This is an activity that comes directly from 21 Must-Use Reading Activities For Your Language Lessons: Fun Pre-Reading and Post-Reading Activities for All Language Classrooms by Sabina. I'll quote first how Sabina describes it, before going in to my own experiences:
Gap-Fill Transcript Dictation Reading Activity (Individual)Provide students with a copy of the text, with gaps. I suggest three forms, one with verbs missing, the second with nouns missing and the third with adjectives missing. Distribute the sheets so they have people around them who had the same sheet. The students must individually fill in the words as they listen. You could read again if necessary. Once finished, get learners to check they have spelled the words correctly by discussing (not showing!) with their neighbours.
Sabina includes this as one of her "Pre-Reading" Activities. As with a lot of her pre-reading activities, the purpose seems to be to force the learner's attention onto the text, before moving into activities that ask the learners to think critically about the text.
(Sabina's learners are probably a lot like mine. They're not always inherently motivated to read the text, so sometimes activities are needed to direct their attention onto the text.)
In my own classes, I have toyed with using this activity after the gist reading as a way to get students to carefully analyze the sentences, and focus on sentence level comprehension.
As you can see above, Sabina mentions having 3 sets of worksheets--one with missing verbs, one with missing nouns, and one with missing adjectives. So far, however, I've only gotten around to creating one worksheet--the one with missing verbs. (It seemed like it was more work than necessary to create additional worksheets with nouns or adjectives deleted.)
When using this activity, I typically have my students read the text once for the main idea, and give them some gist question for general understanding. Then after they have absorbed the text once for general understanding, I have them close their books, and give out the worksheet with missing verbs in it. The students still find this activity challenging despite the fact that they have already seen these sentences before. (My students never remember the text well enough that they are able to complete the sentences from memory, so I've found that it doesn't spoil the activity even if I do it as the second reading task.)
In fact, perhaps the activity is too challenging. Cloze activities are useful for reading comprehension, but usually cloze activities remove words at regular intervals (e.g. every 7th word.) Deleting all the verbs from the sentences left my worksheet with perhaps too many gaps. That, plus the verbs are an important part of the meaning of a sentence, so with all the verbs gone, it was hard for my students to guess the meaning from context.
Nevertheless, they did engage with the activity, and struggled with it for a while. It generates enough student engagement that I will usually use this activity once a term, but not twice.
After they've struggled with it for a while, I give them some support by having them check their answers either with a running dictation (with the full text placed outside the classroom). or, in textbooks which have an audio track to accompany the reading, by playing the audio, and have them listen and check.
I usually frame this activity as a competition. Students are put into groups and complete the worksheet together. Then at the end of the activity, they trade their worksheets with another group, and mark each other's answers. (I give out the answer sheet at this point). Students usually get into the competitive element of it.
The sample activity included at the top of this post comes from Unit 5 Reading 2: How is Paper Manufactured p.93-95 from Unlock 4: Reading and Writing Skills.
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