Practicing FCE reading part 2

 Classroom Handout 3 Aims:  To practise the skills required for Part 2 of the First Reading Exam by focusing on identifying grammatical and lexical clues A1.. Then give out A3: Cla

Contents

A TEACHERS’ NOTES 2

A1 Lesson Plan 2

A2 Classroom Handout 1 4

A3 Classroom Handout 2 5

A4 Classroom Handout 3 6

A5 Classroom Handout 1, 2 and 3 - Answer Key 7

A6 Suggested homework/self study activities 8

B GUIDANCE FOR FOLLOW UP ACTIVITIES 9

A TEACHERS’ NOTES

Description

Time required: 50 minutes

Materials

required:

 Classroom Handout 1 – one per pair of students

should be cut up before the lesson and kept separate from the text

 Classroom Handout 3

Aims:  To practise the skills required for Part 2 of the First Reading Exam

by focusing on identifying grammatical and lexical clues

A1 Lesson Plan

1 Warmer: Write ‘Harrods offers all things for all people, everywhere’ Elicit or explain that Harrods is a famous London department store Ask students what they think of the

statement – it is quite ambitious Elicit the kind of things students think that Harrods might not be able to sell

Timing: 5 mins

2 Give out A2 Classroom Handout 1 Ask students to read the passage and find three

animals that Harrods sells Which animal do they think this story is going to be about and why? (Answers: cat, dog, lion; lion – because there is a lot of background information about the lion)

Timing: 5 mins

3 Explain that in Part 2 of Cambridge First Reading candidates have to read a passage and put some sentences in the correct position in the passage To do this they need to use their knowledge of reading and of the English Language to help them

5 Go through the predictions as a class On the board, write down any sensible predictions

based on the sentences before and after the gap See Suggested Answers in A5:

Classroom Handout 1, 2 and 3 - Answer Key

Timing: 5 mins

6 Then give out A3: Classroom Handout 2 - the missing sentences for the students to put in

the correct gaps – it shouldn’t be too difficult following the previous exercise Answers (1B, 2D, 3E, 4A, 5C)

Timing: 5 mins

7 Explain that in the Part 2 of the First Reading exam there will be seven sentences missing from the text and candidates have to choose from 7 sentences plus an additional

sentence (distracter) It is therefore more difficult, and candidates should not rely on selecting sentences by using just the topic They should also look for: lexical clues,

repetition of a word in a previous sentence or a paraphrase of that word; grammatical clues – for example a word (often a pronoun) that refers back to the subject or object of the previous sentence

8 Give out the complete text with the missing sentences highlighted (A4: Classroom

Handout 3) and ask students to find an example of a lexical clue and a grammatical clue

(See detailed list of lexical and grammatical clues in A5 Classroom Handout 1, 2 and 3 – Answer Key) After you have highlighted one lexical clue and one grammatical clue to the

class, let them look for other clues on their own and compare with a partner Check

answers together

Timing: 15 mins

A2 Classroom Handout 1

In August, 1969, four lion cubs were born in a small zoo in the south-west of England There were three females and a male (1)………

In October, when the summer was over and the tourists had gone, the cubs were sold Two

of the females were bought by a circus (2)………

Three months earlier, in May, 1969, two young Australian men, Anthony (‘Ace’) Bourke and John Rendall, had left Australia for the first time They had finished university and had done a number of jobs (3) ……… They visited the usual tourist attractions like the Tower of London, and then, one day, they went to Harrods

Harrods was a very special department store The owners of Harrods used to proudly say that the store offered ‘all things for all people, everywhere’ At that time, there was even a zoo in the shop (4) ……… They went to the zoo on the second floor to see the animals for sale And there, in a small cage between the cats and the dogs, they saw the two lion cubs

The female cub seemed bad-tempered and showed her teeth to shoppers who looked at her Her brother seemed quite easy-going (5)……… Ace and John immediately fell in love with him They sat down beside the cage and stayed there for hours

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A3 Classroom Handout 2

Missing Sentences (cut these sentences up before the lesson)

A Ace and John wanted to see if they could really buy ‘anything’ in

Harrods

B Their father, Butch, came from Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands and their mother, Mary, from a zoo in Jerusalem, Israel

