skim the text and read the captions, examples, or summaries.
• I use a systematic method such as the Cornell method or something similar.
• I highlight or underline all the important information.
• I create outlines and/or note-cards.
• I use an app or program.
• I write notes in my text (print or digital).
• I don’t have a style. I just write down what seems important.
• I don't take many notes.

You can also take the anonymous What Students Say surveys to add your voice to this textbook. Your responses will be included in updates.

Students offered their views on these questions, and the results are displayed in the graphs below.

What is the most influential factor in how thoroughly you read the material for a given course?

What best describes your reading approach for required texts/materials for your classes?

What best describes your note-taking style?

Researching Topic and Author

During your preview stage, sometimes called pre-reading, you can easily pick up on information from various sources that may help you understand the material you’re reading more fully or place it in context with other important works in the discipline. If your selection is a book, flip it over or turn to the back pages and look for an author’s biography or note from the author. See if the book itself contains any other information about the author or the subject matter.

The main things you need to recall from your reading in college are the topics covered and how the information fits into the discipline. You can find these parts throughout the textbook chapter in the form of headings in larger and bold font, summary lists, and important quotations pulled out of the narrative. Use these features as you read to help you determine what the most important ideas are.

Remember, many books use quotations about the book or author as testimonials in a marketing approach to sell more books, so these may not be the most reliable sources of unbiased opinions, but it’s a start. Sometimes you can find a list of other books the author has written near the front of a book. Do you recognize any of the other titles? Can you do an Internet search for the name of the book or author? Go beyond the search results that want you to buy the book and see if you can glean any other relevant information about the author or the reading selection. Beyond a standard Internet search, try the library article database. These are more relevant to academic disciplines and contain resources you typically will not find in a standard search engine. If you are unfamiliar with how to use the library database, ask a reference librarian on campus. They are often underused resources that can point you in the right direction.

Understanding Your Own Preset Ideas on a Topic

Laura really enjoys learning about environmental issues. She has read many books and watched numerous televised documentaries on this topic and actively seeks out additional information on the environment. While Laura’s interest can help her understand a new reading encounter about the environment, Laura also has to be aware that with this interest, she also brings forward her preset ideas and biases about the topic. Sometimes these prejudices against other ideas relate to religion or nationality or even just tradition. Without evidence, thinking the way we always have is not a good enough reason; evidence can change, and at the very least it needs honest review and assessment to determine its validity. Ironically, we may not want to learn new ideas because that may mean we would have to give up old ideas we have already mastered, which can be a daunting prospect.

With every reading situation about the environment, Laura needs to remain open-minded about what she is about to read and pay careful attention if she begins to ignore certain parts of the text because of her preconceived notions. Learning new information can be very difficult if you balk at ideas that are different from what you’ve always thought. You may have to force yourself to listen to a different viewpoint multiple times to make sure you are not closing your mind to a viable solution your mindset does not currently allow.

Can you think of times you have struggled reading college content for a course? Which of these strategies might have helped you understand the content? Why do you think those strategies would work?

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

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Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/college-success/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Amy Baldwin
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: College Success
• Publication date: Mar 27, 2020
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/college-success/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/college-success/pages/5-2-effective-reading-strategies

© Sep 20, 2023 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

Academic Reading Strategies

Completing reading assignments is one of the biggest challenges in academia. However, are you managing your reading efficiently? Consider this cooking analogy, noting the differences in process:

Taylor’s process was more efficient because his purpose was clear. Establishing why you are reading something will help you decide how to read it, which saves time and improves comprehension. This guide lists some purposes for reading as well as different strategies to try at different stages of the reading process.

Purposes for reading

People read different kinds of text (e.g., scholarly articles, textbooks, reviews) for different reasons. Some purposes for reading might be

• to scan for specific information
• to skim to get an overview of the text
• to relate new content to existing knowledge
• to write something (often depends on a prompt)
• to critique an argument
• to learn something
• for general comprehension

Strategies differ from reader to reader. The same reader may use different strategies for different contexts because their purpose for reading changes. Ask yourself “why am I reading?” and “what am I reading?” when deciding which strategies to try.

Before reading

• Establish your purpose for reading
• Speculate about the author’s purpose for writing
• Review what you already know and want to learn about the topic (see the guides below)
• Preview the text to get an overview of its structure, looking at headings, figures, tables, glossary, etc.
• Predict the contents of the text and pose questions about it. If the authors have provided discussion questions, read them and write them on a note-taking sheet.
• Note any discussion questions that have been provided (sometimes at the end of the text)
• Sample pre-reading guides – K-W-L guide
• Critical reading questionnaire

During reading

• Annotate and mark (sparingly) sections of the text to easily recall important or interesting ideas
• Check your predictions and find answers to posed questions
• Use headings and transition words to identify relationships in the text
• Create a vocabulary list of other unfamiliar words to define later
• Try to infer unfamiliar words’ meanings by identifying their relationship to the main idea
• Connect the text to what you already know about the topic
• Take breaks (split the text into segments if necessary)
• Sample annotated texts – Journal article · Book chapter excerpt

After reading

• Summarize the text in your own words (note what you learned, impressions, and reactions) in an outline, concept map, or matrix (for several texts)
• Talk to someone about the author’s ideas to check your comprehension
• Identify and reread difficult parts of the text
• Define words on your vocabulary list (try a learner’s dictionary ) and practice using them
• Sample graphic organizers – Concept map · Literature review matrix

Works consulted

Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (2002). Teaching and researching reading. Harlow: Longman.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout (just click print) and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

If you enjoy using our handouts, we appreciate contributions of acknowledgement.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

12 Reading Review

Reading, like learning, involves a cycle of preparing, absorbing, recording, and reviewing. In your education, you will be expected to do much reading; it is not unusual to do two or more hours of reading for every hour you spend in class. You are also expected to think critically about what you read.

Effective reading involves several steps:

• Prepare for reading by scanning the assignment and developing questions for which you want to discover answers through your reading.
• Read the material and discover the answers to your questions.
• Capture the information by highlighting and annotating the text as well as by taking effective notes.
• Review the reading by studying your notes, by integrating them with your class notes, and by discussing the reading with classmates.

Before you read, learn as much as you can about the author and their reason for writing the text. What is their area of expertise? Why did the instructor select this text? When scanning a reading, look for clues to what might be important. Read the section titles, study illustrations, and look for keywords and boldface text. Do not highlight your text until you have read a section completely to be sure you understand the context. Then go back and highlight and annotate your text during a second read-through.

Think critically about what you are reading. Do you agree with what the author is saying? How does it relate to the rest of the material in the course? What does this new material mean to you in “real life”?

Special Texts and Situations

• Do all the exercises in math textbooks; apply the formulas to real-world situations.
• Practice “reading” the illustrations. Each type of graphic material has its own strength or purpose.
• Look for statements of hypotheses and experimental design when reading science texts.
• History, economics, and political science texts are heavily influenced by interpretation. Think critically about what you are reading.
• Working with foreign language texts requires more time and more frequent breaks. Don’t rely on word-for-word translations.
• If you need to read with children around, don’t put off your reading until you have a large block of time; learn to read in short periods as available.
• When reading on the Internet, be extra diligent to evaluate the source of the material to decide how reliable that source may be.
• If English is your second language, seek out resources that may be offered on campus or at your institution. In any case, be patient with the process of mastering advanced-level English. And always remember this: what feels like a disadvantage in one situation can be a great gift in another situation.
• Reading and vocabulary development are closely linked. A stronger vocabulary makes reading easier and more fun; the best way to build a vocabulary is to read.
• Look for new words everywhere, not just in class.

When you encounter a new word, follow these steps:

• Write it down and write down the sentence in which it was used.
• Infer its meaning based on the context and word roots.
• Look it up in a dictionary.
• Write your own sentence using the word.
• Say the word, its definition, and your sentence out loud.
• Find an opportunity to use the word within two days.

Exercise: Make an Action List

Text Attributions

• This chapter was adapted from “ Chapter Activities ” in College Success by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution (and republished by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing), which is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence . Adapted by Allison Kilgannon.

Reading Review Copyright © 2021 by Allison Kilgannon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Honey Badgers (Gr. 4-8)
• Hyperinflation (Gr. 4-8)
• Koko (Gr. 4-8)
• Mongooses (Gr. 5-9)
• Trampolines (Gr. 5-9)
• Garbage (Gr. 5-9)
• Maginot Line (Gr. 5-9)
• Asian Carp (Gr. 5-9)
• Tale of Two Countries (Gr. 6-10)
• Kevlar (Gr. 7-10)
• Tigers (Gr. 7-11)
• Statue of Liberty (Gr. 8-10)
• Submarines (Gr. 8-12)
• Castles (Gr. 9-13)
• Gutenberg (Gr. 9-13)
• Author's Purpose Practice 1
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• Genre Practice 1
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8th grade students are a special bunch. They often behave as though they are too cool for school, yet they keep coming back. Ha ha. We love them. This page has all of my reading worksheets that were written at or around the 8th grade level. I've used this website to determine the reading scores, but you'll want to read and approve each of these worksheets before giving them to your students. I've worked hard to produce the following materials and make them available to you. I hope that these resources help your students reach your learning goals.

• Reading Comprehension Worksheets

“Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie - Barrie, who is better known for creating Peter Pan, writes a whopper of a short story that highlights just how unreliable a narrator can be. This is a fun one to read out loud. View my readibility scores . “Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie | RTF “Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie | PDF “Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie | Preview “Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie | Answers “Gilray’s Flower-Pot” | By J.M. Barrie | Ereading Worksheet

“The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb - Cobb takes readers on a snipe hunt in this short, witty tale. Students should appreciate the humorous plot movements so much, that they may not even get hung up on the bits of dialect. View my readibility scores . “The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb | RTF “The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb | PDF “The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb | Preview “The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb | Answers “The Hydrophobic Skunk” | By Irvin S. Cobb | Ereading Worksheet

“A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin - The presence of a guest causes tension in a married woman’s home. Warning: this story deals with issues of infidelity, or at least the implications of such. View my readibility scores . “A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin | RTF “A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin | PDF “A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin | Preview “A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin | Answers “A Respectable Woman” | By Kate Chopin | Ereading Worksheet

“A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London - What is the difference between winning and losing? Sometimes, it can be less than you think. This is the story of an old boxer who cannot afford to lose his next fight. View my readibility scores . “A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London | RTF “A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London | PDF “A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London | Preview “A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London | Answers “A Piece of Steak” | By Jack London | Ereading Worksheet

“The Son” | By Hermann Hesse - The story of a loving and patient dad who struggles with his restless and undisciplined son. View my readibility scores . “The Son” | By Hermann Hesse | RTF “The Son” | By Hermann Hesse | PDF “The Son” | By Hermann Hesse | Preview “The Son” | By Hermann Hesse | Answers “The Son” | By Hermann Hesse | Ereading Worksheet

Context Clues 2.5 - This worksheet has another 12 context clues problems. Students determine the meanings of the bolded words based on the context, and then explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Context Clues 2.5 | RTF Context Clues 2.5 | PDF Context Clues 2.5 | Preview Context Clues 2.5 | Answers

Context Clues 3.1 - This worksheet will help students sharpen their vocabulary skills with 12 challenging practice problems. Determine the meaning of challenging vocabulary words based on contextual clues and explain your answer. View my readibility scores . Context Clues 3.1 | RTF Context Clues 3.1 | PDF Context Clues 3.1 | Preview Context Clues 3.1 | Answers

