Communicative Follow Up

(TESOL Ideas--Stages of a Reading Lesson, Stages of a Listening Lesson)

Index

* Balloon Debate

* Discussion Questions Related to the Topic of the Reading or Listening

* Retell the Story from a Different Perspective

* Using IELTS Speaking Part 2 Topics

* Create Your Own Organization; Create Your own _____

* Personalize the Theme of the Text

* Extend the Story

The Communicative Follow Up is the final stage of a reading or listening lesson.

In the communicative methodology, reading or listening texts are not simply texts to be absorbed for comprehension.  They also serve as prompts for communicative activities in which students can talk and write about their own ideas.

It is traditional to have the communicative activity match the receptive skill.  Reading and writing are thought to be related skills, so after a reading lesson, the communicative follow up activity would be writing.  Similarly, listening and speaking are related skills, so after a listening lesson, there would be a speaking activity.  

However, this is not a hard and fast rule, and the teacher should also take into account student preferences (many students prefer to use in-class time for speaking practice, and to do writing at home).  Also the teacher should take into account whether the topic lends itself to a speaking activity or a writing activity.  

One possible communicative follow up activity is to just give students a list of discussion questions on the same topic as the reading or listening text.  This is often the simplest and most straightforward activity to design, and it is also very easy to set-up in class (i.e. instructions to students are very simple "Here are some questions, discuss them with your group).  

However, these are not always the best type of activity, because the students may lack motivation to just discuss the question if there is no greater purpose to the discussion.  (But this will depend on the motivation level of your class.  For highly motivated students, a list of discussion question may work just fine.)

However, a better communicative activity usually contains a communicative outcome--that is, the students need to achieve something during the activity.  For example "plan a vacation with your group.  Where will you go?  What will you do?  Where will you stay? etc"  This works better because now the students are not simply talking for the sake of talking, but they actually have an outcome that they need to achieve to complete the activity successfully.  (This idea could be used as a communicative follow up to any reading or listening text that was about travelling).

Other popular communicative activities are:

* role play .  Students are put into pairs, or small groups, and assigned characters from the reading or listening text.  Each character has a goal for the conversation.  (e.g imagine a reading text or listening text that involved some sort of conflict between characters.  In the role play, the students could be assigned one of the characters, and the goal could be to resolves the conflict.)

* ranking activity.  students are given a list of things that relate to the reading or listening text in some way, and must rank them in order of importance.  They and their partner must agree on the rankings, so the communicative activity is to talk through the rankings until they reach an agreement.  (e.g. for a reading or listening text on travel, students could rank the most important features when choosing a destination)

* balloon debate.  there are six people in the hot air balloon, and the balloon is too heavy.  One person needs to be thrown out to save the lives of the other five. Who will it be?  This activity could be directly adapted to a reading or listening text using the characters from the reading or listening.  Or, it could be loosely adapted as just a "choose which one is out" activity.  (e.g. again, sticking with the theme of travel, a follow up to a reading and listening text on travel could be: you are going on a camping trip.  Here are six items.  You can only bring 5.  With your partner, decide which item you are going to leave behind.)

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The communicative activity should in some ways expand on the topic of the reading or listening text.

With the traditional style textbooks, this used to be fairly straightforward.  For example, a listening text would be 4 characters talking about movies that they liked.  The communicative follow up, then, would be for the students to talk in their groups about movies that they liked.

However, recently textbooks quite often are about topics that are not related to the students' lives, such as the National Geographic books, and then some creativity is required to create a communicative follow up.  However, with some creativity, it is usually possible to relate some aspect of the text to the student's lives.

For example, when teaching out of a National Geographic textbook, I once had to teach a lesson on Alaskan Ice Climbing.  This was a listening text about mountaineer guides in Alaska who guide tourists through the dangers of ice climbing.  It was completely unrelated to the lives of my students in Vietnam, so for the communicative follow up, I had the students pretend to be tour guides in Vietnam and think of the dangers in Vietnam that they needed to warn tourists about--see example here.  

Another example of a listening text I had to teach that was completely unrelated to my students' lives was this lesson on the reindeer people of Mongolia.  The lesson was about how the traditional way of life among the reindeer people in Mongolia are threatened because of the end of government subsidies.  Again, it was completely related to the lives of my students, but I created a role play in which a government official had to negotiate between the needs of the urban workers and the nomadic reindeer herders--see here.  

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Because Communicative Follow Ups are often a type of free conversation, I used to refer to them as "free practice" in my lesson planning.  (And if you look through my old archives, I think you can find some communicative follow ups mislabeled as "free practice" in my old lesson plans.)

But a couple of years ago, when I was working with an experienced CELTA tutor, he took great care to always correct me whenever I said "free practice" for a reading or listening lesson.  So now I try to always take care to differentiate between "free practice" and "communicative follow up".

