This is yet another activity I got from an idea bank at my school. As it was written up on that idea bank, it originally read:
Choose a short text that can be copied into a word document for editing. It should have a good number of reference words. Before the activity, edit the document by changing the reference words into their referents. Share the text with learners and ask them to read. They should notice that without the reference words, the text is repetitive and lacks fluency. Ask learners to improve the text by changing repetitive parts of the text with appropriate reference words. When done, show the learners the original text and compare them.
I actually found this a bit difficult to prepare, in part because it seemed that in most of the texts that I looked at, a lot of the pronouns were either exophoric reference or were dummy pronouns. I don't know--possibly I gave up on the original idea too easily. But what I decided to do instead was to just delete all the pronouns from the text, and then have the students work to identify and write in the missing pronouns.
I debated leaving a space for the students to write in the missing pronoun, but then decided that would be giving too much away. So instead I just double spaced the reading, so that the students could have room to write the missing pronoun above the line. (I also enlarged the text onto A3 size paper to give the students even more room to write.)
As with the Faulty Printer activity, I turned this into a competition. Students were divided into groups, and each group was given one text to edit and write in the missing pronouns. Then I had them correct each other's papers, and give each other 1 point for each correctly placed pronoun.
At the end of the activity, the scores were very low. (Some groups only got 1 or 2 points.) But student engagement was pretty high throughout the activity, so that was good.
As with a lot of these types of activities, I suspect the novelty was a factor. I suspect they would tire of this activity soon if I did it multiple times, but as one time activity, they had fun with it.
As noted in the instructions I pasted above, in order to prepare this activity you need access to the reading text in electronic form. The text I used for this activity is Reading 1: A Healthy Lifestyle Can Reduce Fatigue, Boost Energy p.227-234 from Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 5 (Second Edition).
According to my school, this activity is designed to focus students on identifying text fluency and the purpose of reference words.
Addendum: Since originally posting this, I have done this activity a second time, and this second time I was using a text that lended itself more to the original description of this activity--i.e. "changing the reference words into their referents." That lesson was Unit 3 Reading 2: Bird by Bird p.72-78 from Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 4 (Second Edition). The activity is on Google Docs here: docs, pub
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