Context Clues 3.2 - This worksheet will give students practice with challenging vocabulary words. They will figure out what the words mean based on how they are used and then explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Context Clues 3.2 | RTF Context Clues 3.2 | PDF Context Clues 3.2 | Preview Context Clues 3.2 | Answers

Context Clues 3.3 - This worksheet will give students even more practice with context clues. Students will determine the meanings of 12 more challenging vocabulary words and explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Context Clues 3.3 | RTF Context Clues 3.3 | PDF Context Clues 3.3 | Preview Context Clues 3.3 | Answers

Context Clues 3.4 - This worksheet features another 12 tricky vocabulary words used in context-rich sentences. Students determine the meanings of the words and explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Context Clues 3.4 | RTF Context Clues 3.4 | PDF Context Clues 3.4 | Preview Context Clues 3.4 | Answers

Figurative Language Poem | "The Grave" - This wry Robert Blair poems contains some great examples of personification and metaphor. Students read the poem and answer questions about figurative language and poetic techniques used in the poem. View my readibility scores . Figurative Language Poem | "The Grave" | RTF Figurative Language Poem | "The Grave" | PDF Figurative Language Poem | "The Grave" | Preview Figurative Language Poem | "The Grave" | Answers

Figurative Language Poem | "X" and "XXI" - This figurative language worksheet focuses on two short poem excerpts from Emily Dickinson. These are great poems that promote literacy and also have a bunch of metaphors. Students read the poems and answer questions about figurative language and poetic techniques. View my readibility scores . Figurative Language Poem | "X" and "XXI" | RTF Figurative Language Poem | "X" and "XXI" | PDF Figurative Language Poem | "X" and "XXI" | Preview Figurative Language Poem | "X" and "XXI" | Answers

Figurative Language Poem | "A Lady" - Amy Lowell's interesting poem focuses on an interaction between a young woman and an old woman. It contains metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and simile. Students read the poem and answer questions about figurative language techniques and poetic devices. View my readibility scores . Figurative Language Poem | "A Lady" | RTF Figurative Language Poem | "A Lady" | PDF Figurative Language Poem | "A Lady" | Preview Figurative Language Poem | "A Lady" | Answers

Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare - If you've never heard of William Shakespeare, he wrote sonnets and plays. Ha ha. Just joking. Of course you've heard of William Shakespeare. This four page worksheet has 23 figurative language examples taken from some of the master's texts. Students read each example, determine the technique being used, and explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare | RTF Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare | PDF Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare | Preview Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare | Answers Figurative Language Worksheet | Shakespeare | Ereading Worksheet

Personification Worksheet 6 - This worksheet features another 10 examples of personification from classic poems. Students find the object or idea that is being personified in each example and then explain the quality or trait that is given. View my readibility scores . Personification Worksheet 6 | RTF Personification Worksheet 6 | PDF Personification Worksheet 6 | Preview Personification Worksheet 6 | Answers

Personification Worksheet 7 - This worksheet features 10 more poetic examples of personification. Students identify what is being personified and then explain the human quality or trait that is given. View my readibility scores . Personification Worksheet 7 | RTF Personification Worksheet 7 | PDF Personification Worksheet 7 | Preview Personification Worksheet 7 | Answers

Genre Worksheet 3 - This worksheet contains another 8 problems that will help students master genre. Based on short descriptions of texts, students must determine the genre and subgenre of a variety of works. They also must explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Genre Worksheet 3 | RTF Genre Worksheet 3 | PDF Genre Worksheet 3 | Preview Genre Worksheet 3 | Answers Genre Worksheet 3 | Ereading Worksheet

Genre Worksheet 4 - This worksheet has 9 problems to help students become genre experts. Students read short descriptions of texts and determine the genre and subgenre based on textual details. Then they explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Genre Worksheet 4 | RTF Genre Worksheet 4 | PDF Genre Worksheet 4 | Preview Genre Worksheet 4 | Answers Genre Worksheet 4 | Ereading Worksheet

Genre Worksheet 6 - This worksheet has 8 short descriptions of texts. Students read these descriptions and determine the genre and subgenre of each text. Then they explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Genre Worksheet 6 | RTF Genre Worksheet 6 | PDF Genre Worksheet 6 | Preview Genre Worksheet 6 | Answers Genre Worksheet 6 | Ereading Worksheet

Genre Worksheet 9 - This worksheet has 9 more descriptions of texts. Students read each description and determine the genre and subgenre of the text. Then they explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Genre Worksheet 9 | RTF Genre Worksheet 9 | PDF Genre Worksheet 9 | Preview Genre Worksheet 9 | Answers Genre Worksheet 9 | Ereading Worksheet

Main Idea, Text Structure, and Valentine's Day - This worksheet has six passages related to Valentine's Day. Students read the passages, interpret the main ideas, express the main ideas as a title, and represent the text structures using graphic organizers. View my readibility scores . Main Idea, Text Structure, and Valentine's Day | RTF Main Idea, Text Structure, and Valentine's Day | PDF Main Idea, Text Structure, and Valentine's Day | Preview Main Idea, Text Structure, and Valentine's Day | Answers

Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Robots - Students read six paragraphs about robots and identify and express the main idea of each. Then they write a title for the passage that expresses the main idea of the text, and create a graphic organizer that represents the structure of text. View my readibility scores . Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Robots | RTF Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Robots | PDF Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Robots | Preview Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Robots | Answers

Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Bicycles - Students will have a "wheelie" good time completing this 6 question text structure and main idea worksheet. Students read each passage, identify and explain the main idea, create a title related to the main idea, and draw and use an appropriate graphic organizer to contain information from the text. View my readibility scores . Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Bicycles | RTF Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Bicycles | PDF Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Bicycles | Preview Main Idea and Text Structure Worksheet | Bicycles | Answers

Point of View Worksheet 4 - This worksheet has 9 passages taken from short stories. Students read the passages, determine the narrator's view point, and explain their answers. View my readibility scores . Point of View Worksheet 4 | RTF Point of View Worksheet 4 | PDF Point of View Worksheet 4 | Preview Point of View Worksheet 4 | Answers Point of View Worksheet 4 | Ereading Worksheet

Story Structure Quiz | "Blood is Thicker" - Students read a short story about two sisters who learn to work together. Then they answer multiple-choice questions about the story structure. View my readibility scores . Story Structure Quiz | "Blood is Thicker" | RTF Story Structure Quiz | "Blood is Thicker" | PDF Story Structure Quiz | "Blood is Thicker" | Preview Story Structure Quiz | "Blood is Thicker" | Answers

Story Structure Worksheet | "The Way of the World" - Students read a short story about an old-school businessman who must learn to adapt to the new world. Then they analyze the story structure and answer questions related to the plot. View my readibility scores . Story Structure Worksheet | "The Way of the World" | RTF Story Structure Worksheet | "The Way of the World" | PDF Story Structure Worksheet | "The Way of the World" | Preview Story Structure Worksheet | "The Way of the World" | Answers

Summary and Main Idea with Trains - Students read four short passages related to trains. Then they summarize each passage and come up with a title related to the main idea of the passage. View my readibility scores . Summary and Main Idea with Trains | RTF Summary and Main Idea with Trains | PDF Summary and Main Idea with Trains | Preview Summary and Main Idea with Trains | Answers

Text Structure Worksheet 1 - This worksheet contains six passages, each structured using a different pattern of organization. Students read each passage, determine how it is structured, and add information from the passage into the appropriate graphic organizer. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet 1 | RTF Text Structure Worksheet 1 | PDF Text Structure Worksheet 1 | Preview Text Structure Worksheet 1 | Answers Text Structure Worksheet 1 | Ereading Worksheet

Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs - This worksheet contains 6 passages about dinosaurs. Students determine the structure of each passage and put information from the text into an appropriate graphic organizer. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs | Answers Text Structure Worksheet | Dinosaurs | Ereading Worksheet

Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters - This worksheet has 11 passages about tornados, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Students determine the structure of each text and put information from the passage into the appropriate graphic organizer. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters | Answers Text Structure Worksheet | Natural Disasters | Ereading Worksheet

Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza - This worksheet has 10 delicious passages about pizza. Students identify the structure of each text and then put information from the passage into an appropriate graphic organizer. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza | Answers Text Structure Worksheet | Pizza | Ereading Worksheet

Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters - This worksheet has 5 twister related passages. Students determine the structure of each text and then put information from each passage into an appropriate graphic organizer. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters | Answers Text Structure Worksheet | Twisters | Ereading Worksheet

Text Structure Worksheet | Fireworks - Students will have an explosive time completing this text structure worksheet. They read 11 passages about fireworks, determine the structure of each, and create a graphic organizer that contains important information from the passage. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Fireworks | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Fireworks | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Fireworks | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Fireworks | Answers

Text Structure Worksheet | Computers - Students read 10 paragraphs about computers and determine the text structure of each. Then they create and use a graphic organizer to visually represent the structure of the passage. View my readibility scores . Text Structure Worksheet | Computers | RTF Text Structure Worksheet | Computers | PDF Text Structure Worksheet | Computers | Preview Text Structure Worksheet | Computers | Answers

Tone Worksheet 2 - This worksheet has another four emotive poems. Students identify the speaker's tone and support their answers by referring to the text. View my readibility scores . Tone Worksheet 2 | RTF Tone Worksheet 2 | PDF Tone Worksheet 2 | Preview Tone Worksheet 2 | Answers

8th grade students are remarkable. What would the future of our world look like without them? It'd be a lot less bright. I hope this collection of worksheets and activities written at or around the 8th grade level will help you to better serve your students. I appreciate all comments, corrections, feedback, and suggestions. The easiest way to contact me is just to leave a comment below. Thanks for visiting!

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All Reading Worksheets and Activities Author's Purpose Worksheets and Activities Characterization Worksheets and Activities Character Types Worksheets and Lessons Context Clues Worksheets Conflict Types Worksheets Differentiated Reading Instruction Worksheets and Activities Fact and Opinion Worksheets and Activities Functional and Nonfiction Comprehension Worksheets Activities Genre Activities Genre Worksheets Inferences Worksheets and Activities Irony Worksheets and Activities Literature Units Main Idea Worksheets and Activities Making Predictions Worksheets Point of View Activities Point of View Worksheets Reading Comprehension Worksheets Summary Worksheets and Activities Story Structure Worksheets Story Structure Activities Text Structure Activities Text Structure Worksheets Theme Worksheets and Activities