The difference is that free practice takes place at the end of a grammar lesson. So there is a specific grammar point that the students are practicing, and at the end of the free practice the teacher can provide feedback on how accurately the students were using the grammar (or vocabulary).

With a communicative follow up, however, there is no language point that is being practiced.  It is simply practicing general fluency, and communicative ability.

As such, there is no need for feedback on language mistakes.  If the students can complete the task, they have successfully fulfilled the communicative objective.  The teacher can (and should) give some sort of feedback on the task.  (e.g. "Oh, that looks like a very nice vacation that you've planned.  I like the way you included so many outdoor activities.  I would like to go on your vacation myself." etc)  But there is no need to give feedback on language accuracy.

The exception to this, however, is if you're teaching a class where the students really want a lot of feedback on language accuracy.  Then, you can integrate some language points into the feedback.  However, because communicative follow ups are fluency activities, don't interrupt the students while they're speaking.  Save all the language accuracy feedback points until the end of the activity.

Stages of a Reading Lesson

(TESOL Ideas--Reading, Lesson Planning)

[Note: it is not possible or desirable to do all of these stages in a single lesson.  This simply represents a range of options that can be used for a reading text.  The activities are listed in the order that they should be done in class--i.e. you can omit activities, but don't change the order of activities.]

Pre-Reading

1. lead-in

2. Orientation to the text

3. Pre-Teach Vocabulary (This can also be moved to after the gist task)

4. Prediction 

Reading

5. Gist Task or Prediction and Check (possibly done as listen and read, put the paragraphs in order, matching heading to paragraphs, matching paragraphs to pictures)

6. Finding Specific Information (e.g. scanning race game, garbage man, quizziz, Baamboozle)

7. Understanding the text for Detailed Comprehension

8. Understanding Inferences in the text

9. Personalization (Students' own opinions about the text)

Post Reading

10. Bonus activities (e.g. faulty printer, student editors, running dictation, wrong words, Paraphrase Recognition Race, Paragraph Reconstruction, Match the Sentences in the Paragraph to their Function, Write in the Missing Verbs, Find the Missing Sentence)

11. Exploit the text for grammar or vocabulary work

12. Communicative Follow-up (discussion questions, Retell the Story from a different Perspective)

For a similar Lesson Planning Template, see the 2nd page of this flowchart HERE: 

Orientation to the Text (for Reading and Listening Lessons)

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

This is another entry in my quest to define all the terms I use on this blog.

"Orientation to the text" usually occurs after the lead-in.  The purpose is to clarify for the students all the variables of the reading or listening text.  So, for example, for a listening text, some of the variables could be: Who are the speakers on the audio? What is their relationship to each other? Where are they? What are they talking about? etc

In the past, I've often confused the lead-in with orientation to the text.  And, I hate to say this, but if you search my archives of materials on this blog, you will find several examples of a lesson stage that is labelled as "lead-in" but is actually "orientation to the text".

But I had the opportunity to work with a CELTA tutor a few years ago, and he set me straight on the difference.  And going forward, I'm going to try to be more precise in my terminology.

The difference is that a lead-in is supposed to be a brief conversation prompt that allows the students to relate their own life to an aspect of the reading or listening text.  So, to continue the example of parties that I introduced in the previous post, for a listening text on parties, the lead-in might be, "talk to your partner about a party that you enjoyed."

However, the orientation to the text would be: "You are going to listen to a conversation between two people.  They are brother and sister.  They are talking about a party that they went to last night."

As always, as much as possible, this should be done through eliciting.  Most textbooks nowadays have  will have some sort of photo that shows the people, so use the photo.  "What can you see? Who are they? What do you think their relationship is?  What do you think they are talking about?"

If the textbook doesn't have a suitable photo, you can usually find some sort of approximate photo on Google images that you can appropriate.  

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"Orientation to the text" could also be a time where you clarify any background information that the text assumes, but that may not be known to the students. 

A good example of this is a lesson I taught recently in Reflect Listening & Speaking 5, Listening 1: How to Structure a Good Story p.4-8.  The listening text was on story structure.  Romeo and Juliet was used as an example to illustrate the stages of a story.  The assumption behind the text was that the students were already familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet, and the purpose of the listening text was to use this pre-existing information as an example of the 3 act story structure.

However, in my case, I knew not all of my students would be familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet.  So before we did the listening, I briefly went over some of the key plot points of Romeo and Juliet.  

I did this by showing them some Youtube clips from the Romeo and Juliet movies.  See HERE.  

• Orientation to the Text 

• Tybalt kills Mercutio (Carlei)

• Romeo kills Tybalt (Carlei) or Romeo + Juliet (1996) - Romeo Kills Tybalt (HD)

• Romeo is Banished

• Romeo + Juliet (1996) - Romeo Dies Scene 

And once again, it's best to elicit as much as possible.  (To once again quote As J.J. Wilson from How to Teach Listening, you don't want to do a listening before the listening.)  So instead of narrating the clips myself, I played the movie clips without the sound on, and got the students to describe to me what was happening.  I added clarification as necessary, but for the most part the students were able to get the main parts themselves. 

