Faulty Printer

(TESOL Ideas--Activities that Can Be Used with Any Reading Text)

Sample: docs, pub

Information slides: slides, pub

This is an idea I got recently from an idea bank at my school.  I tried it out in one of my classes and it worked well.  In my class, I used it with Unit 7 Reading 2 from Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 5 (Second Edition), and the sample worksheet that I made reflects that, but it can also be adapted to any number of readings.

The directions I got from my school were that the students are given a copy of the reading where the final 2 cm of each line is missing.  (This could be easily done by with a photocopier, and folding the sheet slightly.) To make it humorous, it's suggested that you tell the students a story about how the photocopier or the printer has malfunctioned.  (Hence the name for this activity: Faulty Printer).  The students then work together to predict or guess what the missing words are.  

I adjusted this slightly to remove some of the ambiguity around it.  I thought it might be confusing for students if they did not know how many words were missing from each line, so I changed it slightly so that instead of deleting 2 cm from each line, I just deleted the final word.  I was lucky that I had an electronic copy of the reading text, which made this relatively easy to do.  

Although even in this case, there were some headaches with the spacing.  I found I needed to first put line breaks in at the end of every line on the Google Document (i.e. hit the "enter" button after each line) before deleting the final word in order to keep the lines consistent on the question sheet and the answer sheet. 

In my classes, in order to increase engagement, I did this activity as a competition.  The class was divided into teams.  Each team was given one worksheet (which I enlarged onto an A3 size paper) , and had to work together to guess the missing words.  Then, they exchanged their papers with another group, and each group was given a copy of the answer sheet.  They then marked the points for each other, and the team with the most points wins.  

Despite this being a rather sedentary activity, my students worked well on this.  I think they enjoyed the detective work and guessing element, and I think they also enjoyed the competitive element.  No doubt it also helped that I used this activity only once this term, so the novelty was a factor.  (I'm not sure how they would react to doing this activity multiple times, but as a one time activity, it proved to be a nice change of pace.)

According to my school, this activity is supposed to focus on sentence analysis skills and predicting skills.

In the worksheet I created, I only used the first 3 paragraphs from a longer reading.  

I also did this activity after the students had already read the whole reading for gist.  But I had them close their books after we completed the gist reading task.  I was counting on the fact that the students wouldn't remember the sentences perfectly after the gist reading, and so there would still be an element of challenge in this activity.  And this proved to be correct.