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Chess | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 1-4) TV | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 1-4) Metal Detectors | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) Tetris | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) Seat Belts | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) The Coliseum | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) The Pony Express | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) Wintertime | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 2-6) Reading | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 3-7) Black Friday | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 3-7) Hummingbirds | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 3-7) Worst Game Ever? | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 4-8) Carnivorous Plants | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 4-8) Google | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 4-8) Honey Badgers | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 4-8) Hyperinflation | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 4-8) Koko | Nonfiction Reading Test Ereading Worksheet (Gr. 4-8) Mongooses | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 5-9) Trampolines | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 5-9) Garbage | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 5-9) Maginot Line | Nonfiction Reading Test Ereading Worksheet (Gr. 5-9) Asian Carp | Nonfiction Reading Test Ereading Worksheet (Gr. 5-9) A Tale of Two Countries | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 6-10) Kevlar | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 7-10) Tigers | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 7-11) Statue of Liberty | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 8-10) Submarines | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 8-12) Castles | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 9-13) Gutenberg | Nonfiction Reading Test (Gr. 9-13) Author's Purpose Practice 1 Author's Purpose Practice 2 Author's Purpose Practice 3 Author's Purpose Practice 4 Author's Purpose Practice 5 Author's Purpose Practice 6 Fact and Opinion Practice 1 Fact and Opinion Practice 2 Fact and Opinion Practice 3 Idioms Practice Test 1 With Long Responses Idioms Practice Test 2 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 1 Figurative Language Practice 1 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 2 Figurative Language Practice 2 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 3 Figurative Language Practice 3 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 4 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 5 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 6 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 7 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 8 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice 9 With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice | Edgar Allan Poe Figurative Language Practice | Edgar Allan Poe With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice | O. Henry Figurative Language Practice | O. Henry With Long Responses Figurative Language Practice | Shakespeare Genre and Subgenre Practice 1 Genre and Subgenre Practice 2 Genre and Subgenre Practice 3 Genre and Subgenre Practice 4 View More Genre and Subgenre Practice Tests Irony Practice 1 Irony Practice 2 Irony Practice 3 Making Inferences Practice 2 Main Idea Practice 1 Main Idea Practice 2 Point of View Practice 1 | Multiple Choice Only Point of View Practice 1 | With Long Responses Point of View Practice 2 | Multiple Choice Only Point of View Practice 2 | With Long Responses Text Structure Practice 1 Text Structure Practice 2 Text Structure Practice 3 Text Structure Practice 4 Text Structure Practice 5 Story Structure Practice 1

Examples of Alliteration Examples of Figurative Language Examples of Hyperbole Examples of Metaphor Examples of Onomatopoeia Examples of Personification Examples of Simile Figurative Language Activities Figurative Language Poems With Questions Figurative Language Worksheets Idiom Worksheets Onomatopoeia Worksheets and Activities Personification Worksheets Poetic Devices Activities Poetic Devices Worksheets

Adverbs and Adjectives Worksheets and Activities Capitalization Worksheets and Activities Comma Worksheets and Activities Contractions Worksheets and Activities End Mark Worksheets Grammar Worksheets Homograph, Homonym, and Homophone Worksheets and Activities Noun Worksheets Parts of Speech Activities Parts of Speech Worksheets Prepositions Worksheets and Activities Pronoun Worksheets and Activities Punctuation Worksheets and Activities Semicolon Worksheets Sentence Structure Activities Sentence Structure Worksheets Verb Tense Activities Verb Tense Worksheets Verb Worksheets and Activities Was and Were Worksheets and Activities

Essay Writing Rubrics Narrative Essay Assignments Narrative Essay Topics and Story Ideas How to Write Narrative Essays and Short Stories Persuasive Essay and Speech Topics Persuasive Essay Worksheets Research Paper Topics Writing Persuasive Essays

Author's Purpose Figurative Language How to Identify Figurative Language Techniques Ideas for Projects List of Character Traits Literary Genres and Subgenres Poetic Devices Point of View Sentence Structure Story Structure Teaching Point of View Teaching Theme Text Structure Text Structure | Patterns of Organization Understanding Common Core State Standards Units and Lesson Plans Aligned With Common Core State Standards

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57 Comments

Josephine amos.

This website has been so helpful for many of my students and I am so thankful. The resources have helped in vocabulary, creative writing and comprehension! Thank you so much!

Rouena M. Bonilla

Thank you so much for the reading materials I accessed from your website. This could be a great help for my learners struggling in reading comprehension.

Nice for students

Just found this site, and I, too, am amazed at the quality and generosity. Thank you!!!

Marissa C. Cabanela

This site is a useful source for my reading activities for students. I have to share this with my colleagues.

Miss, I am a new teacher starlight out of senior high teaching grades 7-9 reading. It would be of great help to me if you could please post the answers to these question so I can use them for guidance. I am working with a bunch of slow-learners but I want them to be better.

Dina Beydoun

This is wonderfully organised! Great job!

The answer key for the reading comprehension worksheet named “A Respectable Woman” is wrong for Problem 1. I think the correct answer should be A instead of C.

An excellent job

This is the best educational website ever for all EFL students around the world.

Thank you so much!

Ina Mitchell

my grand daughter needs reading material for the 8th grade reading test to get her driving permit

Honduranteacher

Hello from Honduras. Just wanted to thank you for the provided activities and useful reading material. I am the Language Arts teacher in a bilingual school in Honduras and this material has been really useful. Thank you once again. Cheers

I’m a student in Asia and my teacher uses those materials in our class.I think all the English learners around the world can use it.It’s really a great website!

Awesome activities especially to challenge my Year 8 with a high level of reading comp. Highly recommended.

Marie Fircz

I admire your organized, informed, and thorough approach. I am also awed by your exceptional generosity. Thank you many times over! Marie Fircz, SSMS, RVC, NY

I Really like this website thanks for making this website

This website is a very good website.I like this website because I learn a lot of knowledge from it thanks for making this website for all of us

Rama Alzamel

hey, Ia Rama I want to read a story for 8th grade can you send me a story that i can read thanks

Hello. Are all these stories Fair Use? Do we have to worry about Copyright?

You may use them in classrooms, homes, and other educational settings. If you are a publisher or other commercial entity: contact me .

I cant find the long reponse answer :()

Yeah, those vary and should be evaluated more openly.

We can talk about any of them though, if you have a question or want to bounce your ideas off someone.

april siose

Thank you so much… You made my preparation so easy… 🙂

Bill Bryant

Wow! I have been searching all over the internet for something like this. I am doing a jumpstart class for struggling students prior to the beginning of the school year and this is exactly what they need. Thank you.

Where can i get a solution to these worksheets

I think this site is fantastic and it’s easy to use 🙂 It’s nice that for the reading comprehension worksheets there are multiple choice and long response questions, as students need practice answering harder questions.

Hey +Georgia , did you get a solution to these?

Check the links that say “Answers”

These are AMAZING!!! Thank you so much!!! A long-term substitute who has been struggling.

Hi I really need a story about friendship as a reading comprehension for my grade 8 learners Thanks in advance

can i have a worksheet of seat belts?please?

Where is the comprehension. Which. I can practice

This is a pretty good section for that: http://www.ereadingworksheets.com/free-reading-worksheets/reading-comprehension-worksheets/

How can I even begin to say THANK YOU for this incredible resource that you have created. It is much appreciated.

Norma Hernandez

Need some worksheets on Connotation/Denotation

Courtney Meger

Very helpful for me and my friends to learn more about language arts

Lori Reaves

I teach a nursing assistant course. I came across your very helpful site while looking for a way to determine incoming students’ reading comprehension level. What grade would they have to score to be considered competent at that grade level? Thanks!

These worksheets shouldn’t really be used to evaluate a student’s reading level. Rather, they should be used with students whose reading levels are known. If you know that a student is reading at a 6th-10th grade level, these 8th grade worksheets are probably appropriate for him or her. I’m sorry that I currently have no diagnostic test available. Perhaps I will devise one someday. Best wishes!

Thank you Made it very easy to find anwsers to my work

Yeah, this is an interesting situation.

I’ve thought about putting up a 99 cent annual paywall over the answer keys to prevent students from accessing them, but decided that it was a bad idea.

Mainly because motivated students use the site too, as well as cheaters, and shouldn’t motivated students be able to check their work?

Not to mention that a resourceful student can always use the Internet to find the answers to their homework and “workaround” the learning experience, so to speak.

I’m all for making it harder for cheaters, but not to the point where it cripples the learning experiences of those with sincere intentions.

Any one else have any thoughts on this?

I just have to echo all the comments here. This is THE most helpful site I have ever found for teaching reading comprehension at a variety of levels. These are not boring and are not so extensive as to intimidate reluctant readers. You are an absolute life saver!!! Thank you!

I appreciate your echoes. Thank you for visiting and I hope that I can continue to an asset to you in the coming years.

AWESOME stuff here!!! I am excited to be able to use this material for my low level 9th graders. Interesting passages with appropriate questions. Hoping they will have interest in improving their reading scores. Older new teacher here – thanks for all of your hard work and dedication.

You are most welcome. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

dimple bakhda

You have one of the best English language tutorial website. My compliments to you Sir, and my heartfelt gratitude!! Any student of English will be able to improvise and develop his language to another level with your worksheets. Amazing and painstaking work done!!

Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment. I appreciate it.

I agree, thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting together such an amazing site. I teach a free GED program to low-income students ages & your site allows me to access wonderful resource materials for them.

I am so happy to hear it. Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment. Best wishes!

Thank you for creating this website. I teach ESL students and the woksheets are very helpful.

What can I say? Thank you and you are AWESOME! This is the most helpful site that I have found for teaching middle school ELA.

Thank you very much for your time and effort in putting up this great site. I find it really useful and my students learn a lot! Thanks again.

Thank you for the wonderful work you have done to provide such awesome resources. This makes my job much easier, as well as makes me more effective in teaching my students what they are expected to learn. I appreciate your efforts!!

You are so welcome.

This is the best English site I have found! Love all the different reading levels and variety of passages!!!

Thank you so much for saying so.

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Advanced Reading Intervention Plans

By Mary Montero

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Last year, I spent a lot of my time with “advanced” readers.  These are readers who can read lickity split and don’t need any more instruction on reading fluency.  These are the students who so often get left behind because to the “naked eye,” they look perfectly fine academically. They can give you the gist of what they read, but sometimes they have working memory issues and can’t recall specific details.  Maybe they are the student that can get through an entire page of text but can’t tell you what they read.  Or perhaps they are the student who performs well in class because they have learned excellent compensatory skills, like always going back and rereading to find answers in texts…but when you try to chat with them about a page in a book, they struggle.

Read on to see how I used task cards in the classroom to put together some advanced reading comprehension groups!

Even with my advanced readers, who were performing well in most aspects, I still had a few who needed extra help with their comprehension skills.  I put together a plan to attack some of these areas of need and increase their reading comprehension.  This could be used with struggling students, but this specific sequence is for kids who were on grade level, but still needed some extra work on comprehension. I was happy with the results, and the students in the group enjoyed working through it with me.

When I realized I had this group of kids struggling, I knew that I needed to do something.  As a former academic interventionist, this was a little bit of a different need for me to address.  These kids had their basic comprehension skills down, but now they needed some help to move beyond that.  I thought about the skills they needed to work on, then came up with a plan.

Here’s a look at the basic outline of what I came up with.  We started out looking at Literal Vs. Inferential questions .  This is so crucial, as all students need to be able to tell the difference between the two.  They need to know whether they need to infer to find the answer or if the answer should be jumping right out at them in the text.

After we worked with literal and inferential questions, we moved on to focusing only on inference.  I used my story elements inference task cards so that we could hit two birds with one stone–story elements like characters, settings, problems, and solutions while still working on inference.

Before I go on, I need to mention the awesomeness of these highlighters.  Do you see that highlighter in the picture?  That is no typical highlighter.  That, my friends, is a Sharpie Clear View Highlighter.  You can see right through the tip of the highlighter so that you can tell where to stop your highlighting.  This is BRILLIANT for use with students, who are notorious for over highlighting.

Do you see that?  The tip is almost fully transparent!  How incredibly cool is that?  I got these snazzy highlighters from Office Depot .

Over the weeks, we worked our way through the task cards in a variety of ways.  Here are some ways I used the cards with my students in the intervention group:

• I read the card aloud to the students while they closed their eyes and listened.  Then, I asked them questions about what I had read, using the prompts on the cards.  This helped with their listening and memory skills.  They didn’t have to worry about reading the cards, they only had to worry about comprehending what they were hearing.
• This was very powerful for several of my students… Either I read the card or the kids read the card out loud.  They used a mini dry erase board to take VERY brief notes about what the story was about.  I taught them to pick out key details in the story that could help trigger their memory.  I explained that they wouldn’t always have the dry erase board but that we needed to train their brain to latch on to those key details so that they didn’t forget what they were reading.  We did the same thing with visualizing and my free visualizing task cards .