Update March 14, 2025:  I was just rereading this old post, and it struck me that I should probably make something clear.

As you can see above, I'm using two definitions of "orientation to the text".  The first definition is to clarify all the different variables in the text, the second is to give any necessary background information.

I should make clear that the first definition is the traditional definition.  The second is my own extension.  It's probably debatable whether providing background knowledge is best classified under "orientation to the text" or not.  

Specific Information Questions for Reading and Listening

(TESOL Ideas--Stages of a Reading Lesson, Stages of a Listening Lesson)

In a reading or listening lesson, specific information questions (sometimes known as "finding specific information") are the easiest task after the gist task, and so usually follow the gist task in the task cycle.  Sometimes, depending on the text, specific information questions can be done as the first task instead of a gist task, if the text doesn't lend itself to a gist question. (For more information about the task cycle, see here).  

Specific information questions can take many forms (short answer questions, multiple choice questions, true or false questions, fill in the blank questions, etc).  But what makes them specific information questions is that they are asking the students to pick out little bits of specific information in the text.  The who, the what, the where, the when.  (But not the why.)

Specific information questions only ask the students to find information that is explicitly stated in the text.  They don't ask the students to make any inferences about the text.  So don't ask students why something happened unless it is explicitly stated in the text.

Specific information questions are also usually about sentence level comprehension.  They ask about information that is contained in one sentence, but they do not ask the student to comprehend multiple sentences.

Specific information questions are often (although not always) things like names of people or specific numbers that appear in the text--e.g. "How old is Tom?" "How many years has he worked as a teacher?" "Who is the principle of the school?" etc.

Below is a somewhat contrived example, but hopefully it serves to illustrate.  Imagine students are given the following paragraph as part of a reading text.

"Tom was 52 years old.  He had grey hair, and blue eyes.  He was riding his bicycle home from work.  Tom was a teacher.  He had been teaching for 30 years.  He was very tired.  The students had been very difficult and noisy today.  'I can't wait until I retire,' Tom thought to himself."

Based on this text, the following could be specific information questions:

How old is Tom?

What color is Tom's hair?

What color are Tom's eyes?

What is Tom riding?

What is Tom's job?

How long has Tom been teaching for?

...etc.

The following would not be specific information questions:

How old was Tom when he started teaching?  (This is a detailed comprehension questions, because it involves taking information from two separate sentences in the text, and understanding how they fit together.)

Does Tom like his job?  (This is an inference question.  It's not explicitly stated that he doesn't like his job, but we can infer that from the fact that he is looking forward to retirement.)

Would you like to have Tom's job?  Why or why not?  (This is a personalization question.)

Detailed comprehension questions, inference questions, and personalization questions are all valuable, of course.  But they are also more difficult, so they would typically come in a later stage of the lesson.  (Again, see the task cycle here).

Specific information questions involve picking out little details from the text, rather than understanding the whole text in detail.  In a reading lesson, they can usually be answered by scanning through the text to find the answer, and for that reason, they lend themselves to scanning race games.  They don't have to be done as a race, of course, but they can be if you have a class who likes games or who likes running around.  Possible games include scanning race game, garbage man and quizziz.

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I once worked with a CELTA tutor who used the following example to demonstrate how not to make specific information questions.

The teacher trainees were instructed to "read the passage, and answer the questions below."

1. Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?

2. Miten hän tuli Hampurista Helsinkiin?

3. Mista hän ajoi omalla autolla Lappiin?

4. Mitä hän näki lapissa?

5. Missä hän kävi?

The point was, as you can probably already see, that it was possible to answer these questions without understanding the text at all.  The text and the questions are written in Finnish, but I don't speak a word of Finnish and was still able to work out the answers for each question.  For each question, you just look at the line, and see which word is omitted.  So for number 1 "Kuka Johannes Wassermann on?", you just look at the first line, and see that the answer has to be "saksalinen".

And the whole point of this exercise was to make the trainees realize that if the purpose of the reading task is to guide students to greater comprehension of the text, then you want to avoid using questions that are worded exactly the same as the text.

So, just as a quick example, if the text said something like, "Tom worked as a teacher", then a specific information question like "What did Tom work as?" would be too easy.  But you could paraphrase it just a little bit, and say something like "What was Tom's job?" or " What did Tom do to earn money?" et cetera.

That being said, however, in my opinion it depends on the level of the students.  I've had some low-level classes where the students were so weak that they were struggling with the simple skill of just scanning through the reading text to find the answer--even if I used the same wording as the text.  So for those classes, I didn't even bother trying to paraphrase the question until the students got a bit more confident just answering specific information questions generally.

