READING

Prompting reading speeds

This is a really handy little tool which is doing the rounds at the moment. It's called CuePrompter and it's an online Teleprompter. 

This one is very simple to use and you simply cut and paste your text into the field, choose screen size, text size and colours and click a button and you are off.

Some possible tasks:

• Paste in a news text and actually get your students to read it as it scrolls. You could repeat and gradually increase the speed.
• Put students in pairs / groups to read out load the parts of plays or dialogues. With short dialogues you could get them to read through a few times and then play the mirror image and see if they can still remember and follow the dialogue.
• Play the text through in it's mirrored inversion first and see how much Sts understand (make it a short text though and don't expect too much)
• With short texts you could try to get students to read the text the write down what they have read. You'll need to re-show the text a number of times if you want them to get every word, or they could just summarise after a couple of times through.
• Try playing your text through at high speed the first time and get students to try to guess what it's about and then gradually slow down the speed each time so they develop a better understanding.
• To get students doing some TPR ( Total Physical Response), write a list of instructions and get the students to do them in the order they appear on the prompter. It might also be fun to gradually increase the speed of the text and see if the students can keep up!