• I had some kids who were having a really hard time remembering specific details about what they were reading.  I gave them a sheet of task cards (4 to a sheet) and had them read all the cards to themselves at least once.  Then, they read the cards out loud one at a time, and I would ask detail-oriented questions after each card was read.  They could reference the cards answering the questions. This took about 20 minutes to get through all 4 cards on a page.  Then, with the last few minutes, I would take the paper away from the students and ask them more questions about what they had read.  This worked SO well, and it was SO simple.
• You can see in the picture above that I had students highlight evidence for their answers to the questions directly on the task cards.  Then, they wrote the answers on a blank piece of paper. They love to this because what kid doesn’t love highlighting things.

Here is a look at the contents of my folder when I planned everything out… I only used 4 or 5 of each card at each session, so I could still use the rest of the cards at another time.  Perhaps in centers or as a whole group.

I get a a lot of questions about task cards and why I use them.  This intervention group was a perfect example of the beauty of task cards.  Reading task cards include short and sweet, totally non-threatening passages.  It’s not an entire page of text–it’s either half a page or a quarter of a page, and most often, it’s visually pleasing.  My kids just aren’t intimidated by task cards in the same way they are intimidated by page-long passages.

This was such a quick-prep group using the cards, and I threw the highlighters, pens, and pencils in an organizer and was always ready to go.

If you are looking for the task cards I used in my intervention group, you can find them all in my TpT store . You can truly use any set of cards that meet your needs, or other passages you have.

InLinkz.com

Disclaimer: I received products in this blog post to help facilitate this review and was compensated by Office Depot for my time. For more information about these products please visit Office Depot, Teachers Change Lives.

Mary Montero

I’m so glad you are here. I’m a current gifted and talented teacher in a small town in Colorado, and I’ve been in education since 2009. My passion (other than my family and cookies) is for making teachers’ lives easier and classrooms more engaging.

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This is wonderful information! Thanks so much for helping this "struggling" teacher not be as anxious and stressed on how to teach these concepts!!

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This is incredibly helpful to me, as I'm getting ready to hone in on specific interventions for the second half of the school year. Thanks so much!!!

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I love your task cards! I was just doing lesson planning and racking my brain on how to take my higher kids who , like you wrote, are fluent readers but lack basic recall and inference skills. Now I know what I'm going to do! Thanks!

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The #1 Goal for Advanced Readers

Are you concerned that you’re spending so much time planning and teaching weaker readers that the higher-level readers aren’t getting enough from you?  

We’ve all been there .   B ut there’s no need to feel guilty because in this blog post, we're going to make the vision much simpler than you may currently see. Drop the burden of All. The. Things. Instead, focus first on the #1 goal for advanced readers. Then learn how you can accomplish this goal!   This post about the primary goal for advanced readers is in a series of posts about advanced readers. See what where the advanced readers falls along a continuum of reading goals here . Or, if you want inspiration for how to develop readers who read all the time,  head here. 

  (To watch a video where I discuss the #1 reading goal you should have for your advanced readers, hit play below, or keep reading for a detailed overview)  

What is the #1 Reading Goal for Advanced Readers?

Our #1 goal for advanced readers is to encourage them to read  widely . Through wide reading, students learn the vocabulary and background knowledge that allows them to have excellent reading comprehension . They know a little bit about everything, so they can read and understand a wide variety of texts.  

Today we're getting a lot of advice to teach reading comprehension strategies. These, indeed, are demonstrated by multiple research studies to make a difference in reading comprehension. However, KNOWLEDGE is a much greater influence on reading comprehension.  

So, we DO teach, discuss, and practice reading comprehension strategies. But MORE of our time should be spent on encouraging and inspiring students to read, including across many genres - especially non-fiction.   

Teaching Content IS Teaching Reading 

According to a famous study by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding, that looked at upper elementary students and tracked how much they read outside of school, kids in the 98th percentile read almost five million words per year. However, children who fell in the 50% mark read just 600,000 words a year and yet, there was a massive difference between the two.  

You can see this in the graph below:

The conclusion?  

Kids who read a lot do better in reading comprehension tests because all of that reading has made them super knowledgeable about the world around them. When kids read about things like history, science or art, they get the vocabulary and background knowledge needed to be able to comprehend things they read in various subject areas.  

Check out this short video below by Professor Dan Willingham where he makes the case that teaching content IS teaching reading:  

Guidelines for Advanced Readers  

I recently picked up an old book I used to love called “ Food Rules ” by Michael  Pollan . I f you’re familiar with it, you’ll know that he boiled down the “science of healthy eating” to three simple statements :    

Eat food.   

Not too much.   

Mostly plants.   

Simple but powerful, right?  

Inspired by  Pollan , I decided to recreate something similar with reading for advanced students. After all, that’s what we do here on Reading Simplified – we  simplify  things!   

There are so many things you can do to help develop an advanced reader’s background knowledge and deepen their comprehension. But here’s my top three rules for advanced readers:  

Why Advanced Readers Must Read Widely 

Reading widely comes with a wide range of benefits for our advanced readers. It helps to engage the brain and provoke mental stimulation because it gets kids focused and encourages them to think about the world around them.  

It’s important for readers to broaden their horizon and read different books from lots of different genres . When I was young, I was hooked on Nancy Drew books, and then I moved into Agatha Christie. I was reading widely, even in just one genre. But I also expanded into other genres too like historical fiction, science fiction, and nonfiction, etc.   

If you stick to the same type of book and genre, you’ll get bored and give up on reading. So, you’ve got to keep things interesting for your kiddos to help develop their love and passion for the written word. Not to mention, reading widely expands vocabulary, equips students with more background knowledge, improves focus and concentration AND it helps to increase an advanced reader’s analytical thinking skills too.   

Think & Share Sometimes 

My next guideline for advanced readers is to think and share   (sometimes) . And what I mean by this is to encourage kids to  think  deeply about what they have read. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or you choose to teach kids a reading strategy, you want them to think about their reading.  

Analyzing  the details of a story and being able to critique and understand the plot is so important for advanced readers. Discussing what they’ve read with their peers is also beneficial because when  readers engage socially, they become more motivated to continue reading and engaging with the text.   Writing is another huge way in which we can develop students' knowledge and thinking. Writing may be one of the highest forms of thinking. So include writing about fiction and non-fiction, yet don't allow so many challenging writing projects sap the joy out of reading. 

Reading for Fun 

Kids don’t want to spend a whole lot of time reading something they don’t care about – and who can blame them!  

It’s important to give your students the privilege of reading often for fun. Kids are more likely to read when they enjoy what they’re reading. So, let them choose a book from the school library and engross themselves with stories about dragons, adventure or fantasy.  

When you encourage kids to read for pleasure, they’ll start to enjoy it more and develop a passion for reading because when you give students a choice and expose them to more and more things across multiple genres, they’ll be more likely to read. Not to mention, it’ll also help them to develop fluency and reading skills so that they can continue along the path towards (and beyond) advanced literacy.  

A Final Word… 

The next time you’re thinking about what to do with your advanced readers, ask yourself these questions:  

• Are you giving advanced readers enough time to read widely?  
• Are they doing spending time doing some deep thinking about what they’ve read?   
• Are they sharing what they’ve learned with their peers?  
• And…are you giving them the freedom to just read for fun or for pleasure?  

Once you start doing all of these things with your advanced readers, you’ll help them develop that intrinsic love for reading that will carry them through their whole life.

If you want to learn more about instruction for advanced readers and get your hands on our Developmental Model of Reading for Instruction freebie, just sign up below and we’ll send the FREE   downloadable PDF straight to your inbox!

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• Practice Questions

Reading Comprehension Practice for Advanced ESL Students

• Posted by Brian
• Date June 22, 2018
• Comments 1 comment

The following questions are based on several reading passages. Each passage is followed by a series of questions. Read each passage carefully, and then answer the questions based on it. You may reread the passage as often as you wish. When you have finished answering the questions based on one passage, go right onto the next passage.

Choose the best answer based on the information given and implied.

Social Media Use in Teens Linked to Poor Sleep, Anxiety.

Source:  [ By Agata Blaszczak-Boxe, Originally published on Live Science, September 2015 ]

According to a new study, the pressure to be available 24/7 on social media may lead to poorer sleep quality as well as an increased risk of depression and anxiety in teens. In the study, researchers asked 467 teenagers ages 11 to 17 about their use of social media during the day and at night. In other tests, they examined the teens’ sleep quality, self-esteem, anxiety and depression. They also looked at whether and to what extent the kids felt the pressure to be available on social media all the time. The researchers found that using social media at any point was significantly related to decreased sleep quality, lower self-esteem, and increased depression levels in the study participants. However, when it comes to sleep quality, “those who log on at night appear to be particularly affected,” study author Heather Cleland Woods, of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, said in a statement. Research presented at the American Psychological Association meeting in 2011 found a link between the use of social media in teens and traits linked to schizophrenia and depression.

In another study, published this year in the journal Cyber psychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, frequent social media use in teens was tied to an increased risk of poor mental health. “Since adolescence is a vulnerable period for development of long-term issues, it is essential that we understand how adolescents’ social media use relates to” factors like sleep quality and the risk of depression, the researchers wrote in the new study. Cleland Woods suggested that families use what she calls a “digital sunset”, to minimize the potential negative effects of social media use on sleep and feelings of well-being. “Turn off the devices and the blue light, stop checking emails and social media, and allow yourself time to finish your day,” she said. “Sleep is important, so put your phone away. “Still, Cleland Woods stressed that the use of social media itself is not a negative activity. “We all do it,” she told Live Science. “However, we need to think about how and when we are online.” 1.  By using the term “digital sunset”, Author refers to:

a) Artificially creating darker surroundings at home.

b) Sleeping before actual sunset.

c) Turning off the Television.

d) Turning off all gadgets which link to internet and social media.

2. Which of the following specifically describes the word “adolescents” used in the passage?

a) People under the age of 25.

b) Pubescents.

d)  Children  under the age of 12.

Frequent Travelers

Source: [By A.W, Originally published in The Economist, August 2015]

Researchers at the University of Surrey, in Britain, and Linnaeus University, in Sweden, have published a new study highlighting what they call “a darker side of hypermobility”. The “hypermobile”—largely but not exclusively business travelers—have won a certain cachet in contemporary society, with the worldliness they seem to acquire from their travels and the envy-inducing social-media posts they leave in their wake. But, the researchers warn, “Whilst aspects of glamorization in regard to mobility are omnipresent in our lives, there exists an ominous silence with regard to its darker side”.

The study, which synthesizes existing research on the effects of frequent travel, finds three types of consequence: physiological, psychological and emotional, and social. The physiological ones are the most obvious. Jet lag is the affliction travelers know best, although they may not anticipate some of its direr, if rarer, potential effects, like speeding ageing or increasing the risk of heart attack and stroke. Then there’s the danger of deep-vein thrombosis, exposure to germs and radiation—people who fly more than 85,000 miles a year (say, New York to Seattle and back every three weeks, or New York to Tokyo and back seven times) exceed the regulatory limit for exposure to radiation. And finally, of course, business travelers tend to get less exercise and eat less healthily than people who stay in place. The psychological and emotional toll of business travel is more abstract, but just as real.

