Gist Task

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

I realized that I've been referring to "gist" in a lot of my posts recently (including the previous post), but that I've never actually defined my terms.  And since I don't know who's reading this blog, I can't assume everyone has the same training and background that I do, so I figured I should take a minute to talk about what I mean by "gist".

The gist task is part of what Scrivener calls the task cycle, which is used for reading and listening lessons (i.e. receptive skills lessons).  The idea is that the same reading text or listening text (*) is used multiple times for different tasks.  Each time the teacher sets the task for the reading or listening text.  Then the students read or listen to the text with the object of completing the task.  Then they usually check their answers with a partner.  Then there's an all class feedback session in which the teacher evaluates whether or not the learners could successfully complete the task.  If the learners have not successfully completed the task, then they try again (probably with more guidance from the teacher).  If they have successfully completed the task, then the teacher goes on to the next task, in which the same listening/reading text is used, but the difficulty of the task is increased.

Learning Teaching p.253

A commonly used order of difficulty is

Gist--easiest

Finding Specific Information in the text--slightly harder

Understanding the text for Detailed Comprehension--even harder

Understanding Inferences in the text--most difficult

Personalization (Students' own opinions about the text)--a good way to finish off

Not all of these need to be used with every text (and indeed, not every text will lend itself to all five of these tasks), but the basic idea is that in reading or listening lesson, the students will read or listen to the same text at least 2 or 3 times, with different tasks each time, and the tasks will start out very easy, and get progressively more challenging. 

[An assumption behind the task cycle is that the texts are very short.  For example, Scrivener says that listening texts shouldn't be longer than 2 minutes.  If you're using textbooks that have longer texts, then the task cycle doesn't always work very well.  In English for Academic Purposes courses, the texts are usually longer, and then you can't always do the task cycle. For example, when I was teaching out of Q: Skills for Success: Listening and Speaking 5, some of the listening texts were mini-lectures that were up to 11 minutes long, and my students would have mutinied if I had tried to make them sit through those listening texts 2 or 3 times.]

The gist task is the first task in the task cycle.  It is supposed to be the easiest task.  The point of the gist task is not to challenge the students, but just to give them an opportunity to understanding the main idea of the text.  (Hence the name "gist"--the students only need to understand the gist of the reading or listening.)  You also want to make the gist task nice and easy to build the students' confidence.  The more challenging questions will come later.

Gist tasks usually revolve around understanding the main idea of a text.  So, for years, I would often use "What is it about?" as my standard gist question.  (e.g. "Listen to the conversation.  What are they talking about?")

However, a few years ago I was working with a CELTA tutor, and he told me it's not usually a good idea to simply ask: "What is the listening/reading about?"  These types of questions are too open ended, and also it can be difficult for learners to summarize the whole text.  After all, gist questions are supposed to be easy.

You can still do the "What is the text about?" questions, but make it a multiple choice answer rather than asking the students to provide the summary themselves.   

(e.g. "Listen to the conversation.  What are they talking about? a) shopping, b) planning a vacation c) booking a hotel or d) cleaning the garage)

Other typical gist tasks involve things like choosing the correct title for a text from a list of options, or ticking which topics are mentioned, or ordering 3 or 4 pictures.  Gist tasks can also be related to attitude or tone  (e.g. Did they like the film?) You could also ask a personalized question (e.g. "Do you agree with the speaker?") provided you don't expect the students to come up with fully detailed justifications.

Gist tasks can also be prediction tasks--i.e. get the students to predict the content of the text, then they read/listen to check their prediction.  This is provided the students are predicting the main idea of the text, and not the specific details of the text.  (Otherwise it becomes a finding specific information task.  More on prediction in a future post.)

Ideally, you want all the students to be able to answer the gist task very easily.  

For listening texts, gist tasks are relatively straightforward.  You set the task, you play the audio, and students answer the task.  

But reading lessons are a bit more problematic, because the students are all reading at their own individual pace.  Some students read quickly, some students read slowly.  And some students, if left to their own devices, will read very slowly, agonize over every unknown word, and might even get out their dictionaries to look up all the words that they don't know.  And you don't really want that in a gist task, because the whole point is that they're supposed to be just reading for the main idea.  Thus, teachers often force the students to skim the text for the gist task.

Many students are reluctant to skim the text.  They want to read it word by word, like they normally do.  But if you want them to read it quickly, the most common way is to give them a time limit.  2-3 minutes is common.

(There are other techniques.  In the past, I've known teachers who trained students in skimming techniques, such as trying to train students to quickly run their eyes over a text.  Or training students to run a finger down the text quickly, and keep pace with their finger as they skim.  Or one of my old managers even used to give out strips of paper for the students to cover up the left and right margins of the text, so that they physically couldn't read every word, even if they wanted to, and thus had to just rely on skimming to get the main idea.)

This emphasis on skimming techniques for gist reading has become very prominent in certain areas of ESL (i.e. CELTA courses, and other places associated with CELTA methodology.)  

Recently, there's been some pushback against it.  See, for example, Russ Mayne's excellent blog post in which he argues against teaching skimming and scanning techniques.

I personally have never liked forcing students to skim a text under timed conditions.  I think it's unnecessarily stressful for everyone involved.  

But (and here I part company from Russ Mayne somewhat) I do believe that gist tasks are useful because I believe that it's helpful for students to understand the main idea of the reading/listening text first before you start asking them the hard questions.  So when I set a gist reading task, I'll give my students what I think is an appropriate amount of time to read the text under normal conditions.  (This will vary with the length of the text, of course, but typically around 5-6 minutes for a short ESL text.)  And, as I mentioned in the previous post, if the coursebook has an audio recording of the reading text, I'll typically play the audio and ask the students to follow along to help students keep an appropriate pace during the gist reading.

Footnotes:

(*) I'm using "text" here in the technical linguistic sense, meaning an extended piece of written or spoken discourse.  So a "listening text" in this sense is just the listening audio track that you play for the students.