Seven steps to design a successful

reading lesson plan.

1. The aim
What is your objective when designing your lesson? Do you want your learners to:

 Be able to read for gist?

 Be able to read for detailed information?
 Be able to preview/survey a text?
 Be able to use prior knowledge to understand a text?
 Be able to locate referents?
 Be able to infer meaning from context?
 Be able to summarize a passage?
 Be able to speed read?
 Be able to think critically?
 …

2. Preparation
To prepare your learners for the reading tasks, start with

 A warm-up such as a tongue twister, a command drill, or a riddle. This

shouldn’t take more than 2 or 3 minutes.
 A lead-in. This stage is intended to prepare the learners to the reading task.
Examples of lead-ins include: vocabulary pre-teaching, discussing a quote
related to the topic, a word list that the SS have to study in groups to guess
which words will be used by the writer in the text, etc.
Think of a task that will help the SS read and understand the text.

3. Strategy teaching and modeling

Depending on the aims of the lesson, choose a strategy (e.g. activating prior knowledge,
predicting, guessing the meaning of difficult words from the context, questioning,
summarizing, using graphic organizers….) and teach it explicitly using another short
text (just to demonstrate how the strategy should be used.)

4. Strategy use/practice.
Learners have to use the strategy you explained in the previous stage. They have to
apply it to understand the current text.
5. Comprehension Tasks
For a deeper understanding of the text, assign comprehension exercises such as:

 Finding an appropriate title for the text.

 Locating referents (i.e. what do these words refer to?)
 Sentence completion
 Matching
 Comprehension questions,
 True or false statements,
 Chart completion (i.e. information transfer)
 ….

6. Reviewing
Reviewing consists of checking to what extent the learners understood the text and how
much they can recall. This can be done in different ways:

 Retelling the story

 Writing a short paragraph using the ideas they got from the text.
 Using graphic organizers to organize what they have learned from the text
 Completing a chart with the most pertinent information from the passage.
 Summarizing the text.

7. Connecting
Learners have to connect what they have read with themselves, with the world, and with
other related texts they have read.Teachers in this stage typically try to answer the
follwing question:

How does what does the topic of the passage relates to the learners’ lives?

Finally, here is a summary of the most important principles underlying teaching

comprehension skills:

 Reading is purposeful
 Choose appropriate texts
 Vocabulary knowledge facilitates comprehension
 Opt for activities that focus on skills integration
 Knowledge of text type and format is important
 Explicitly teach and model reading strategies
 Reading activities start from general to specific
 Devise a well-structured lesson plan