C He didn’t pay attention to anybody

D The other female and the male were bought by Harrods, a very

famous department store in London

E After travelling on their own around Europe in search of adventure, Ace and John met up again in London

A4 Classroom Handout 3

A Lion Called Christian’ by Anthony Burke & John Rendall

In August, 1969, four lion cubs were born in a small zoo in the south-west of England There were three females and a male (1) Their father, Butch, came from Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands and their mother, Mary, from a zoo in Jerusalem, Israel In October, when the summer was over and the tourists had gone, the cubs were sold Two of the females were bought by a circus (2) The other female and the male were bought by Harrods, a very

famous department store in London

Three months earlier, in May, 1969, two young Australian men, Anthony (‘Ace’) Bourke and John Rendall, had left Australia for the first time They had finished university and had done a number of jobs (3) After travelling on their own around Europe in search of adventure, Ace and John met up again in London They visited the usual tourist attractions like the Tower of London, and then, one day, they went to Harrods

Harrods was a very special department store The owners of Harrods used to proudly say that the store offered ‘all things for all people, everywhere’ At that time, there was even a zoo in the shop (4) Ace and John wanted to see if they could really buy ‘anything’ in

Harrods They went to the zoo on the second floor to see the animals for sale And there, in a small cage between the cats and the dogs, they saw the two lion cubs

The female cub seemed bad-tempered and showed her teeth to shoppers who looked at her Her brother seemed quite easy-going (5) He didn’t pay attention to anybody Ace and John immediately fell in love with him They sat down beside the cage and stayed there for hours

A5 Classroom Handout 1, 2 and 3 - Answer Key

For Stage 5 of lesson plan

Here are some suggestions for the kind of information the students might predict:

1 some other information about the lion family

2 what happened to the other two (only two out of four lions mentioned in the preceding sentence)

3 something about their jobs/something about them coming to London

4 something about Ace and Jon going to Harrods (because of ‘They’ in line following)

5 some other information about the male lion

Classroom Handout 3

(1) father/mother refers to the family – the

parents of the cubs

(2) female and male – matches lexis in

previous sentence

(3) travelling, Europe, adventure – follows on

from previous sentence, which is talking

about them finishing studying and leaving

Australia

Ace and John – repetition of names

introduced in previous sentence

London is introduced in this sentence and

then expanded on in the next sentence

(4) anything in sentence is a paraphrase of

‘all things for all people, everywhere’

Harrods – repetition of store name

(5) didn’t pay attention to anybody is more an

expansion on ‘easy-going’ and contrasts to

the behaviour of the female cub

(1) Their father/mother – refers back to the cubs

(2) The other – two of the cubs have been mentioned but there were four cubs…

(5) He – refers back to ‘her brother’

A6 Suggested homework/self study activities

1 Get students to look at/read books as much as possible The more exposure they have to different types of texts, the more confident they will become with this part of the exam

2 As a follow on activity, ask your students to select a page of text from a reader (make them a photocopy of their chosen page to work on) At home or in the next class students can select sentences to delete from the text – ask them to write their sentences on strips

of paper before deleting them from the main text by using tippex or a strip from a sticky label They can then give the activity to another student in the class to do When students

do the activity, make sure that they are following the procedure used in this lesson – trying

to predict what comes in the gaps before matching the missing sentences, then checking

by looking for lexical and grammatical clues

3 This can then lead into doing a practice exam task Students will have found this lesson and accompanying activities easier than an exam task – this will hopefully have built their confidence and helped them to focus on the skills required for doing this part of the exam

B GUIDANCE FOR FOLLOW UP ACTIVITIES

1 The text for this activity was taken from a reader at Upper Intermediate level (A Lion Called Christian, Scholastic) If you want to do a similar activity to this one, it is good to choose a reader at this level You will then know that the language used is appropriate for your students

2 Note that you can also find samples of readers online at publisher’s websites For

example,

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/project/custom/item2505731/ Cambridge-English-Readers-Sample-chapters/?site_locale=en_GB&current

Level 4 is FCE level

3 If the class are all reading a specific reader in class, you could take a passage from the next chapter and do a gap-fill as a warmer to review the exam skills they need This will then lead in to talking about the story