OK, I’m going to set a time limit, I want you to read the text quickly, don’t worry about any words you don’t know, just try to get a general understanding.’ If you have done an initial training course such as the Trinity CertTESOL or the CELTA, you will recognise these gist reading instructions, and you have probably uttered them yourself on many occasions. The idea of skim reading or reading for gist is considered to be a fundamental part of the reading process in ELT – coursebooks encourage it, initial training courses still insist on it, in-service observation pro-forma reference it and school inspectors expect it. For 30 years, I’ve always taken it for granted, done it without thinking because it was what we always did. But recently, I read a MET article by my first boss in the ELT world, Charles Lowe. In ‘Dare to think for yourself’ he argued that we should not be constrained by what we learnt on initial or subsequent training courses and to trust our instincts as teachers. (Lowe, 2023) His words struck a chord and encouraged me to think again about gist reading, something I have increasingly felt uncomfortable with. Why was I still giving up 10 minutes of every reading lesson to encouraging students to get a general understanding of a text? Was it just because it was the done thing or is it actually a useful skill for students to acquire?
Why has gist reading been such an integral part of ELT reading lessons for so long? Looking back at books aimed at pre-service training, it is clear that the answer is that it is a quick and efficient way to get a general, top down, holistic, understanding of a text, (Lindsay & Knight, 2006; Harmer, 2001). This was borne out by my initial experience in the classroom. Many years ago, a student of mine, a top manager of a multinational company, told me he had about thirty emails a day in English and he needed to work out which ones were urgent and which could wait. These were pre-Google days; the only access to a text in the target language was through the target language. Translation of the whole text was nigh on impossible and even stopping to look up an unknown word would mean flicking through the well-thumbed pages of a translation dictionary whilst losing the thread in the text and taking up a huge amount of time. Thus, learners of a language had no choice but to develop strategies to help them deal with texts in the target language quickly, efficiently and effectively, in other words: reading for gist. Therefore, reading for a general understanding and then using that general understanding to help work out the meaning of the text and the meaning of individual vocabulary items made perfect sense. It was a strategy to improve reading efficiency, to lighten the load.
But reading for gist has long felt uncomfortable to me. Maybe it is bad teaching technique on my part, but I have rarely felt that I have actively improved my students’ skim reading skills. It never seemed to work. Here are some of the things that went wrong.
- My time limits seemed arbitrary – to create a time limit for my students I would often do the task myself and double the time it took me. There was no science behind it and students were rarely finished when the time was up no matter how much I tinkered with the timings.
- Students would be unwilling to ignore unknown words and would get hung up on words they didn’t understand.
- My students often looked confused when I was stopping them before they had finished, no matter how many times I tried to explain the process.
- It felt pointless, if my prediction task was good and created good discussion about the text, the gist reading task often seemed superfluous.
- Students would often get half the gist or get the wrong end of the stick. When they are reading quickly, students often miss the key words such as discourse markers that help to carry meaning. For example, if there is a slightly unfamiliar paragraph structure like pivotal paragraphs so expertly outlined by Nigel J. Ross (2024) in a previous issue (MET 34:1), then students who have been taught to treasure the topic sentence can be misled by a skim reading task when they don’t have time to really analyse the text.
More recently I have begun to notice another problem with gist reading and that is that times have changed. Students no longer need to ‘learn’ to read in the language they are studying because translation is becoming more reliable, now they can access texts in their own language even if they were written in the target language. This means that the ‘efficiency’ justification for gist reading no longer stands up. This begs the question, does technology mean developing the different reading skills is becoming redundant? I think we need to ask ourselves why we use reading texts in the 21st century classroom. Should the primary focus of reading texts switch from being a way to develop reading skills to being vehicles to expose students to the language? Text are still an essential part of the learning process; they can help students see grammar and vocabulary in context and understand how the syntax works. Reading texts give students exposure to the target language so they can develop their implicit knowledge of it. Reading can also be a pleasurable experience and a way to show how students are progressing with their language learning.
A new focus
If the focus is changing, then we need to change the way we approach reading texts in the classroom. Here are a few of the ideas I have been trying out recently.
As I mentioned above, the gist of a text can be gleaned from discussion of the title, the pictures and the author. So, encouraging a good discussion of these, with some clues from the teacher can, in my opinion, replace the need for reading for gist. Here are three ways to follow up a prediction stage without doing a gist reading.
- The first option is to ask the students to write their own questions, things they would like to know about the subject of the text. When they read the text, they can take their time and can look for answers to their own questions rather than questions that the coursebook writers have come up with. If they can’t find answers to their own questions, they can do some research online either in the class or as homework.
- The second option is to use the questions in the coursebook, but the students read them and guess the answers before reading the text. They discuss with their partners, looking for clues in the questions to help them, trying to use some creativity or critical thinking skills to work out what the answers should logically be. After a class discussion of the possible answers, ask the students to read the text. Encourage them to take their time and see if their ideas were correct.
- The third way is to again use the questions in the coursebook, but this time ask the students to read the questions and then work with a partner to try to write a summary of the text – again using the clues the questions give them. Then, they read the text and try to assess and rewrite their summary. These three activities encourage the students to be curious and also it is much more rewarding when they find answers to their own questions or confirm their own predictions. These activities take away the need for a gist reading task and allow students more time to analyse the text.
Another approach I’ve tried is to replace the gist task with translation. One way of doing this is to ask the students to scan the text for words they don’t know. They make a list and then use their phones to make translations. I monitor this carefully to ensure they are finding the correct meaning or seeing if they need to expand their search to chunks of vocabulary rather than single items. Once they have found and discussed their translations, they can then read the text doing the main reading task. Hopefully, they are now better equipped to understand the text without the need for a gist task.
My second translation idea is to ask the students to use the camera function on Google Translate to translate the whole text into their own language. I ask them to read it in their own language and then create a summary in English. (I often set this as homework.) Now that they have a working understanding of the text, we can start to analyse it in English. This might seem controversial, but it is what I am doing myself when learning Welsh. It helps me look at the text with confidence and understand word order and the relationship between words. The more I do it, the less I need to do it. For me, the important thing is that the students understand the text so that when they are discussing why the author used the present perfect or discussing the author’s point of view, they are doing it from a solid foundation.
So, are you with me? Is it time to ditch the gist reading task and approach reading texts in a different way? Or does skimming still have an important role to play in accessing the meaning of texts and thus should be protected at all costs? To answer this, I’ll go back to the article that inspired this piece. Charles Lowe says simply: ‘do what you feel is right for you and your students.’ Maybe try some of the ideas I’ve outlined above and make up your own mind.