Prediction and Check for Reading and Listening

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

Sample activity: docs, pub

Yesterday I wrote about Gist Tasks.  An alternative to gist tasks is getting students to predict the content of the reading/listening text, and then read or listen to check their predictions.

Prediction is done before reading or listening, but of course you want to give the students some clue as to what text will be about, so they know what they are making predictions about.  Teachers commonly show the students the title of the reading/listening, and maybe draw their attention to any pictures that are in the textbook.  Possibly you may even read the first paragraph, or listen to the section of the text.  And then students make predictions about what will be in the rest of the text.

A common technique is to turn the title of the text into a question, and then get students to predict the answer to that question.

Here's an example from my own classroom. Q: Skills for Success: Reading and Writing 4: Unit 3 Reading 1: The Good Teen p.65-70

The title of the reading was "The Good Teen".  

I asked my students: "What do you think are the characteristics of a Good Teen?"

I asked my students to close their textbooks, and in groups, students brainstormed ideas and wrote their predictions up on the white boards.

Then, I told them to open up their books, read the text, and check which of their predictions were in the text.  I gave them a red marker so that they could go back to the white board and check which of their predictions were actually in the text.

Sometimes students miss things on an initial reading, of course, so I also monitored and gave hints.  (e.g. "You're missing one.  Check paragraph 6 again.  One of your predictions was in paragraph 6.")

Listening predictions could be done in a similar way, although if students missed a prediction, the teacher might need to help by replaying the relevant section of the audio.

Prediction-and-Check tasks, by their very nature, have to be done as an initial task.  So they would be done instead of a gist task.

For years, I thought prediction tasks were a type of gist task, but then when I was working with a CELTA tutor, he set me straight on this.  Prediction-and-Check tasks can be gist tasks if they're focused on the main idea of the text.  So, for example, if there's a story, and students have to predict the ending, and then they read/listen to check their prediction.  Because this is predicting the main idea of the text, it's a gist task.

But in the case mentioned above, where I asked the students to predict all the characteristics of a Good Teen, this is actually a "Finding Specific Information Task", because the students are not checking the text simply for the main idea, they're checking to see which specific characteristics are mentioned.

[To put it simply: If you're asking students to predict the main idea of a text, and then check, it's a gist task.  If you're asking students to predict specific information, and then check, then it's a specific information task.]

So, depending on the type of prediction, it's either a gist task or a finding specific information task.  If it's used as a finding specific information task, that's okay--you can sometimes substitute finding specific information for gist as the first task in the task cycle. (Finding specific information is still one of the easier tasks in the task cycle--easier than tasks like understanding the text for detailed comprehension and understanding inferences in the text.)

As the CELTA tutor told me, you have to think about what tasks the text lends itself to.  (You also consider the level of the students, motivation of the students, et cetera.)

I find a Prediction-and-Check activities to be a useful way to build interest in a text.   However, everyone's favorite EFL contrarian Russ Mayne has a blog post on why Prediction activities don't actually work.  

Russ Mayne is always entertaining.  Read his post.  I love the way he's constantly trying to strip away the dogmatism that has grown up in this industry.

But, that being said, if you read Russ Mayne's post, I think it's evident that he's arguing against teaching prediction as a skill.  I primarily find prediction-and-check activities useful for building interest in the text.  Particularly if you have a group of demotivated students who don't want to be in the classroom, are not interested in the content of the text, and don't want to read it.  (We've all been there, right?)  In these cases, it can increase motivation slightly to have students input their own ideas first, and then reading the text to check the ideas they themselves have selected.

Below is a sample activity for a listening Prediction and Check that I used for Reflect Listening & Speaking 5 Unit 8 Listening: No Time to Choke p.136-140:

	My ideas	Ideas from the listening
What causes choking?
What can people do to stop choking?

Update February 19, 2025: Since Russ Mayne has deleted his blog, I've updated the links to the version preserved on Internet Archive.

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.

Update February 19, 2025: Since Russ Mayne has deleted his blog, I've updated the links to the version preserved on Internet Archive.

Lesson Planning Templates

(TESOL Worksheets--Lesson Planning)
Google Drive folder HERE
Flowchart PDF HERE
Flowchart PDF Black and White (for printing) HERE
Productive Skills Lessons: Speaking/Writing Template: docs, pub
Receptive Skills Lessons: Reading/Listening Template: docs, pub
Systems Learning: Grammar / Vocabulary Template: docs, pub

Update (2024): I've put together another template for grammar lessons: docs, pub

This is designed to help new teachers with their lesson planning.  The Flowchart PDFs are NOT mine.  They were developed by a colleague.  My only addition is to convert these Flowcharts into a Google Doc where teachers can write out their activities and plan their instructions in a table format.  For more of my colleague's materials, please see HERE.