Adult Literacy Core Curriculum - Nationally developed Skills for Life ...

Sample activities
• Read some simple instructions closely. Highlight examples of key sentence and language
features, e.g.: opening statement of purpose; individual sentences often convey separate steps;
the reader is addressed directly (in the second person); the reader is told what to do
(imperative verbs).
• Practise recognising commands by sorting phrases and sentences into two separate lists of
commands and statements using a computer, e.g. Check the form, Take care, We'll meet you at
4pm, Complete in BLOCK CAPITALS, Sorry I missed you, etc.
• Complete a cloze exercise in which all missing words are verbs, some in the imperative, some
in simple present and past tenses. Read to check for sense.
• Read a short text in which certain words have been masked out. Keep going, then go back and
guess the words using the context and their knowledge of word order and sentence patterns.
Discuss the choice of words with the teacher/other learners.
• Practise how to monitor their own reading for sense and self-correction, becoming used to
‘listening’ internally to their own reading to spot errors of sense.
• Read some text extracts from everyday experience in which potentially tricky words have been
highlighted. Read in pairs and apply knowledge of context, illustrations, grammatical
understanding to work out any unknown words. Discuss the process, e.g.:
[From instructions for a vacuum cleaner]
. . . For cleaning awkward places remove handle and insert tool adapter into end of hose. Attach
tools as required.
Awkward must relate to places and so is likely to be an adjective giving some information
about places. Knowledge of context plus diagrams might suggest ‘hard to reach’ places, which
in turn might suggest awkward, a phonetically irregular word.
• Choose a text. Highlight the words that are difficult. Cut and paste them out of the text. Read
the text again with the blank spaces, and record how much you understand.
• Read a range of different simple texts (e.g. a form, a letter, an extract from a story/article, a
poem); highlight the punctuation. Discuss this with their teacher/other learners and identify
some ‘rules’ about punctuation that can be written up as reference list.
• Underline/highlight direct speech on paper or screen, in different types of text, and consider its
effect, e.g. in a fanzine or simplified magazine article about a celebrity, in a promotional text
(e.g. Mr C of Bradford said, “..............................”)
Reading
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