Reading practice in class

I'm wondering what kind of reading practice people are using in lower CL classes. Especially for students or classes that are having difficulties. I've had some high CKs transition to CL02 and their reading is good, but following a long together for all students has been difficult. I have been doing practice reading of the dialogue where one student reads one word of the sentence in a line till we get through the dialogue two times.

Example: Student 1: Hi!
Student 2: How
Student 3: are
Doug: you?

It has helped with students from just haphazardly repeating after the teacher, forcing them to see the words. What other things are you doing for reading practice in class?

Thanks!

I think its important to task students with reading for a purpose - even at very low levels. Rather than, as Keola says, randomly repeating after the teacher.

Ask yourself, why are they reading? What can be accomplished?

Two skills to focus on at this level are matching and scanning.

Here are 4 tasks that you could roll into one pretty effective Spec 1/2 segment.

Gist Task: Project the dialogue on the board and ask a few simple questions, 'Who do you see?' 'What color is Rodney's hair? Give students a photocopied page that has the head pics of the Spec characters in one column and OUT OF ORDER the speech bubbles for the given dialogue. Either keep the projection up, or pic mute it. Students must join lines from the speech bubble to the head of the character they think speaks that line.

Detailed Task: give students a table, projected in a PPT is fine. They must locate words in the dialogue according to the guidelines you give them. Ie: rhyming words, words with a certain number of letters, fill in the blank words.

After these kinds of tasks, have students feedback to each other before the teacher. Get them used to reporting their answers to one another and then they can report each other's findings to the teacher - who will report on the correct answers.

Listening Task: It's important to build the students' ability to discern the CD dialogue without the teacher always slowly repeating it for them.
. Create 3 simple multiple choice questions from the dialogue. Give each student one question, or pair weak students together and strong students together - NOT one weak and one strong, as the strong student will always command the task. Listen to the dialogue on the CD and after one round, ask students to report to one another what answer they got. CHANGE who had what question and repeat a second, then third time, so each student has had each question at least once. Finally project the questions and have students come on an agreement to the final answer - listen one last time and confirm the final answers.

Productive Task: Now that the students have skimmed, scanned, and listened 3-4 times to the dialogue, they should be ready to use the language.
A simple matching task can be done: print two copies of each sentence from the dialogue and make sure you have enough to make pairs for the whole class - include yourself and the TA if you need to. Give one sentence to each student and they must stand up walk around reading their sentence until they locate their 'mate.' You could then have each pair read out the dialogue in order.

This type of Spec segment would activate the students beyond what they are used to as well as develop reading skills which are more closely aligned to how we ourselves read in every day life - either to match images to picture, skim for general gist or scan for detailed information.

These are some things I do to practice the reading in my low CL classes:

*I put the dialogue on the whiteboard with the projector. I go through the sentences with the kids and I also make them see that some words are repeated. I than point at different words and the kids have to tell me that specific word. It's a kind of drill.

ex: How are {you}? I'm fine thank {you}.

I think it helps them remember individual words better.

*I make them listen to the CD and follow the words with the CD. I give a lot of points to the team that did the best job of paying attention and following the dialogue with their finger.(the class is divided in two teams).

*The class is divided in two teams.I make the kids repeat after the CD twice. I make each kid read a sentence.Every time a kids reads they get to throw the big dice. In the end I add up the points and the team with the most wins.They like that.If they didn't follow and they don't know which sentence to read they give a point to the opposite team.

*Matching games are good like Shannon mentioned. I print out the dialogue and cut it up.One dialogue for two kids. After reviewing the dialogue. I make put them in teams of two. They have to listen to the CD and put the pieces of the dialogue in the right order.

*Role play is another good one. You can put the dialogue on the projector. Go through it with the kids. Have several kids in the front act out the parts and fake talking while other students read the dialogue on the board.

Hope this helps

peace