Interacting with B1 Preliminary Reading Part 2

More than three years ago, I wrote about How to approach B1 Preliminary Reading Part 2.

In today’s post, I’m going to suggest a few ideas for working on this task in class, and making it more interactive.

To make these activities reusable, I suggest making copies of the eight short texts and laminating them, so that you can reuse them.

Here are some cards that I made a few years ago and you can see that they are still in great condition.

Find the matches

1. Read and analyse the 5 people and their 3 needs/wants, as I suggested in my post about this part.
2. Give each student a card with a text. They each read their text and look for matches for one of the 5 people. Only if they find all 3 matches will it mean it’s the answer for that person. They will also probably find partial matches to other people.
3. Each student then ‘presents’ their text and says why it is/isn’t the answer.

5 key words

1. Give each student a different text.
2. Tell them to write down 5 key words from the text.
3. Next, they place their text face down, or cover it so that they can no longer see it.
4. Put students in pairs or groups.
5. Each student tells the others about their text, using the key words.
6. Next, give them the information about the five people and they decide which text is a match for each person.

Make 3 changes

1. After doing the exam task, and/or any of the above activities, give each student a different text.
2. They copy their text, but make 3 key changes to it.
3. In pairs or small groups, students read the ‘revised’ texts and try and find the 3 changes.

As always, I hope that you find these suggestions useful and that your students will enjoy the activities.