Frequent flyers experience “travel disorientation” from changing places and time zones so often. They also suffer mounting stress, given that “time spent travelling will rarely be offset through a reduced workload, and that there may be anxieties associated with work continuing to accumulate (e.g. ‘inbox overload’) whilst away”. Due to the absence from family and friends, “hypermobility is frequently an isolating and lonely experience,” the authors write. The accumulated impact can be substantial. One study of 10,000 World Bank employees found that the business travelers among them were three times as likely to file psychological insurance claims. Finally, there are the social effects. Marriages suffer from the time apart, as does  children ’s behavior. What is more, relationships tend to become more unequal, as the partner who stays at home is forced to take on more domestic duties. There’s a gender disparity here, since most business travelers are men.

Friendships also fray, as business travelers often “sacrifice local collective activities and instead priorities their immediate families when returning from trips”. Of course, these impacts are mitigated by the fact that they fall disproportionately on a segment of the population that is already doing rather well. The “mobile elite” tend to have higher incomes and access to better health care than the population at large. According to the study, in Sweden, 3% of the population accounts for a quarter of international travel; in France, 5% covers half of the population’s total distance traveled. So these may be problems of the 1% (or the 3%, or the 5%). But they’re real enough regardless. By all means feel jealous of acquaintances’ Instagram photos of exotic meals and faraway attractions. But harbor a small amount of concern as well.

3. Which of the following problems is NOT linked with hypermobility as per passage?

a) Loneliness.

b) Relationship issues.

c) Social effects.

d) Mortification

4.  Frequent long distance Travelers are more likely to get involved in which of the following Medical conditions?

a) Height phobia.

b) Cardiovascular diseases.

c) Schizophrenia.

d) Diabetes.

5. Society envies the frequent travelers due to which of the following reason(s)?

a) Frequent travelers tend to visit attractive locations and enjoy exotic meals.

b) Hyper-mobile elite possess a cachet in the society.

c) Less awareness exists concerning the problems faced by hyper-mobile people.

d) All of the above.

Source: [By Terri Yablonsky, originally published on Republican-American, September 2015]

Countless studies have found that generosity, both volunteering and charitable donations, benefits young and old physically and psychologically. “Volunteering moves people into the present and distracts the mind from the stresses and problems of the self,” said Stephen G. Post, founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities. “Many studies show that one of the best ways to deal with the hardships in life is not to just center on yourself but to take the opportunity to engage in simple acts of kindness.” Studies show that when people think about helping others, they activate a part of the brain called the mesolimbic pathway, which is responsible for feelings of gratification.

Helping others doles out happiness chemicals, including dopamine, endorphins that block pain signals and oxytocin, known as the tranquility hormone. Even just the thought of giving money to a specific charity has this effect on the brain, research shows. Intuition tells us that giving more to oneself is the best way to be happy. But that’s not the case, according to Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics and psychology at Duke University. “If you are a recipient of a good deed, you may have momentary happiness, but your long-term happiness is higher if you are the giver,” Ariely said. For example, if you give people a gift card for a Starbucks cappuccino and call them that evening and ask how happy they are, people say they are not happier than if you hadn’t given it to them. If you give another group a gift card and ask them to give it to a random person, when you call them at night, those people are happier. “People are happier when they give, even if they’re just following instructions,” Ariely said. “They take credit for the giving and therefore are happier at the end of the day.” The way we give is important, too, Ariely said. Taxes are a form of giving that typically does not make Americans happy. “If you give directly from a paycheck, we don’t pay attention to it,” he said. “It’s the way we give and how we give that makes us happy. The key is to give deliberately and thoughtfully, so that other people benefit from it.” Research supports this, and researchers started from a baseline of equal physical characteristics among study participants, so it wasn’t a case of healthier people being more willing to volunteer.

6. Which of the following statements is NOT true according to the passage?

a)    People feel happy even if they have to be generous just to follow instructions.

b)    Charity benefits young and old physically and psychologically.

c)     One feels long-term happiness of higher level, if he/she is a recipient of good deed.

d)    The way we give and how we give is equally important to be happy.

7. “Mesolimbic pathway” is a part of the brain which gets activated when one thinks of helping others. Which of the following best describes the feelings generated as a result of this activity?

a)    Meagre.

b)    Restraint.

c)     Aversion.

d)    Fulfillment

Answer Key 

1. D “Digital sunset” has been related to logging out of all online/social media applications and putting away the cell phones. Only choice D is the correct answer. 2. B Adolescents are youngsters going through the process of developing from a child into an adult.. Hence, option-c and d are wrong. Option-a is too much a generic category. Option-c (Pubescents is the synonym) is the correct answer. 3. D Options a, b and c have all been linked to frequent traveling in the passage. Mortification indicates Humiliation which is not faced by hyper-mobile people. Hence option-d is the correct answer. 4. B As per passage, one of the physiological issues associated with frequent long distance travelers is “Jet-Lag”, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Hence “b” is the correct option.  Option-a, c and d are wrong as these are not related to traveling.

5. D All options a, b and c have been implied in the passage. General public fantasizes frequent travelling and being hyper-mobile due to tourism opportunities, exotic meals and lack of knowledge about the “darker side” of being hyper-mobile.

6. C Options a, b and d have been discussed in the passage to be true. Option-c is a false statement since one feels long-term happiness of higher level if he/she is a giver not the recipient. Hence c) is the correct answer.

7. D Studies show that when people think about helping others, they activate a part of the brain called the mesolimbic pathway, which is responsible for feelings of “gratification”. Best available synonym of gratification is option-d i.e fulfillment.

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Listening and Speaking English Practice 1

Get kids interested and excited about learning english, you may also like, listening comprehension practice questions.

Passage 1 – On the Bus – Questions 1 – 3 Passage Only Passage and Questions   1. a. Because she likes hockey b. Because her cousin is playing c. …

Vocabulary for each Lesson Everyday Conversations – Listen to full audio then role-play! 14 Lessons 2 Review Chapters 2 Full Audio Tests with Answer Key Role Play Telephone Conversations and …

22 Effective ESL Reading Activities

Do your ESL students sometimes struggle to understand what they’ve read?

Reading comprehension is notoriously difficult for students to learn and for teachers to teach. You have to make it interesting and effective. Otherwise, your students will lose interest and get discouraged from reading in English altogether.

In this post, I’ve compiled 22 awesome and effective ESL reading comprehension activities that your students will surely enjoy. Some are straightforward, while others require a bit of preparation prior to the main activity.

1. Pick the Right Word: Which Is It?

2. picture quiz: brown bear, what do you see, 3. connect the dots: this word goes with that picture, 4. sequence: putting humpty dumpty back together, 5. story retelling: showtime, 6. cause and effect: who solves the mystery, 7. following directions: it’s a treasure hunt, 8. multiple-choice: get it right, 9. short answers: a story within a story, 10. vocabulary focus: show and tell, 11. decoding idioms: guess what the phrase means, 12. question time: prep for the real work, 13. read and repeat: get pronunciation down pat, 14. paragraph summary: tell it another way, 15. quiz writing and giving: stump your classmates, 16. true or false: give me a thumbs-up (or down), 17. puzzle making: cut and paste, 18. taboo: don’t say that, 19. class discussions: talk it out, 20. class debates: fight it out, 21. class presentations: in-class ted talks, 22. class presentations redux: tell me about [a favorite topic], why do esl reading comprehension activities.

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Most ESL reading activities designed to test comprehension look like this:

Sarah went to the (beach/park). There, she met a friend who went to (science class/summer camp) two years ago.

You can usually find exercises like this for free on K12Reader.com and Mr. Nussbaum.com , so you don’t need to spend time making them on your own.

They’re rather cut-and-dry as far as exercises go, but if you’re new to giving out ESL reading comprehension activities or are looking for a safe option, you can always fall back on this one.

If you’re looking for a more creative version of “Pick the Right Word,” you can also craft an ESL reading comprehension activity that doesn’t necessarily involve words and sentences (as strange as that might sound).

Instead of giving students two options to choose from or having them fill in the blanks, you can give them a bunch of pictures and have them do some matching.

Using the example above ( Sarah went to the (beach/park) . ..), you can label several pictures as A, B, C and D. Picture A can be a beach, Picture B can be a park and so on. Students can then sort through the pictures, and write the correct letter corresponding to the correct image in the blank space.

Alternatively, you could also use “Connect the Dots” for the same exercise above. This works especially well with younger ESL learners, who’ll be more appreciative of colorful pictures accompanying their learning activities.

Feel free to throw in an irrelevant picture or two to make the activity a tad more tricky and interesting. It’ll also more accurately gauge whether your students actually understand the answers they’re giving out or are just guessing them.

Nursery rhymes like “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall” are engaging for ESL learners of any age.

For this activity, use pictures to retell the story and help your students remember the main plot points, characters and events of the text.

Preparation

• Create copies of two stories. Make sure each is single-spaced and printed on a separate piece of paper. Label each story “Story 1” and “Story 2.”
• Make a worksheet of a bunch of pictures (related to the stories you’ve created) labeled with either numbers or letters. Make sure there are spaces or lines immediately below the pictures where your students can write their answers. Depending on your class’s level, you can turn the labeling exercise into the perfect drill for practicing spelling and sentence construction.
• Give your students the picture worksheet, and talk about what’s happening in each picture.
• Ask your students to turn over the picture worksheet, and hand out the two stories to read.
• After the students have finished reading, have them flip the papers with the stories over to the blank back side. Without looking at the story, students should cut out the pictures, and glue them to the back of the right story in chronological order.

If you need some inspiration for fantastic picture reading comprehension worksheets, try ESlFlow.com . There are also some interesting picture worksheets on Cal.org that  focus specifically on health literacy for ESL adults .

You’ll probably find that it’s easier and more fun to find a story online, and download images from Google to make your own picture stories.

Story retelling involves reading a text or story and then acting it out to other students. If you have students who love role play, they’ll enjoy this one and similar activities .

• Choose from any of these short stories for ESL students , print them out and make enough copies for the whole class.
• Divide students into small groups. Make sure the size of each group matches the number of characters in the stories you’re handing out.
• Give each group a different story that they’ll need to act out in front of the class.
• Prepare (or have your students prepare) a list of short answers/multiple choice/true or false questions to engage the audience and evaluate how well the actors captured the events of the story.
• Once everything is set, it’s showtime!

Cause and effect questions help students think outside the box and better understand the ripple effect of events.

Text materials that have a mysterious plot or historical background are excellent choices, because they require students to understand the context of the mystery, the clues and the characters to fully appreciate the thrills of crime solving.

For example, you can read this interesting crime scene together with your students in class. Your objective with this activity is to answer the final question: Why isn’t Inspector Coderre satisfied with Ms. Webb’s version of the event? 

• Divide students into groups.
• Create a cause and effect map to capture the first part of Ms. Webb’s testimony, which ends right before the sentence, “The inspector was very sympathetic and told her that it was very natural to not want to damage somebody’s property.” For example, you can write something like “ (effect) Ms. Webb could see the study room → it was well-lit. (cause) ” or “ (cause) Ms. Webb broke a small window → to get into the house. (effect) ” It doesn’t matter how you order the cause and effect—the point is to help students notice details in the story and make an effective analysis.
• Ask the students to identify the part of the testimony that made the detective lose his sympathy. Analyze that testimonial section with another cause and effect chart. Do they notice any inconsistencies?
• Discuss the students’ findings in class or in small groups.

You don’t have to limit ESL reading comprehension activities to short stories. You can also facilitate hands-on activities to encourage your students to read, such as this treasure hunt game.

