Lesson Plan Tips #3: Solutions to Anticipated Problems - part 2

This post is about problems and solutions related to reading and listening. As always, if you have any problems which have not been mentioned below, feel free to write a comment and I'll do my best to help. 😊

Problem	Solution(s)
The text is very long.	·   Leave a part of the text out without risking it not being coherent ·  Insert short comprehension tasks dealing with short chunks of the text each time to break it down ·  If it’s listening, pause the recording to make it easier to deal with.
The text contains difficult vocabulary.	·  Pre-teach these words before the learners start doing the exercises that go with the text ·  Before the learners start doing the exercises that go with the text, explain to them that they do not need to understand every single word in the text
The learners stop reading to look words up in their dictionaries OR they stop to ask the teacher for unknown words.	·   See solutions above
The students cannot find the answer to a difficult comprehension question.	·  Monitor to check which questions/items give learners a hard time ·  Narrow down their options by telling them which part of the text they should read to find the answer ·  (listening) replay or read out loud the specific bit of the text to help them spot the correct answer
The accent is difficult OR the participants speak very fast.	·  Before the learners start doing the listening exercises, raise their awareness of the main features of this specific accent, e.g. Scottish hard /r/ sound. · If the learners speak fast, pause the recording or ask the learners to count how many words they heard, etc.
There is a lot of background noise in the recording.	· Instruct the learners to focus on the information they need to get from the text and avoid trying to understand everything.
The learners do not know much/anything about the topic of the text	·  Build on the learners’ knowledge by giving them the information they need to deal with the tasks in the lesson; again, this could be done through short exercises based on topic-related texts, videos, news stories, etc.