The need to be able to read quickly, utilising the famed strategies of skimming and scanning is clear. How to enable students to do it effectively is not so clear. One way to do it is to give students a reading passage and give them a time limit in which to read through the passage and find the answers to various questions. This works well in principle, but, especially if the student gets the answers wrong, we don't really know whether they skimmed through or scanned the whole passage or just intensively read the first part and then guessed! The only way to force students to read at speed is to take away parts of the passage after a few seconds or minutes. This, clearly, is impractical, unless of course you have a computer plugged into a projector, in which case it's easy to scroll down a passage steadily, forcing students to read more quickly.

A cheaper alternative is to make use of either subtitles in films or the end credits of films which always scroll up from the bottom of the film. By making up a worksheet with questions such as :

Who played Catwoman?

How many stunt actors were there?

What was the name of the orchestra that played the music for the film?

Who was the dubbing mixer?

What job does Bob Simpkins do?

etc, or by creating a gap-fill of the credits, you can force students to read through the passage at speed. Gap-fills work particularly well with subtitles.

Using newspapers in class is a very good idea. The language is authentic, and students should get used to reading newspapers as that's one easy way of continuing their studies outside class.

To make reading newspaper articles more communicative, one thing you can do is cut up the newspaper headline into how ever many words are in it, and give those to groups of three or four students to put together. Explain to them that there may be more than one way of putting the headline together. You don't care how they do it, as long as it's accurate and make sense. Hell, even if it doesn't make sense, as long as it's accurate, it'll be fine.

Once that's done, put the headline on the board and try to get students to predict what the story will be about. Brainstorm a list of ideas onto the board and then give students the reading passage and see who can identify the correct summary first.

By doing all this, you are creating interest in the reading passage, and students will then be less daunted and bored by the prospect of reading.

Students' imaginations are vast. However, if they are asked to write a story in class, usually it is impossible to get them to think of anything quickly and anything interesting and motivating at all. How can we counter this?

Well, one way is to influence the stories students write by giving them ingredients to use in the stories. Grab eight pictures from magazines or your picture drawer at school, put some bluetak on the back and stick them to the whiteboard. They must then include these 'ingredients' in their story. The pictures may not seem to be connected in any way. Even better! The story will need more invention and will undoubtedly be more interesting for having to include a gun, a banana, a goat, four old women in a café and a pair of tweezers. Students working in groups will need to use more spoken language to construct a good story

Alternatively, split the board into three columns. Go round the class asking students for a noun (first column), a verb (second column) or an adjective (third column) without telling them what they are going to do with them. Once you have a good selection, set them a time limit and get them to write the story in groups, saying there will be points for accuracy, imagination and humour, for example.

With reading passages, there are alternatives to giving students the entire reading passage to read. One of these is text re-ordering. Text re-ordering can either be done on a macro or micro scale. On a macro scale, you chop up the paragraphs that make up the story and jumble them up an a page. Students then have to put the passage in the correct order. As well as making the reading passage more manageable by making the sections to read smaller, they get valuable practice in recognising text and context markers, conjunctions and writing styles.

On the micro-level, each line of one paragraph can be cut up and re-ordered, the skills needed for this being somewhat different, centred very much more on understanding and syntax.

Either way it is done, this utilisation of a reading passage for more than just practising reading can be argued to be more valuable for students.