• Create a map. It can be hand-drawn or printed. Give unique names to the basic geographic features of the classroom/schoolyard, so students can navigate the “rainforest” or “dark caves” without getting lost.
• Put together a clue sheet to help locate the treasure. It should be filled with hints, codes and even secret messages for students to decode. For example, if you hid a diamond playing card on the third shelf of a bookcase in the corner, you can give the following clue: It stands in a corner with lots of pages for you to read. The diamond is on the third floor and right under a fairy tale. 
• Hide different treasures (cards, small balls and beanies) in the classroom or schoolyard.
• Divide your students into groups.
• Give them the map and clue sheet to locate the treasure.
• The first group that finds their treasure wins the game. But they’re always welcome to join other teams to help them find their treasures, too!

Multiple-choice is a classic, wonderful way to ease your students into new material. It’s also excellent for building much-needed confidence before moving on to more challenging ways of checking reading comprehension.

You’ll want to use “scaling” in your multiple choice questions—i.e., making each question slightly more difficult than the one before it. This way, your students will be challenged just enough to keep going.

To get started:

• Ask students to read a short story, article or blog post. 
• Give them a few concise multiple-choice questions afterward.
• Go over the questions and answers as a class.

In this activity, your aim is to get students to dig deeper beneath the surface of what they’re reading. You want them to go beyond answering questions about the events and characters in the story, and talk about related topics as well.

For example, if a short story features lovers who are of the same gender, the students might want to formulate short answers about the concept of homosexuality. (Of course, if this is a taboo topic in the area where you’re teaching, or your students aren’t at the level where they can talk about such topics yet, you may want to pick an easier subject that’s less emotionally charged or controversial.) 

There are a lot of ways to go about this activity. You can:

• Give students time to read the story in class.
• Assign the story as homework.
• Pair students up, and have them develop short answers together.
• Have pairs read their short answers to other pairs.

This exercise is a great way to put some of your students’ newly learned words to good use. Plus, you don’t have to search far for new words—the ones that appear in the assigned reading will do.

All you have to do is:

• Pair students up.
• Have them underline key words in the target text.
• Have them look up any words they don’t know.
• Have students present their vocabulary terms to their classmates.

Decoding phrases, especially idioms, can be tricky for most students. That’s why it’s a good idea to devote an entire activity to this concept alone.

• Scan the assigned or target text for idioms that may be difficult to decode based on context alone.
• Compile these words and phrases, and print them on a worksheet.
• Ask your students to read the collection of phrases, and have them write down or discuss what they think the phrases mean. Be careful not to use too many phrases, or you’ll bore the life out of your students and discourage them from reading the assigned or target text further. 
• Once everyone is done, explain the phrases to the students. If you speak your students’ mother tongue, you can also judiciously use the bilingual method of teaching English . Ask them if they have similar idioms in their language.
• Challenge your students to write sentences using the new idioms, either in class or for homework. This allows you to check for comprehension and tweak accordingly.

Often, ESL reading activities involve answering questions after the text has been read. For this activity, it’ll be the other way around. 

Pre-reading questions are great for reading comprehension because:

• They orient the reader to the genre, topic and purpose of the text.
• They allow the reader to activate their knowledge of related vocabulary, and glean the key words and phrases they should seek to understand in the reading.
• They provide a focus for the reading of the text, so students know what information is important and what isn’t.
• They save a ton of time during reading comprehension tests.

Encourage your students to underline key words and phrases, and make notes and translations where necessary. This will help them avoid the common error of not answering the question as it’s written on the paper. A little time spent going over their notes here can improve the overall accuracy and relevance of their answers.

Reading comprehension work gives you an excellent opportunity to get in some pronunciation activities for your ESL students . These will enhance their speaking and listening skills all at once.

For example, when working on a text in class, you can:

• Read a sentence in the target text.
• Have the students repeat the sentence after you, paying close attention to their pronunciation.
• If you notice anything off about their pronunciation, give them gentle feedback .
• Once you’ve worked through the entire piece, have the students read it back to you paragraph by paragraph. Again, take the opportunity to correct where necessary.

Similar to the short answer activity discussed earlier, paragraph summary activities can challenge your students and help them develop their unique English voices.

This activity could be done post-reading, but it’s also an excellent way to ensure comprehension as you work through the text with your students.

• Put students in groups.
• Give them the text as you usually would.
• Encourage your students to take notes, annotate and underline as they go. Ask them to talk about any personal connections that they have to the topic(s), or to put themselves in the shoes of someone featured in the text. Students will benefit from relating what they’ve learned to their own lives.
• At the end of a paragraph (or suitable portion of the text), have the students summarize what they’ve read in their own words. They should be instructed to write it out in no more than four or five sentences. Encourage them to use different words and sentence constructions.
• Have them present their summaries to the class. The presentations can last from 30 seconds to a minute each.
• Answer any questions that arise.

A fun post-reading activity is to have a quiz based on the reading comprehension text.

Students generally get lots of opportunities to answer questions in class, but not as many to ask them. Try checking their comprehension by having them ask their classmates questions about the passage they’ve read.

I’ll go into the specific quiz formats later, but the activity will generally go like this:

• Have them create a quiz for the other groups.
• Have the groups grade the quizzes.
• Discuss the quiz questions and answers as a class.

The quizzes don’t have to be in the usual pen-and-paper format. They can also come in the form of an:

• Oral quiz.  This gives the students an opportunity to use their new vocabulary in speech.
• Game show quiz. Set up a game resembling “Jeopardy!,” or choose from any other famous TV game show to model your quiz on.

True or false is yet another standard classroom activity that can be made fun for your ESL classroom.

• Take your featured text, and create a good number of “yes or no” questions about it. Each question should be relatively simple, covering the main topic, events, themes, characters and anything else described in the text.
• Read the questions out loud while students follow along on a worksheet. Have the students respond to the statements by giving a thumbs-up for a true statement or a thumbs-down for a false statement. This allows you to easily spot the students who are struggling to understand the piece and support them accordingly.

For longer and more complex pieces, you can review the true or false statements at the end of each paragraph or page, instead of the end like you would with simpler pieces.

This could be done as a pre- or post-reading activity and works best in groups.

• Photocopy the passage, and cut it into pieces. Chunks of one or two paragraphs are best.
• Get your students to put the reading together. 

You could also do a cloze reading exercise like so:

• From the reading, choose topic sentences that you want your students to work on.
• Using your word processor software (like Microsoft Word or Google Docs ), type or copy-and-paste the topic sentences into a blank page.
• From the sentences, cut the words you want your students to work on, and paste them at the bottom of the page. Replace the cut words in the sentences with blanks.
• Let your students fill out the blanks using the words pasted at the bottom of the page.

Luckily, here are some ready-to-use cloze activities on different topics you can swipe from. 

Taboo is arguably the best game for practicing vocabulary and livening up your lesson. If you haven’t heard of it before, it essentially involves a student explaining what the key word they’re thinking of means without using the key word itself or synonyms of any kind.

Here’s another variation:

• Put students in groups of four to five members.
• One student goes first. They draw their key word on the board. If the word is “financial,” the student won’t be able to say “bank,” “money” or “financial.” They can only make gestures or add details to their drawing.
• The student who guesses which word fits the drawing gets a point.

Class discussions can take place before or after your ESL reading activities.

If you’re doing it beforehand, your goal should be to engage the students and activate their current vocabulary, getting them to talk in broad terms about the topic they’ll be reading.

For example, if the text will be about tourism, kickstart a discussion with questions like:

• What are the benefits of a strong tourism industry?
• What are the best tourist destinations in their home country, and why?
• What are major problems for tourism for their home country?

You can put these questions on a worksheet with ample space for brainstorming and forming opinions independently.

Alternatively, you could divide students into pairs or small groups to discuss the topic before reading the text. Since you’re already familiar with the text they’ll be looking at, you can skillfully and subtly steer the conversation into issues and areas related to the gist of the text to come.

If you’re doing post-reading discussions, you can use questions from ESL textbooks , come up with your own questions or—if your students are at a high enough level—have them come up with the questions themselves.

• Have them write two to three discussion questions.
• Use the questions as a basis for class discussion.

For some fantastic ESL-oriented discussion questions on a variety of topics, click right here .

If the passage is about something topical, you could use it to organize a debate.

There are many ways to structure a class debate, but the one I usually use is pretty simple:

• One-minute argument
• One-minute rebuttal
• The facilitator (usually you or a capable student) gives feedback.

Suitable for intermediate to advanced students, a debate offers a platform to share opinions about a given topic. Often, with a little imagination, a reading comprehension topic can segue into a debate topic relevant to the students’ own lives.

You know how watching a TED Talk often leaves you with a feeling that you’ve learned something new or even life-changing afterward? Recreate that format in class to further boost reading comprehension.

For example, if the class just read an article about the qualities of a good brand, the students could deliver two-minute presentations about their favorite brand and what makes it special.

To make the most of these in-class TED Talks:

• Show them a relevant TED Talk in class, so they can get the hang of the format.
• Give students time to create their own TED Talks. You could also assign it as a homework assignment instead.
• Decide whether the TED Talk should be done individually or in groups. Both work well enough, in my experience.

Then again, your students might feel intimidated at the thought of having to recreate presentations that are given by big-name personalities and watched by millions of people around the world.

In that case, it’s okay to take a more down-to-earth approach to presentations. Give your students a bit more leeway with the format. Better yet, let them have the freedom to talk about any topic they choose.

This way, they’ll make more of an effort to communicate their passion for something in English. They’ll also have a solid incentive to brush up on the necessary vocabulary and express themselves in colorful ways. Watch them come alive as they talk about the things that matter the most to them.

• Reading doesn’t only teach ESL students grammar, word usage and sentence structure. It also enables them to acquire new information about the culture surrounding their target language.
• Reading helps students see how English is communicated through writing. As you know, good writing and being a good reader go hand in hand.
• Reading comprehension activities help students test their understanding of words in a written context. At the same time, they can get the most out of their reading assignments.

While you’ve undoubtedly used conventional tests to quiz your students, there are ways to make reading comprehension activities effective without relying on the same old methods.

For example, you can:

• Have your students listen to ESL podcasts . Some of them have transcripts, so students could read those first, then listen to the episode afterward and combine listening and reading comprehension.
• Use videos with subtitles in your classroom for a fun twist on reading comprehension. The key is to use videos that have subtitles, like YouTube and FluentU , the latter of which has authentic videos with accurate transcripts. Have students read the transcript first, then play the video in class.

Sure, there’s a time for your students to read for pleasure outside the classroom. However, in-class reading comprehension activities maximize the benefits of reading by making it more relevant and personal to them.

Also, as their teacher, you’ll have opportunities to clarify misunderstandings and ambiguities, as well as enhance students’ vocabulary, word usage and interpretation skills.

With a few dashes of entertainment and creativity here and there, your ESL students will come to love reading in English beyond its educational benefits. 

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1.1 Reading and Writing in College

Learning objectives.

• Understand the expectations for reading and writing assignments in college courses.
• Understand and apply general strategies to complete college-level reading assignments efficiently and effectively.
• Recognize specific types of writing assignments frequently included in college courses.
• Understand and apply general strategies for managing college-level writing assignments.
• Determine specific reading and writing strategies that work best for you individually.

As you begin this chapter, you may be wondering why you need an introduction. After all, you have been writing and reading since elementary school. You completed numerous assessments of your reading and writing skills in high school and as part of your application process for college. You may write on the job, too. Why is a college writing course even necessary?

