During the first few classes of the academic year, I tell students that I will help them deal with English assigned reading materials. The objective of this exercise is to enable students to develop and improve their strategies for abstracting important information from academic textbooks. They should read the summary section at the end of the chapter and decide how the summary relates to the introduction. They must identify the different sections or headings of the chapter and read the subheadings to determine how they relate to the headings. Then they start reading and focus on the first and last sentence of each paragraph.
Attention is paid to words in bold face or italics.
They reread the summary section at the end of the chapter and decide if any concepts or important ideas were missed. Then they write notes or points about the information and a simple summary of the chapter. Usually steps 1 and 2 are done with the whole class, but steps 3 through 7 are conducted in groups in which students are performing identical activities simultan-eously. After each activity, the groups report on their findings and are given a little time for discussions. As for step 7, the summary could be written in English or the native language, depending on the assignment given by the content teacher.