All tasks must involve reading with a focus.

The aim is to read for information. The more support that the pupils are given, the more they will get out of the text.

Many activities help to open up a text

· True/false
· Find the (4) correct statements from a list
· Correct the false statements/ mistranslation
· Top and tail : matching the beginning and ends of sentences (the focus here maybe purely grammatical; many of these exercise-types can be done without actually referring to the original text)
· Simple multi-choice statements
· Match statistics to facts
· Match questions and answers (many of these exercise-types can be done without actually referring to the original text)
· Match caption and picture
· Match a headline to a specific part of the text
· Sequence a set of sentences in chronological order
· Tabular format -fill in details: Who, when, where, why, how often
· Traditional comprehension questions
· Gap fill - text appears in a slightly modified form with gaps to fill in
· Gap-fills can be graduated in terms of difficulty - see differentiation section
· Vocab search - match up vocab. Find words and expressions in a text.

· Synonym work - very important at higher level GCSE and beyond. Pupils need to be trained to identify and understand time expressions. They should reach a point where they understand that "presque toujours" is almost the same as "tres souvent"

Many good reading activities are enhanced by pre-reading tasks, especially good for texts of a factual nature
e.g. Simple biography of a film star
before reading a text -
use a set of questions to guess, discuss and speculate about a person's life
discuss whether a set of statements may be true/ false

These work well at post GCSE level.

Students can also try reconstructing a story from a skeleton set of key words (perhaps in English first). They can then be shown the full text.

Writing

Keep tasks small and manageable, especially at KS3.

Concentrate on exam-type tasks at KS4.

Use writing frames (gapped texts, substitution tasks), especially at KS4. Begin with the closed mechanical tasks and then open out into more open-ended tasks.

A 'free' writing task should never be set without preparation. The majority of the pupils in a group should be able to perform the task at least 60% successfully.

Try the group writing activity to boost levels of accuracy.