When you are eager to get started on the coursework in your major that will prepare you for your career, getting excited about an introductory college writing course can be difficult. However, regardless of your field of study, honing your writing skills—and your reading and critical-thinking skills—gives you a more solid academic foundation.

In college, academic expectations change from what you may have experienced in high school. The quantity of work you are expected to do is increased. When instructors expect you to read pages upon pages or study hours and hours for one particular course, managing your work load can be challenging. This chapter includes strategies for studying efficiently and managing your time.

The quality of the work you do also changes. It is not enough to understand course material and summarize it on an exam. You will also be expected to seriously engage with new ideas by reflecting on them, analyzing them, critiquing them, making connections, drawing conclusions, or finding new ways of thinking about a given subject. Educationally, you are moving into deeper waters. A good introductory writing course will help you swim.

Table 1.1 “High School versus College Assignments” summarizes some of the other major differences between high school and college assignments.

Table 1.1 High School versus College Assignments

This chapter covers the types of reading and writing assignments you will encounter as a college student. You will also learn a variety of strategies for mastering these new challenges—and becoming a more confident student and writer.

Throughout this chapter, you will follow a first-year student named Crystal. After several years of working as a saleswoman in a department store, Crystal has decided to pursue a degree in elementary education and become a teacher. She is continuing to work part-time, and occasionally she finds it challenging to balance the demands of work, school, and caring for her four-year-old son. As you read about Crystal, think about how you can use her experience to get the most out of your own college experience.

Review Table 1.1 “High School versus College Assignments” and think about how you have found your college experience to be different from high school so far. Respond to the following questions:

• In what ways do you think college will be more rewarding for you as a learner?
• What aspects of college do you expect to find most challenging?
• What changes do you think you might have to make in your life to ensure your success in college?

Reading Strategies

Your college courses will sharpen both your reading and your writing skills. Most of your writing assignments—from brief response papers to in-depth research projects—will depend on your understanding of course reading assignments or related readings you do on your own. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to write effectively about a text that you have not understood. Even when you do understand the reading, it can be hard to write about it if you do not feel personally engaged with the ideas discussed.

This section discusses strategies you can use to get the most out of your college reading assignments. These strategies fall into three broad categories:

• Planning strategies. To help you manage your reading assignments.
• Comprehension strategies. To help you understand the material.
• Active reading strategies. To take your understanding to a higher and deeper level.

Planning Your Reading

Have you ever stayed up all night cramming just before an exam? Or found yourself skimming a detailed memo from your boss five minutes before a crucial meeting? The first step in handling college reading successfully is planning. This involves both managing your time and setting a clear purpose for your reading.

Managing Your Reading Time

You will learn more detailed strategies for time management in Section 1.2 “Developing Study Skills” , but for now, focus on setting aside enough time for reading and breaking your assignments into manageable chunks. If you are assigned a seventy-page chapter to read for next week’s class, try not to wait until the night before to get started. Give yourself at least a few days and tackle one section at a time.

Your method for breaking up the assignment will depend on the type of reading. If the text is very dense and packed with unfamiliar terms and concepts, you may need to read no more than five or ten pages in one sitting so that you can truly understand and process the information. With more user-friendly texts, you will be able to handle longer sections—twenty to forty pages, for instance. And if you have a highly engaging reading assignment, such as a novel you cannot put down, you may be able to read lengthy passages in one sitting.

As the semester progresses, you will develop a better sense of how much time you need to allow for the reading assignments in different subjects. It also makes sense to preview each assignment well in advance to assess its difficulty level and to determine how much reading time to set aside.

College instructors often set aside reserve readings for a particular course. These consist of articles, book chapters, or other texts that are not part of the primary course textbook. Copies of reserve readings are available through the university library; in print; or, more often, online. When you are assigned a reserve reading, download it ahead of time (and let your instructor know if you have trouble accessing it). Skim through it to get a rough idea of how much time you will need to read the assignment in full.

Setting a Purpose

The other key component of planning is setting a purpose. Knowing what you want to get out of a reading assignment helps you determine how to approach it and how much time to spend on it. It also helps you stay focused during those occasional moments when it is late, you are tired, and relaxing in front of the television sounds far more appealing than curling up with a stack of journal articles.

Sometimes your purpose is simple. You might just need to understand the reading material well enough to discuss it intelligently in class the next day. However, your purpose will often go beyond that. For instance, you might also read to compare two texts, to formulate a personal response to a text, or to gather ideas for future research. Here are some questions to ask to help determine your purpose:

How did my instructor frame the assignment? Often your instructors will tell you what they expect you to get out of the reading:

• Read Chapter 2 and come to class prepared to discuss current teaching practices in elementary math.
• Read these two articles and compare Smith’s and Jones’s perspectives on the 2010 health care reform bill.
• Read Chapter 5 and think about how you could apply these guidelines to running your own business.
• How deeply do I need to understand the reading? If you are majoring in computer science and you are assigned to read Chapter 1, “Introduction to Computer Science,” it is safe to assume the chapter presents fundamental concepts that you will be expected to master. However, for some reading assignments, you may be expected to form a general understanding but not necessarily master the content. Again, pay attention to how your instructor presents the assignment.
• How does this assignment relate to other course readings or to concepts discussed in class? Your instructor may make some of these connections explicitly, but if not, try to draw connections on your own. (Needless to say, it helps to take detailed notes both when in class and when you read.)
• How might I use this text again in the future? If you are assigned to read about a topic that has always interested you, your reading assignment might help you develop ideas for a future research paper. Some reading assignments provide valuable tips or summaries worth bookmarking for future reference. Think about what you can take from the reading that will stay with you.

Improving Your Comprehension

You have blocked out time for your reading assignments and set a purpose for reading. Now comes the challenge: making sure you actually understand all the information you are expected to process. Some of your reading assignments will be fairly straightforward. Others, however, will be longer or more complex, so you will need a plan for how to handle them.

For any expository writing —that is, nonfiction, informational writing—your first comprehension goal is to identify the main points and relate any details to those main points. Because college-level texts can be challenging, you will also need to monitor your reading comprehension. That is, you will need to stop periodically and assess how well you understand what you are reading. Finally, you can improve comprehension by taking time to determine which strategies work best for you and putting those strategies into practice.

Identifying the Main Points

In college, you will read a wide variety of materials, including the following:

• Textbooks. These usually include summaries, glossaries, comprehension questions, and other study aids.
• Nonfiction trade books. These are less likely to include the study features found in textbooks.
• Popular magazine, newspaper, or web articles. These are usually written for a general audience.
• Scholarly books and journal articles. These are written for an audience of specialists in a given field.

Regardless of what type of expository text you are assigned to read, your primary comprehension goal is to identify the main point : the most important idea that the writer wants to communicate and often states early on. Finding the main point gives you a framework to organize the details presented in the reading and relate the reading to concepts you learned in class or through other reading assignments. After identifying the main point, you will find the supporting points , the details, facts, and explanations that develop and clarify the main point.

Some texts make that task relatively easy. Textbooks, for instance, include the aforementioned features as well as headings and subheadings intended to make it easier for students to identify core concepts. Graphic features, such as sidebars, diagrams, and charts, help students understand complex information and distinguish between essential and inessential points. When you are assigned to read from a textbook, be sure to use available comprehension aids to help you identify the main points.

Trade books and popular articles may not be written specifically for an educational purpose; nevertheless, they also include features that can help you identify the main ideas. These features include the following:

• Trade books. Many trade books include an introduction that presents the writer’s main ideas and purpose for writing. Reading chapter titles (and any subtitles within the chapter) will help you get a broad sense of what is covered. It also helps to read the beginning and ending paragraphs of a chapter closely. These paragraphs often sum up the main ideas presented.
• Popular articles. Reading the headings and introductory paragraphs carefully is crucial. In magazine articles, these features (along with the closing paragraphs) present the main concepts. Hard news articles in newspapers present the gist of the news story in the lead paragraph, while subsequent paragraphs present increasingly general details.

At the far end of the reading difficulty scale are scholarly books and journal articles. Because these texts are written for a specialized, highly educated audience, the authors presume their readers are already familiar with the topic. The language and writing style is sophisticated and sometimes dense.

When you read scholarly books and journal articles, try to apply the same strategies discussed earlier. The introduction usually presents the writer’s thesis , the idea or hypothesis the writer is trying to prove. Headings and subheadings can help you understand how the writer has organized support for his or her thesis. Additionally, academic journal articles often include a summary at the beginning, called an abstract, and electronic databases include summaries of articles, too.

For more information about reading different types of texts, see Chapter 12 “Writing a Research Paper” .

Monitoring Your Comprehension

Finding the main idea and paying attention to text features as you read helps you figure out what you should know. Just as important, however, is being able to figure out what you do not know and developing a strategy to deal with it.

Textbooks often include comprehension questions in the margins or at the end of a section or chapter. As you read, stop occasionally to answer these questions on paper or in your head. Use them to identify sections you may need to reread, read more carefully, or ask your instructor about later.

Even when a text does not have built-in comprehension features, you can actively monitor your own comprehension. Try these strategies, adapting them as needed to suit different kinds of texts:

• Summarize. At the end of each section, pause to summarize the main points in a few sentences. If you have trouble doing so, revisit that section.
• Ask and answer questions. When you begin reading a section, try to identify two to three questions you should be able to answer after you finish it. Write down your questions and use them to test yourself on the reading. If you cannot answer a question, try to determine why. Is the answer buried in that section of reading but just not coming across to you? Or do you expect to find the answer in another part of the reading?
• Do not read in a vacuum. Look for opportunities to discuss the reading with your classmates. Many instructors set up online discussion forums or blogs specifically for that purpose. Participating in these discussions can help you determine whether your understanding of the main points is the same as your peers’.

These discussions can also serve as a reality check. If everyone in the class struggled with the reading, it may be exceptionally challenging. If it was a breeze for everyone but you, you may need to see your instructor for help.

As a working mother, Crystal found that the best time to get her reading done was in the evening, after she had put her four-year-old to bed. However, she occasionally had trouble concentrating at the end of a long day. She found that by actively working to summarize the reading and asking and answering questions, she focused better and retained more of what she read. She also found that evenings were a good time to check the class discussion forums that a few of her instructors had created.

Choose any text that that you have been assigned to read for one of your college courses. In your notes, complete the following tasks:

• Summarize the main points of the text in two to three sentences.
• Write down two to three questions about the text that you can bring up during class discussion.

Students are often reluctant to seek help. They feel like doing so marks them as slow, weak, or demanding. The truth is, every learner occasionally struggles. If you are sincerely trying to keep up with the course reading but feel like you are in over your head, seek out help. Speak up in class, schedule a meeting with your instructor, or visit your university learning center for assistance.

Deal with the problem as early in the semester as you can. Instructors respect students who are proactive about their own learning. Most instructors will work hard to help students who make the effort to help themselves.

Taking It to the Next Level: Active Reading

Now that you have acquainted (or reacquainted) yourself with useful planning and comprehension strategies, college reading assignments may feel more manageable. You know what you need to do to get your reading done and make sure you grasp the main points. However, the most successful students in college are not only competent readers but active, engaged readers.

Using the SQ3R Strategy

One strategy you can use to become a more active, engaged reader is the SQ3R strategy , a step-by-step process to follow before, during, and after reading. You may already use some variation of it. In essence, the process works like this:

• Survey the text in advance.
• Form questions before you start reading.
• Read the text.
• Recite and/or record important points during and after reading.
• Review and reflect on the text after you read.

