Are you wondering how to make reading practice in English more fun? Would you like some fun content to practice with? I love getting my students to read as much as possible, and I have some fun lesson ideas for using brochures for reading skills comprehension. Brochures are kind of old school, I know that, but I still love them, and here’s why.
I think reading practice for English language learners has to be easy, and students need visuals to help them make sense of what they’re reading. Brochures provide just that! They usually contain short, to-the-point snippets of text, lists, images and other types of visuals. They are perfect to use in class.
Do you want to know how to teach reading in English and how I structure a lesson around a reading text such as a brochure? This free Rad Reading Lesson Checklist will show you how to go about planning a reading lesson.
Want to do some reading to practice English?
Use brochures! I like to get brochures from wherever I go that I find them, such as vacations, theme parks or excursions. Just the other day I got one from Archeon, a history park in The Netherlands. I have a great collection now – mind you, this has been 11 years in the making – and I use them all the time. They are great to use to practice reading English for beginners. So what can you do with them?
1. You can use them for reading comprehension
If you’re using the same brochure(s) for the whole class, you could ask them a set of text-specific reading comprehension questions. If you have a stack of different ones – like I do – and want them to just read a few they find interesting, you could ask them a set of questions that are applicable to all brochures, such as:
- What is the brochure for? If it’s a place: where is it?
- What is the most important thing they want to highlight?
- Is there a pricing chart? What is the most expensive thing on there?
- Are there bullet points? What do they list? What thing on the list do you like most? Why?
- Are there pictures? What are they pictures of? Are they well-chosen? Why, or why not?
- What headings are there?
2. Use them for vocabulary study
Have students note down words they don’t know while they read and get them to look them up in a dictionary. Or have them note down the adjectives that were used to make the things in the brochure sound amazing. Then get them to find synonyms for those words and build a larger adjective list.
3. Talk to students about text type
The brochure is a lovely text type to pick apart. Discuss the layout and conventions of brochures with students. What features do they notice in all brochures? Discuss cover page, titles and headings, bullet points, pictures, pricing charts, contact info and maps, as well as placement of information.
4. Get students to make their own brochure
Now that students understand what brochures look like and what information can usually be found in them, get them to make their own brochure for something they are trying to sell or a place they want people to visit. (I’ve personally done this assignment for favorite countries or cities a few times.) It’s a fun, active exercise in which they can show what they’ve learned through using their reading skills, and they get to show their creative, artsy skills as well! I would give them some guidelines for that though, or even a template. I’ve created one, if you’re interested in using that, and you can find it HERE.
English reading skills practice with various text types
So that’s what I do to make English reading skills practice fun with brochures! I think it’s part of the best practices in reading English to give students fun text types to work with. Would you like some ideas on using other text types, like Menus, Recipes, Newspapers, or Magazines in your lessons? Check the links to find my blog posts on them as well!
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