Before you read, you survey, or preview, the text. As noted earlier, reading introductory paragraphs and headings can help you begin to figure out the author’s main point and identify what important topics will be covered. However, surveying does not stop there. Look over sidebars, photographs, and any other text or graphic features that catch your eye. Skim a few paragraphs. Preview any boldfaced or italicized vocabulary terms. This will help you form a first impression of the material.

Next, start brainstorming questions about the text. What do you expect to learn from the reading? You may find that some questions come to mind immediately based on your initial survey or based on previous readings and class discussions. If not, try using headings and subheadings in the text to formulate questions. For instance, if one heading in your textbook reads “Medicare and Medicaid,” you might ask yourself these questions:

• When was Medicare and Medicaid legislation enacted? Why?
• What are the major differences between these two programs?

Although some of your questions may be simple factual questions, try to come up with a few that are more open-ended. Asking in-depth questions will help you stay more engaged as you read.

The next step is simple: read. As you read, notice whether your first impressions of the text were correct. Are the author’s main points and overall approach about the same as what you predicted—or does the text contain a few surprises? Also, look for answers to your earlier questions and begin forming new questions. Continue to revise your impressions and questions as you read.

While you are reading, pause occasionally to recite or record important points. It is best to do this at the end of each section or when there is an obvious shift in the writer’s train of thought. Put the book aside for a moment and recite aloud the main points of the section or any important answers you found there. You might also record ideas by jotting down a few brief notes in addition to, or instead of, reciting aloud. Either way, the physical act of articulating information makes you more likely to remember it.

After you have completed the reading, take some time to review the material more thoroughly. If the textbook includes review questions or your instructor has provided a study guide, use these tools to guide your review. You will want to record information in a more detailed format than you used during reading, such as in an outline or a list.

As you review the material, reflect on what you learned. Did anything surprise you, upset you, or make you think? Did you find yourself strongly agreeing or disagreeing with any points in the text? What topics would you like to explore further? Jot down your reflections in your notes. (Instructors sometimes require students to write brief response papers or maintain a reading journal. Use these assignments to help you reflect on what you read.)

Choose another text that that you have been assigned to read for a class. Use the SQ3R process to complete the reading. (Keep in mind that you may need to spread the reading over more than one session, especially if the text is long.)

Be sure to complete all the steps involved. Then, reflect on how helpful you found this process. On a scale of one to ten, how useful did you find it? How does it compare with other study techniques you have used?

Using Other Active Reading Strategies

The SQ3R process encompasses a number of valuable active reading strategies: previewing a text, making predictions, asking and answering questions, and summarizing. You can use the following additional strategies to further deepen your understanding of what you read.

• Connect what you read to what you already know. Look for ways the reading supports, extends, or challenges concepts you have learned elsewhere.
• Relate the reading to your own life. What statements, people, or situations relate to your personal experiences?
• Visualize. For both fiction and nonfiction texts, try to picture what is described. Visualizing is especially helpful when you are reading a narrative text, such as a novel or a historical account, or when you read expository text that describes a process, such as how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
• Pay attention to graphics as well as text. Photographs, diagrams, flow charts, tables, and other graphics can help make abstract ideas more concrete and understandable.
• Understand the text in context. Understanding context means thinking about who wrote the text, when and where it was written, the author’s purpose for writing it, and what assumptions or agendas influenced the author’s ideas. For instance, two writers might both address the subject of health care reform, but if one article is an opinion piece and one is a news story, the context is different.
• Plan to talk or write about what you read. Jot down a few questions or comments in your notebook so you can bring them up in class. (This also gives you a source of topic ideas for papers and presentations later in the semester.) Discuss the reading on a class discussion board or blog about it.

As Crystal began her first semester of elementary education courses, she occasionally felt lost in a sea of new terms and theories about teaching and child development. She found that it helped to relate the reading to her personal observations of her son and other kids she knew.

Writing at Work

Many college courses require students to participate in interactive online components, such as a discussion forum, a page on a social networking site, or a class blog. These tools are a great way to reinforce learning. Do not be afraid to be the student who starts the discussion.

Remember that when you interact with other students and teachers online, you need to project a mature, professional image. You may be able to use an informal, conversational tone, but complaining about the work load, using off-color language, or “flaming” other participants is inappropriate.

Active reading can benefit you in ways that go beyond just earning good grades. By practicing these strategies, you will find yourself more interested in your courses and better able to relate your academic work to the rest of your life. Being an interested, engaged student also helps you form lasting connections with your instructors and with other students that can be personally and professionally valuable. In short, it helps you get the most out of your education.

Common Writing Assignments

College writing assignments serve a different purpose than the typical writing assignments you completed in high school. In high school, teachers generally focus on teaching you to write in a variety of modes and formats, including personal writing, expository writing, research papers, creative writing, and writing short answers and essays for exams. Over time, these assignments help you build a foundation of writing skills.

In college, many instructors will expect you to already have that foundation.

Your college composition courses will focus on writing for its own sake, helping you make the transition to college-level writing assignments. However, in most other college courses, writing assignments serve a different purpose. In those courses, you may use writing as one tool among many for learning how to think about a particular academic discipline.

Additionally, certain assignments teach you how to meet the expectations for professional writing in a given field. Depending on the class, you might be asked to write a lab report, a case study, a literary analysis, a business plan, or an account of a personal interview. You will need to learn and follow the standard conventions for those types of written products.

Finally, personal and creative writing assignments are less common in college than in high school. College courses emphasize expository writing, writing that explains or informs. Often expository writing assignments will incorporate outside research, too. Some classes will also require persuasive writing assignments in which you state and support your position on an issue. College instructors will hold you to a higher standard when it comes to supporting your ideas with reasons and evidence.

Table 1.2 “Common Types of College Writing Assignments” lists some of the most common types of college writing assignments. It includes minor, less formal assignments as well as major ones. Which specific assignments you encounter will depend on the courses you take and the learning objectives developed by your instructors.

Table 1.2 Common Types of College Writing Assignments

Part of managing your education is communicating well with others at your university. For instance, you might need to e-mail your instructor to request an office appointment or explain why you will need to miss a class. You might need to contact administrators with questions about your tuition or financial aid. Later, you might ask instructors to write recommendations on your behalf.

Treat these documents as professional communications. Address the recipient politely; state your question, problem, or request clearly; and use a formal, respectful tone. Doing so helps you make a positive impression and get a quicker response.

Key Takeaways

• College-level reading and writing assignments differ from high school assignments not only in quantity but also in quality.
• Managing college reading assignments successfully requires you to plan and manage your time, set a purpose for reading, practice effective comprehension strategies, and use active reading strategies to deepen your understanding of the text.
• College writing assignments place greater emphasis on learning to think critically about a particular discipline and less emphasis on personal and creative writing.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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EDUC 230 Foundations of Reading and Literacy

• Course Description

For information regarding prerequisites for this course, please refer to the  Academic Course Catalog .

Course Guide

View this course’s outcomes, policies, schedule, and more.*

*The information contained in our Course Guides is provided as a sample. Specific course curriculum and requirements for each course are provided by individual instructors each semester. Students should not use Course Guides to find and complete assignments, class prerequisites, or order books.

The candidate will explore the principles of The Science of Reading and its impact on literacy instruction. This will include an emphasis on language development, phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The candidate will develop an overall understanding of the literacy development process through evaluation of current reading research. This understanding will promote the candidate to make informed decisions regarding literacy curricula and instructional strategies. 

Course Assignment

Textbook readings and lecture presentations.

No details available.

Course Requirements Checklist

After reading the Course Syllabus and Student Expectations , the candidate will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview.

Discussions (2)

Discussions are collaborative learning experiences. Therefore, the student is required to provide a thread in response to the provided prompt for each Discussion. Each thread must be 300–400 words and demonstrate course-related knowledge. In addition to the thread, the candidate is required to reply to 2 other classmates’ threads. Each reply must be 100-200 words. Each thread and reply must incorporate at least 1 scholarly citation in current APA format. Any sources cited must have been published within the last 5 years, and acceptable sources include the textbook, course materials, or the Bible. (CLO: A, B, C, E)

Article Application Assignment

Based on the review of research, the candidate will create a teaching activity that integrates oral language and comprehension of informational text for two grade bands. These teaching activities will be rooted in research. The candidate will complete the Article Application Template according to the assignment instructions. The final portion must include one in-text citation from the course textbook and one in-text citation from the assigned article in 1-2 paragraphs describing the benefits of integrating language development and literacy instruction in teaching. (CLO: A, B)

Website Review Assignment

This assignment will allow the candidate to explore and contrast the literacy components of Phonemic Awareness and Phonological Awareness. Using the provided template, the candidate will explore online resources and strategies for supporting classroom instruction of these reading elements and include thorough descriptions of each element with 1-2 paragraphs explaining teacher supports. The student will provide 5 websites regarding phonological and phonemic awareness and the strategies the websites discuss. The candidate will then select and analyze at least 3 of the chosen strategies and write a 1-2 sentence rationale for each strategy. The assignment must include in-text citations and references of the course-textbook and selected websites. (CLO: A, C)

Small Group Instruction for Phonics Assignment

The candidate will identify and provide rationales for two center activities for the various stages of phonics. 3-5 characteristics must be identified for each stage along with a 3-5 sentence description and direct link to each center activity selected, except for one activity noted in the template. (CLO: C, D)

Article Review PowerPoint Assignment

The candidate will review an article related to vocabulary. Based on the content from the article and the text, the candidate will create a PowerPoint outlining the foundational principles of vocabulary instruction. The candidate will choose 2 topics from the provided list and create 3-5 slides for each topic, with a total of 6-10 slides. Both the textbook and the article should be cited in-text and referenced on a Reference slide in APA formatting. (CLO: A, C, E)

Program Evaluation Assignment

The candidate will complete a webquest to identify, describe, and evaluate how curricula based on the science of reading integrate the literacy elements studied. Using the provided template, the candidate will explore, evaluate, analyze, and answer prompts for 3 literacy units. The candidate will then choose one of these units to further evaluate by listing 2 strengths and 1 area of improvement. Finally, the candidate will write a conclusion in 5-7 sentences summarizing what he/she learned from this assignment and must include at least 1 citation to the course textbook or Learn items from the course in current APA format. (CLO: A, C)

Instructional Design for Supporting Literacy Assignment

The candidate will select one of two student scenarios and must describe instructional strategies appropriate for each student in the areas of decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The candidate must describe the instructional approach and give a rationale for how that strategy is based on research to support student mastery of the reading element. Each rationale must be supported with an in-text citation and a full list of references in APA format must be included in the last page of the template. (CLO: A, C, E)

Intervention Strategies Assignment

The candidate will complete a template to describe supports for struggling students related to decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The candidate will integrate supporting diverse students with a biblical worldview. In the provided template, the candidate will outline the individual supports he/she would provide for students needing intervention. Then, the candidate will outline a small group intervention strategy for 2 of the 5 reading elements and provide a rationale for the strategy. Each rationale must include at least 1 in-text citation used to support the strategy. Finally, the candidate will compose a 3-5 sentence paragraph explaining how meeting the students’ needs align with the biblical worldview of a Christian educator. The candidate must support this closing paragraph with at least 1 Scripture citation and reference. All references must be listed on the final page in current APA format. (CLO: A, C, E)

Quizzes (3)

Each quiz will cover the Learn material for the assigned module: week. Each quiz will be open-book/open-notes, contain 5-10 questions (multiple-choice, true/false, matching, etc.), and have a 1-hour time limit. There will be 2 attempts allowed for each quiz and the highest attempt will count towards the grade. (CLO: A, B, C, D)

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